Published by Headpress
Publication date: March 2024
596 pages
450 B&W photos
ISBN: 978-1-909394-95-7
Paperback RRP: £25.99
Hardback RRP: £35.99
Review by Adrian Smith
We
first had a VHS machine in our house in 1985. It was an exciting day, and to
celebrate, my parents rented a cartoon for us all to enjoy. It turned out to be
Watership Down (1978). I was nine years old, and its jarring combination
of cute rabbits and graphic violence was a suitably scary introduction to the
dangerous world of home video. Within a few months both horror films and
illegally distributed pornography would be playing in my living room alongside
the episodes of ThunderCats (1985-1989) I was taping on Saturday
mornings. The video recorder really did change the landscape of the 1980s, and
although I was not really old enough to fully appreciate what was going on, I
did occasionally get glimpses of things that were not meant for me; whether it
was seeing a man getting lowered into a mincing machine from behind the sofa at
a babysitter’s house (a classic moment from The Exterminator (1980)), or
being egged on to play one of my dad’s dodgy tapes by my mates when we were the
only ones home (which very quickly caused a horrified reaction and a mad
scramble for the eject button). So, although VHS had made a personal impact, I
was unaware that my mind and soul had become a battleground for moral
campaigners obsessed with the wild, wild world of unregulated videos in the
early 1980s.
Davids
Kerekes and Slater, who’s Cannibal Error is an updating of their in-depth
study of the ‘video nasty’ panic See No Evil (2000), were the right age
to be smack in the middle of the furore, where independent distributors were
trying to make quick money selling imported horror films from Europe and the
USA and collectors were suddenly turned into potential criminals thanks to the
efforts of campaigners like Mary Whitehouse and Tory MP Graham Bright who
managed to get the right-wing press whipped up into a frenzy which helped rush
through the Video Recordings Act, granting legal powers to the British Board of
Film Classification, amidst claims that children were in danger from films like
SS Experiment Camp (1976), The Driller Killer (1979) and Zombie
Flesh Eaters (1979). The press frequently connected real life crimes with
films as if to suggest that access to violent videos were encouraging copycat
behaviour, which came to a pinnacle in 1987 when Michael Ryan shot and killed
sixteen people in Hungerford, Wiltshire, and the press tried to pin this on his
being obsessed with the character of Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone in two
films by then (1982 & 1985). It was never proved that he’d even seen the
films, but that did not stop the press continuing to blame films for real-life
tragedies such as this and many others.
(Cannibal Error teaser trailer from Headpress on Vimeo.)
The
authors present a huge amount of research here into what was going on during
the 1980s and into the 1990s, both from the legislative side to the effect it
was having on film collectors. There are fascinating interviews with people
whose homes were raided by police or Customs and Excise because they were suspected
of owning pornography or copies of Cannibal Holocaust (1980), and the
impact it made on their lives. Being collectors themselves, Cannibal Error
is not a balanced, dispassionate view of the ‘video nasties’ debates and those
concerned. This is worth bearing in mind when reading. Personally, having been
a child exposed to things I shouldn’t have seen back in the 1980s, I have some
sympathy with Mary Whitehouse and her fellow campaigners. I think there was
merit in trying to ensure that films were not easily available to those who
were underage, and that home video ought to be regulated and controlled in much
the same way as films were for cinemas. However, as this book makes clear,
things went much too far and so much police time was wasted rummaging through teenagers'
bedrooms looking for third-generation copies of I Spit on Your Grave
(1978). The great irony now is that many of these long-considered-dangerous
films are now available restored and uncut with BBFC certificates on Blu-ray
and UHD, and the whole idea of films being dangerous seems rather quaint.
This
new expanded edition of their earlier work features a detailed examination and review
of each film that was considered illegal according to the UK government, known
as the DPP39, alongside lengthy interviews with film collectors and BBFC
examiners, the latter providing some balance to the discussion. Covering
European horror, pornography, film collecting, censorship, moral panics and the
intersection between cinema and politics, Cannibal Error is an important
contribution to our understanding of the ‘video nasty’ debacle.
Cannibal Error
can be ordered direct from Headpress: https://headpress.com/product/cannibal-error/