Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Although government and local authorities are most
responsible for the regulation of movies, moral protest
groups can exert enormous pressure on a film that they
have deemed to be against their beliefs. National and
local elected officials, television broadcasters, and cinema
chains have been targeted by organized campaigners who
write letters of complaint or form demonstrations outside
specific venues. The many pressure groups who have
targeted films have included the religious organization
the Festival of Light, which in the United Kingdom
argued that The Devils (1971) and The Last Temptation
of Christ (1988) were blasphemous; and family protection
groups such as mediawatch-uk (formerly the National
Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, founded in 1965,
and led by Mary Whitehouse), which has campaigned
against violent films such as Baise-moi (2000). In the
United States, the gay rights group Queer Nation
(formed in 1990) attacked Basic Instinct (1992) as homophobic; feminist groups such as Women Against
Violence Against Women assailed Dressed to Kill (1980)
as misogynistic; and ethnic protest groups have variously
picketed against the racial representations of Native
Americans in A Man Called Horse (1970), Italian
Americans in The Godfather (1972), Puerto Ricans in
Fort Apache the Bronx (1981), Cuban Americans in
Scarface (1983), and Asian Americans in The Year of
Living Dangerously (1982), Black Rain (1989), and
Rising Sun (1993). The popular press can be the most
effective tool in generating a moral campaign against a
marked film. Thus pressure groups have taken out fullpage newspaper ads condemning a production. For
instance, the Catholic League advertised in the New
York Times against Disney and Miramax for distributing
Priest (1994), a film it considered blasphemous for its
depiction of sexual acts among members of the clergy.
In the United Kingdom the British press was central
to debates surrounding the cinema release of Crash
(1996), which The Standard and its reviewer, Alexander
Walker, pronounced as depraved. In the 1980s and
1990s, the main target in the United Kingdom was film
on video, reflecting the concern that the age of the viewer
within the home cannot be controlled (nor the power of
the viewer to replay or pause an image). Originally,
certification did not apply to video in the United
Kingdom, with no age-related limitations. In the initial
boom of the video age, from 1979 to 1982, many controversial films slipped out on release with sensational
covers exploiting content in order to attract consumers
among a mass of video shop choices. It was the covers for
videos such as Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur (SS
Experiment Camp, 1976) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
that drew attention to these films. This developed into a
moral panic orchestrated by the press and newspapers
such as the Daily Mail, with its ‘‘Ban the Sadist
Videos’’ campaign; in response, the Director of Public
Prosecutions drew up a list of sixty actionable titles, of
which thirty-two were to become banned films, including
the notorious titles—so-called ‘‘video nasties’’—I Spit on Your Grave (also known as Day of the Woman, 1978),
The Driller Killer (1979), and The Evil Dead (1981).
In 1982 a series of prosecutions took place against
five films that had been charged under the Obscene
Publications Act, with police seizing all tape copies.
With the press fueling the moral panic by publishing
stories of supposed criminal and delinquent behavior
directly linked to the content of ‘‘video nasties,’’ a new
government bill was introduced, the Video Recordings
Act (VRA) of 1984, which implemented video classification under the control of the BBFC. The number of
examiners at the BBFC rapidly increased from four to
fifty to address the quantity of videos that needed classifying. In 1994 the Criminal Justice Act extended the
terms of the VRA, with an emphasis on the effect horrific
videos may have on children. The act had been influenced by a section of British politicians, supported by the
group Movement for Christian Democracy, that viewed
the death of a two-year-old child, James Bulger, at the
hands of two ten-year-old children, as the result of exposure to video violence. The film at the center of this
panic, Child’s Play 3 (1991), became the scapegoat
in a media witchhunt that lead to The Sun newspaper
famously carrying a full front-page image of charred tape
copies of the movie within the headline ‘‘For the sake of
ALL our kids. . .BURN YOUR VIDEO NASTY.’’