Don't be afraid, it's only business exhibition catalogue

In lieu of an abstract, please find an excerpt below:

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the period, the moral panic that accompanied the arrival of video nasties must seem an odd and implausible moment in British history. In 1982, just as home video was finding a foothold, a panic erupted over the publicity materials that were being used to promote a disparate group of horror films that had just been released into the newly established marketplace. One tabloid journalist dubbed these films the ‘video nasties’, and the name stuck, quickly becoming a colloquial term that would be used to describe what was believed to be a new wave of extreme horror films entering the UK from the US and Europe. The video nasties were presented as an external threat, arriving in Britain from somewhere else and having little in common with the established traditions of cinematic horror and, while that narrative was easily contested, it helped perpetuate the perceived threat to British values that the video nasties posed.