Don't be afraid, it's only business: 40 Years of the Video Recordings Act - Public Lecture

Horror film fans are invited to University of Staffordshire for a spooktacular evening this Halloween.

On Thursday 31st October members of the public can join Dr Mark Mckenna, Associate Professor of Film and Media Industries, to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, a period in British history that gave rise to the notorious ‘Video Nasties’.

The event includes an exhibition of Video Nasties and related memorabilia, a talk by Dr McKenna, and a screening of cult classic The Evil Dead (1982).

The rise of home video in the early 1980s saw a wave of extreme horror films released by independent distributors which were branded ‘Video Nasties’ by tabloid newspapers. Dr Mckenna has published a book on the wider political issues which influenced censorship of the Video Nasties and their evolution from media moral panic into a commercially viable subgenre. His public lecture will explore this curious history of the Video Nasties and consider how the Video Recordings Act reshaped the British film industry.

He explained: “In 1982, just as home video was finding a foothold in the United Kingdom, a moral panic erupted about the advertising that was being used to promote an array of horror films that had been imported from Europe and America and released to the far more conservative British marketplace. These films became known as the ‘video nasties’, a disparate collection of unrelated films of varying qualities that were grouped together on the basis that they transgressed the boundaries of respectability.

“The moral panic famously led to the introduction of the Video Recordings Act was a convenient deflection for the Conservative Government, whose reputation had been badly damaged during the events of their previous term. However, what has received far less attention is how the introduction of the Video Recordings Act benefited the various organisations involved and their role in its introduction.”

Hosted in the Flaxman building at the University’s Stoke-on-Trent campus, Cartoon & Comic Arts students will also be selling their anthology and producing horror themed art before the event – including the Drawing Dead, zombie caricatures, iconic slasher scenes, macabre life drawing, and more.

‘Don’t be Afraid, It’s only Business: 40 Years of the Video Recordings Act’ takes place on Thursday 31 October at the Flaxman Building, University of Staffordshire, College Rd, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 2DE.