In all of cinematic history, no other genre has suffered as organized a campaign to ban, edit, and censor it as horror. I grew up in Britain’s “video nasty era,” a term coined to characterize the moral panic that was unleashed upon the genre with the passing of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, an attack on free expression now approaching its 40th anniversary. The story of how Britain came to censor horror is complicated, and it deserves a telling, and a reckoning.

When the British Board of Film Classification was set up in 1912, its initial purpose was to classify and censor films shown in cinemas. However, because of a legal loophole in the laws governing film classification, video certification remained unregulated, even as video home system technology became popular in the early 1980s.