Bruce Campbell’s 40-year feud with “draconian and myopic” British censors: “Thanks for nothing”
In the 1980s, a Satanic Panic swept the United States, and it wasn’t long until this moral panic made its way to the United Kingdom, where paranoia predominantly manifested in the form of the video nasty hysteria.
Conservative Mary Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, was keen to ban various horror and exploitation movies that she saw as damaging from being released on VHS. A loophole in the BBFC’s approach to censorship meant that many controversial movies that might have received cuts or bans when they came to their theatrical releases were able to be purchased on home video without any age classification.
As a result, movies that many deemed to be outrageous, whether that be due to extreme violence and gore or other potentially scarring subject matter, were easily available on VHS, including The Evil Dead, starring Bruce Campbell. Sam Raimi’s 1981 film was one of several low-budget horror movies, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that has since become a stone-cold classic of the genre, but upon its release it faced considerable opposition.
Raimi wasn’t scared of putting lots of gory imagery in his film – he was only 20 when it made it, after all. While The Evil Dead was meant to be a bit of fun, people like Whitehouse were enraged by such supposedly disgusting and corrupting imagery. When it eventually made it to the UK for its theatrical release, the BBFC cut 49 seconds of the movie before it could be shown on the big screen.
But then, once the video nasty panic took hold, resulting in the implementation of the Video Recordings Act 1984, the movie found itself up against it once again. Under this new legislation that emerged due to pressure from the likes of Whitehouse and her conservative crew, the BBFC were put in charge of establishing an age classification system to regulate the sale of movies on home video, as well as advising when a movie needed to have certain scenes cut or, in some extreme cases, if it should be banned altogether.
So, despite the fact that the theatrical version was initially released to great success on home video, when the Video Recordings Act 1984 came into effect, The Evil Dead was banned and declared a ‘video nasty’. The BBFC seemed unable to make up its mind on the film, which faced further cuts before eventually making it to home video in 1990. It wasn’t until 2000 that the movie finally became available to the public in its original uncut format, just as Raimi had initially intended.
Naturally, then, all of this backing-and-forthing, with the movie receiving bans and cuts before it was eventually given the proper life it deserved, angered those who poured themselves into it. Campbell, who played lead character Ash Williams, was particularly annoyed that Raimi’s vision had been tampered with, once taking to Twitter to express his disdain for the way the BBFC treated the movie.
“Let’s be clear. Your system back then was draconian and myopic. Thankfully, your multi-year ‘ban’ only stoked interest in the film and made it #1 on video in the UK when it was finally released. Thanks for nothin’,” he wrote.
Certainly, The Evil Dead soon became a beloved splatter horror – and one of the most popular independently-made entries into the genre – even spawning various sequels and spin-offs. The BBFC clearly couldn’t see how exciting and revolutionary the movie really was.
