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This chapter presents an update regarding film and video censorship five years after the establishment of the Video Recordings Act. It specifically describes the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) Annual Report for 1988. This report stressed its ‘alleged potential for encouraging anti-social violence on the streets of Britain’. The BBFC cut violent material from fifty-four videos and seven films, a total of sixty-three minutes' screen time, in 1988. It was particularly preoccupied with the question of sexual violence, and general violence against women. It was also taken up with what it quaintly called ‘manners’. This turns out to be the problem of bad language. The chapter then investigates some of the issues raised in the Report I through a discussion with the BBFC Director, James Ferman.

This chapter discusses how the succession of events surrounding the British censorship of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is perhaps one of the longest in the annals of the British Board of Film Classification's (BBFC) history. Before the film was submitted for classification at the then titled British Board of Film Censors, Chain Saw Massacre had already garnered a growing global reputation as being one of the most frightening films ever made. While this would seem to imply that such a film would be statured in scenes of graphic violence and bloodshed, this imposed status for Chain Saw came about from the very fact that there was so little violence and gore within it. Instead, audiences and critics were affected by the film's sheer emotional intensity, experiencing the horrific events, almost in real time, alongside protagonist Sally Hardesty. With the majority of films across all genres, such a reputation serves only to stimulate an increased audience curiosity and anticipation, potentially indicating larger audience figures (and therefore larger financial return) on the film than initially expected. Indeed, Chain Saw was eagerly anticipated but its most effective quality would impede its UK cinema release for nearly twenty-five years.

This chapter evaluates the British horror film industry. Given the country's input in the success of the Hollywood horror films of the 1930s, in terms of source material as well as technicians and actors, horror film production in Britain was remarkably slow to emerge. This was due in no small part to the stringent censorship rules of the British Board of Film Censorship/Classification (BBFC), who did their best to dissuade British studios from making such films. The chapter investigates how one studio took up the reins of the genre and went on to dominate it for almost two decades. Matched only by the golden age of Universal in the 1930s and 1940s, Hammer Films produced some of the genre's most iconic images and characters through dozens of productions, while breaking box-office records around the world. The chapter looks at Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the company's first foray into the genre, one which would lay the foundations for their success and set the template for the English Gothic horror film as it flourished into the 1960s and 1970s.

Chapter four examines the film’s uncertain position between arthouse and grindhouse. Possession held the paradoxical position of being showcased at the world’s leading art cinema festival in competition for the illustrious Palme d’Or, and being included in the United Kingdom’s ‘video nasties,’ a list of ‘obscene’ or otherwise questionable films, mostly comprised of violent exploitation fare. The film underwent heavy cuts for the US release. In an attempt to capitalise on the film’s horror elements, almost a quarter of the original film was removed rendering an already enigmatic film utterly incomprehensible. Chapter four unpacks the fraught history of Possession’s conflicting status as art and trash, paying particular attention to the shift the film underwent upon its release on VHS–in terms of its marketing and reception outside of the festival circuit, its butchering for the US market, and its odd place amidst other notorious video nasties. It also takes a dive in the BBFC’s archival records on Possession, shedding new light on the film’s reception history.

This chapter traces the 21^st century synergy between vampire and zombie back to Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, a book that both reinvented the vampire story as science-fiction by reimaging the vampire through the language of science, and served as origin text for the birth of the zombie genre with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Through an analysis of a range of adaptations of Matheson’s novel, including his own script written for Hammer Studios but rejected by the BBFC, this chapter considers how this text marks key transformative moments within the evolution of the horror genre on film.