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Cannibal Error: A Social History of the ‘Video Nasty’

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Moral panic, myth, and the macabre: Video nasties in the 1980s and beyond.

Thursday 21 November 2024

6.30 pm doors. 7 pm start. 

£10 / £7 Concessions Advance Booking

Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL

Tube: Holborn

London Fortean Email List

When the widespread introduction of the VHS cassette changed the face of home entertainment in the early 1980s, it wasn’t long before video rental store shelves were filled with lurid tapes promising orgies of sex, violence, and terror.

In this talk, authors David Kerekes and Jennifer Wallis explore how the panic over ‘video nasties’ developed: prompting raids and arrests, implicating films in real-life murder cases, and targeting film dealers, distributors, and viewers. They will ask how far policies and campaigns directed at video nasties — not forgetting the marketing of these films — created a mystique and mythology of their own, as fans sought out every tape on the famed video nasty ‘list’ produced by the Director of Public Prosecutions, for example. Indeed, the allure of the video nasty continues today, with collectors snapping up titles for significant sums, and modern horror franchises such as V/H/S drawing on the nostalgic appeal of the VHS era.

David Kerekes is co-author of Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and the ‘Video Nasties’ Panic of the 1980s (2024) and founder of Headpress Publishing. 

Jennifer Wallis is a historian, and VHS collector, and Press & Marketing Officer for Headpress.

Hosted by Deborah Hyde of UnCanny. Deborah Hyde wants to know why people believe in weird stuff. She attributes her fascination with the supernatural to having spent her childhood with mad aunties. During the day, she’s a film/TV industry coordinator / production manager who has worked in makeup effects and scenery.



Thursday 21 November 2024

6.30 pm doors. 7 pm start. 

£10 / £7 Concessions Advance Booking

Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL

Tube: Holborn

London Fortean Email List

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