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Video nasty

Video nasty is a colloquial term popularised by the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVALA) in the United Kingdom to refer to a number of films, typically low-budget horror or exploitation films, distributed on video cassette that were criticised for their violent content by the press, social commentators, and various religious organisations in the early 1980s. These video releases were not brought before the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) due to a loophole in film classification laws that allowed videos to bypass the review process. The resulting uncensored video releases led to public debate concerning the availability of these films to children due to the unregulated nature of the market.

Following a campaign led by Mary Whitehouse and the NVALA, prosecutions were commenced against individuals engaged in trades exploiting allegedly obscene videos. To assist local authorities in identifying obscene films, the Director of Public Prosecutions released a list of 72 films the office believed to violate the Obscene Publications Act 1959. This list included films that had either been previously acquitted of obscenity or already obtained BBFC certification. In addition, a second list was released that contained an additional 82 titles which were not believed to lead to obscenity convictions but could nonetheless be confiscated under the Act's forfeiture laws. The resultant confusion regarding the definition of obscene material led to Parliament passing the Video Recordings Act 1984, which required certification of video releases by the BBFC.

The implementation of the Video Recording Act imposed a stricter code of censorship on videos than was required for cinema release. Several major studio productions were banned on video, as they fell within the scope of legislation designed to control the distribution of video nasties. In recent years, the stricter requirements have been relaxed, as numerous films once considered video nasties have obtained certification uncut or with minimal edits. Due to a legislative mistake discovered in August 2009, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was repealed and re-enacted without change by the Video Recordings Act 2010.

Obscenity and video
At the time of the introduction of domestic video recorders in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, there was no legislation specifically designed to regulate video content, apart from the Obscene Publications Act 1959 which had been amended in 1977 to cover erotic films. Major film distributors were initially reluctant to embrace the new medium of video for fear of piracy and the video market became flooded with low-budget horror films. Whilst some of these films had been passed by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) for cinema release, others had been refused certification which effectively banned them. The Obscene Publications Act defined obscenity as that which may "tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it". This definition is of course open to wide interpretation.

If the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) felt that a certain video might be in breach of the Act, then a prosecution could be brought against the film's producers, distributors and retailers. Prosecutions had to be fought on a case-by-case basis and a backlog of prosecutions built up. However, under the terms of the Act, the police were empowered to seize videos from retailers if they were of the opinion that the material was in breach of the Act. In the early 1980s, in certain police constabularies, notably Greater Manchester Police which was at that time run by devout Christian Chief Constable James Anderton, police raids on video hire shops increased. The choice of titles seized appeared to be completely arbitrary, one raid famously netting a copy of the Dolly Parton musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) under the mistaken belief it was pornographic.

The Video Retailers Association were alarmed by the apparently random seizures and asked the DPP to provide a guideline for the industry so that stockists could be made aware of the titles which were liable to be confiscated. The DPP recognised that the current system, where the interpretation of obscenity was down to individual Chief Constables, was inconsistent and decided to publish a list that contained names of films that had already resulted in a successful prosecution or where the DPP had already filed charges against the video's distributors. This list became known as the DPP list of "video nasties".

The lack of regulation of the domestic video market was in sharp contrast to the regulation of material intended for public screenings. The BBFC had been established in 1912, essentially as an unintended consequence of the Cinematograph Act 1909, and it was their responsibility to pass films intended for the cinema for certification within the United Kingdom (though local councils were the final arbiters). As part of this process the board could recommend, or demand in the more extreme cases, that certain cuts be made to the film in order for it to gain a particular certification. Such permission was not always granted, and in the case of the release of The Exorcist in 1973, a number of enterprising managers of cinemas where permission had been granted set about providing buses to transport cinema-goers from other localities where the film could not be seen.

Public concern
Public awareness of the availability of these videos began in early 1982, when Vipco (Video Instant Picture Company), the UK distributors of The Driller Killer, a 1979 splatter film, took out full-page advertisements in a number of specialist video magazines, depicting the video's explicit cover; an action which resulted in a large number of complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency. A few months later Go Video, the distributors of the already-controversial 1980 Italian film Cannibal Holocaust, in an effort to boost publicity and generate sales that ultimately backfired, wrote anonymously to Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association complaining about their own film. Whitehouse sparked off a public campaign and coined the term "video nasty". Amid the growing concern, The Sunday Times brought the issue to a wider audience in May 1982 with an article entitled "How High Street Horror is Invading the Home". Soon the Daily Mail began their own campaign against the distribution of these films. The exposure of "nasties" to children began to be blamed for the increase in violent crime amongst youths. The growing media frenzy only served to increase the demand for such material among adolescents. At the suggestion of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, the Conservative MP Graham Bright introduced a Private Member's Bill to the House of Commons in 1983. This was passed as the Video Recordings Act 1984 which came into effect on 1 September 1985.

Effects of the Video Recordings Act 1984
Under the 1984 Act, the British Board of Film Censors was renamed the British Board of Film Classification and became responsible for the certification of both cinema and video releases. All video releases after 1 September 1985 had to comply with the Act and be submitted for classification by the BBFC. Films released on video before that date had to be re-submitted for classification within the following three years. The increased possibility of videos falling into the hands of children required that film classification for video be a separate process from cinema classification. Films that had passed uncut for cinema release were often cut for video.

The supply of unclassified videos became a criminal offence, as did supplying 15 and 18 certificate videos to under-aged people. As well as the low-budget horror films the Act was originally intended to curb, a number of high-profile films which had passed cinema certification fell foul of the Act. In particular, The Exorcist, which was made available by Warner Home Video in December 1981, was not submitted for video certification by the BBFC and was withdrawn from shelves in 1986. Similarly Straw Dogs was denied video certification and removed from video stores. Popular culture backlash against the Video Recordings Act included the May 1984 release of "Nasty" by the punk-goth outfit The Damned, who celebrated the condemned genre with the lyrics "I fell in love with a video nasty".

Relaxation of censorship
With the passing of the Video Recordings Act, the films on the list could be prosecuted for both obscenity and not being classified. As well as not passing any film liable to be found obscene, the BBFC imposed additional bans and cuts on films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Claims, since proven at best to be speculative, at worst outright media fabrication, relating to the Hungerford massacre and the murder of James Bulger (where the 1991 film Child's Play 3 was erroneously held up as influencing the perpetrators, possibly prompting the 1992 film Mikey to be prohibited in the UK), provided an additional impetus to restrict films and as late as December 1997, the board claimed it "has never relaxed its guidelines on video violence, which remain the strictest in the world". However, the board did loosen its standards, especially at the 18 level, in response to public consultation in 2000. The departure of James Ferman from the BBFC may also have allowed some long-proscribed films to be re-appraised around this time. The Exorcist was granted an uncut 18 video certificate on 25 February 1999, followed by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in August, and several official "nasties" were passed in the early 2000s either uncut or with cuts restricted to sexual violence or actual animals being harmed. A list of these is given below. Among modern films, many, such as the Hostel and Saw series, contain brutal, graphic violence but have passed through uncut.

In 2008, there was another brief media frenzy over such films that had years earlier been approved for release by the BBFC, in particular SS Experiment Camp. This coincided with an attempt by MPs Julian Brazier and Keith Vaz to pass a law allowing MPs greater powers to tighten BBFC guidelines or force an appeal of a release. The bill failed to pass.

The UK Government passed a law criminalising possession of "extreme pornography". Whilst BBFC-rated films are exempt from the legislation, screenshots from these same BBFC-rated movies are not, and would also apply to unrated films. Hostel: Part II was cited in the House of Commons as an example of a film where screenshots could become illegal to possess.

DPP list
The DPP list of "video nasties" was first made public in June 1983. The list was modified monthly as prosecutions failed or were dropped. In total, 72 separate films appeared on the list at one time or another. 39 films were successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act but some of these films have been subsequently cut and then approved for release by the BBFC. The remaining 33 were either not prosecuted or had unsuccessful prosecutions. 10 films remain banned in the UK because they have not yet been resubmitted for classification by any distributors or have been rejected for classification.

A number of films spent a short time on this list because their prosecutions failed shortly after publication or because it was decided that prosecution was not worth pursuing. Ultimately, the list became obsolete when the Video Recordings Act came into force, and since 2001, several of the films have been released uncut. In the majority of cases below where cuts were made, they were scenes of real-life animal cruelty and/or excessive violence to women, both of which are still regarded with some degree of severity by the BBFC. A large number of these movies caused additional controversy with the cover art of the original big box releases seen in the video shops of the early 1980s. Unless noted otherwise, all films that have been released have been rated 18.

The DPP list is divided into two sections: Section 1 and Section 2. Any title seized under Section 1 would make the dealer or distributor liable to prosecution for disseminating obscene materials. Dealers could be fined or jailed and the film itself would be declared obscene if the prosecution was successful, meaning it could not be distributed or sold in the UK until the obscenity was quashed. 39 of the Section 1 films were successfully prosecuted and remained banned. 33 of the Section 1 films had unsuccessful prosecutions and were subsequently dropped from the list and placed onto Section 2.

Section 2 titles were liable to be confiscated under a "less obscene" charge, which allowed the police to seize a film they considered obscene and as long as the dealer cooperated, they legally admit that the articles are obscene and therefore escape any personal prosecution. The 33 films that could not be prosecuted under Section 1 automatically became Section 2 titles and were still seized by the police. The main difference between Section 1 and 2 is that video dealers or distributors could be personally prosecuted in court for holding the film under Section 1 but not under Section 2, where the obscenity is admitted through forfeiting the material.

Section 1: Prosecuted films

 * 1) Absurd (original title: Rosso Sangue, also known as Monster Hunter, Anthropophagus 2, and Horrible) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 2017. The film is classified at 18.
 * 2) Anthropophagous: The Beast (original title: Antropophagus, also known as Anthropophagous, Antropofago, The Grim Reaper, Man Beast, Man-Eater, and The Savage Island) – Released with approximately 8 minutes of pre-edits as The Grim Reaper in 2002. Complete version passed uncut in June 2015.
 * 3) Axe (also known as Lisa, Lisa and California Axe Massacre) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 19 seconds cut in 1999. Released uncut in 2005 with an 18 certificate.
 * 4) A Bay of Blood (original title: Reazione a Catena, also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve, Blood Bath and simply Bay of Blood) – Originally refused a cinema certificate in 1972. Released with 43 seconds cut in 1994. Re-released uncut in 2010.
 * 5) The Beast in Heat (original title: La Bestia in Calore, also known as SS Hell Camp) – No UK re-release.
 * 6) Blood Feast – Released with 23 seconds cut in 2001. Re-released uncut in 2005.
 * 7) Blood Rites (also known as The Ghastly Ones) – No UK re-release.
 * 8) Bloody Moon (original title: Die Säge des Todes) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 1 minute 20 seconds cut in 1993. Released uncut November 2008.
 * 9) The Burning – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 19 seconds cut in 1992. Re-released uncut in 2001.
 * 10) Cannibal Apocalypse (original title: Apocalypse Domani, also known as Invasion of the Flesh Hunters) – Released with 2 seconds of animal cruelty cut in 2005.
 * 11) Cannibal Ferox (also known as Make Them Die Slowly) – Released with approximately 6 minutes of pre-cuts plus an additional 6 sec cut to a scene of animal cruelty in 2000. Re-released with 1 minute 55 seconds of animal cruelty cuts in 2018.
 * 12) Cannibal Holocaust – Released in 2001 with 5 minutes 44 seconds cut to remove most animal cruelty and rape scenes. Re-released with 15 seconds cut to one animal cruelty scene in 2011.
 * 13) The Cannibal Man (original title: La Semana del Asesino) – Released with 3 seconds cut in 1993.
 * 14) Devil Hunter (original title: El Canibal) – Released uncut in November 2008.
 * 15) Don't Go in the Woods – Released uncut in 2007 with a 15 rating.
 * 16) The Driller Killer – Released with 54 seconds of pre-cuts in 1999. Re-released uncut in 2002. Now considered to be in public domain.
 * 17) Evilspeak – Released with 3 minutes 34 seconds cut in 1987. Re-released uncut in 2004.
 * 18) Exposé (also known as House on Straw Hill) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 51 seconds cut in 1997.
 * 19) Faces of Death – Released with 2 minutes 19 seconds cut to animal cruelty in 2003.
 * 20) Fight for Your Life – Originally refused a cinema certificate in 1981. No UK re-release.
 * 21) Flesh for Frankenstein (also known as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 56 seconds cut in 1996. Released uncut in 2006.
 * 22) Forest of Fear (also known as Toxic Zombies and Bloodeaters) – No UK re-release.
 * 23) Gestapo's Last Orgy (original title: L'ultima orgia del III Reich, also known as Last Orgy of the Third Reich and Caligula Reincarnated As Hitler) –  Refused a video certificate in 2021.
 * 24) The House by the Cemetery (original title: Quella villa accanto al cimitero) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with over 4 minutes cut in 1988. Re-released with 33 seconds cut in 2001. Released uncut in 2009.
 * 25) The House on the Edge of the Park (original title: La casa sperduta nel parco) – Originally refused a cinema certificate in 1981. Released with 11 minutes 43 seconds cut in 2002, and re-released with 42 seconds cut in 2011. Passed fully uncut in May 2022.
 * 26) I Spit on Your Grave (also known as Day of the Woman) – Released with 7 minutes 2 seconds cut in 2001. Re-released in a longer re-edited format in 2003 which reframed the rape scenes but was cut by 43 seconds to the second rape scene by the BBFC. The original print was released again with 3 minutes cut in 2010, and the film again received 1 minute 41 seconds of cuts for the 2020 Blu-ray release.
 * 27) Island of Death (original title: Ta Pedhia tou dhiavolou, also known as Devils in Mykonos and A Craving For Lust) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Refused a video certificate in 1987 under the title Psychic Killer II. Re-released with 4 minutes 9 seconds cut in 2002. Released uncut September 2010.
 * 28) The Last House on the Left – Originally refused a cinema certificate in 1974 and again in 2000. Also refused a video certificate in 2001. Passed with 31 seconds cut in 2002. Released uncut on 17 March 2008.
 * 29) Love Camp 7 – Refused a video certificate in 2002. Refused a certificate for streaming in 2020.
 * 30) Madhouse (also known as There Was a Little Girl) – Released uncut in 2004.
 * 31) Mardi Gras Massacre – Passed fully uncut in March 2022.
 * 32) Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (also known as Nightmare) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with approximately 3 minutes of pre-edits in 2005. Re-released uncut in November 2015.
 * 33) Night of the Bloody Apes (original title: La Horripilante bestia humana) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with approximately 3 minutes of pre-cuts in 1999. Re-released uncut in 2002.
 * 34) Night of the Demon – Released with 1 minute 41 seconds cut in 1994. Released uncut in 2022.
 * 35) Snuff – Passed uncut in 2003 but no UK release to date.
 * 36) SS Experiment Camp (original title: Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur, also known as SS Experiment Love Camp) – Released uncut in 2005.
 * 37) Tenebrae (original title: Tenebre, also known as Unsane) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 5 seconds cut in 1999. Re-released uncut in 2003.
 * 38) The Werewolf and the Yeti (original title: La Maldicion de la Bestia, also known as Night of the Howling Beast) – No UK re-release.
 * 39) Zombie Flesh Eaters (also known as Zombie and Zombi 2) – Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 1 minute 46 seconds cut in 1992. Re-released with 23 seconds cut in 1999. Released uncut in 2005.

Section 2: Non Prosecuted films

 * 1) The Beyond (original title: E Tu Vivrai Nel Terrore ‒ L'Aldilà, also known as Seven Doors of Death) — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with approximately 2 minutes cut in 1987. Re-released uncut in 2001.
 * 2) The Bogey Man (also known as The Boogeyman) — Originally passed uncut for cinema. Released with 44 seconds cut in 1992. Re-released uncut in 2000.
 * 3) Cannibal Terror (original title: Terreur Cannibale) — Released uncut in 2003.
 * 4) Contamination — Released uncut in 2004 with a 15 rating.
 * 5) Dead & Buried — Originally passed uncut for cinema. Released with 30 seconds cut in 1990. Re-released uncut in 1999.
 * 6) Death Trap (also known as Eaten Alive and Starlight Slaughter) — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 25 seconds cut in 1992. Re-released uncut in 2000.
 * 7) Deep River Savages (original title: Il paese del sesso selvaggio, also known as Man From Deep River) — Originally refused a cinema certificate in 1975. Eventually released with 3 minutes 45 seconds of animal cruelty cuts in 2003, and re-released with 3 minutes of similar cuts in 2016.
 * 8) Delirium (also known as Psycho Puppet) — Released with 16 seconds cut in 1987. Released uncut in February 2022.
 * 9) Don't Go in the House — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 3 minutes 7 seconds cut in 1987. Re-released uncut in December 2011.
 * 10) Don't Go Near the Park — Released uncut in 2006.
 * 11) Don't Look in the Basement (also known as The Forgotten) — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 2005 with a 15 rating.
 * 12) The Evil Dead — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with approximately 2 minutes cut in 1990. Re-released uncut in 2001.
 * 13) Frozen Scream — No UK re-release.
 * 14) The Funhouse — Originally passed uncut for cinema. Released uncut in 1987. Re-classified 15 in 2007.
 * 15) Human Experiments  — Originally passed uncut for cinema. No UK re-release.
 * 16) I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses (also known as Drop Dead Dearest) — Released with 1 minute 6 seconds cut in 1986.
 * 17) Inferno — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 20 seconds cut in 1993. Re-released uncut in September 2010.
 * 18) Killer Nun (original title: Suor Omicidi) — Released with 13 seconds cut in 1993. Re-released uncut in 2006.
 * 19) Late Night Trains (original title: L'ultimo treno della notte, also known as Night Train Murders) — Originally refused a cinema certificate in 1976. Released uncut in 2008.
 * 20) The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (original title: Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti, also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and Don't Open the Window) — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 1 minute 53 seconds cut in 1985. Re-released uncut in 2002.
 * 21) Nightmare Maker (also known as Night Warning and Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker) — Refused a video certificate in 1987 under the title The Evil Protege. No UK re-release.
 * 22) Possession — Originally passed uncut for cinema. Released uncut in 1999.
 * 23) Pranks (also known as The Dorm That Dripped Blood and Death Dorm) — Released with 10 seconds cut in 1992.
 * 24) Prisoner of the Cannibal God (original title: La montagna del dio cannibale, also known as Mountain of the Cannibal God and Slave of the Cannibal God) — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 2 minutes 6 seconds of animal cruelty cuts in 2001, and re-released with 2 minutes of similar cuts in 2018.
 * 25) Revenge of the Bogey Man (original title: Boogeyman II) — Released in re-edited form with additional footage in 2003.
 * 26) The Slayer — Released with 14 seconds cut in 1992. Re-released uncut in 2001.
 * 27) Terror Eyes (also known as Night School) — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 1 minute 16 seconds cut in 1987.
 * 28) The Toolbox Murders — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 1 minute 46 seconds cut in 2000. Re-released uncut in 2017.
 * 29) Unhinged — Originally passed uncut for cinema. Released uncut in 2004.
 * 30) Visiting Hours — Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released with approximately 1 minute cut in 1986. Passed uncut in 2017.
 * 31) The Witch Who Came From the Sea — Released uncut in 2006.
 * 32) Women Behind Bars (original title: Des diamants pour l'enfer) — Passed uncut in 2017.
 * 33) Zombie Creeping Flesh (also known as Hell of the Living Dead, Night of the Zombies and Virus) — Originally passed uncut for cinema in an edited version. Full version released uncut in 2002.

Section 3: Video Nasties
A supplementary list was issued along with the official list which featured a list of so-called "Section 3 Video Nasties". Titles on the Section 3 list could not be prosecuted for obscenity but were liable to seizure and confiscation under a "less obscene" charge. Tapes seized under Section 3 could be destroyed after distributors or merchants forfeited them.

 * 1) Abducted (a.k.a. Schoolgirls in Chains) – No UK re-release.
 * 2) The Aftermath (a.k.a. Zombie Aftermath) – Passed without cuts in 1988 on the Goldcrest video label.
 * 3) The Black Room – Originally passed uncut for cinema. No UK re-release.
 * 4) Blood Lust (a.k.a. Mosquito the Rapist) – Passed with heavy cuts for cinema. No UK re-release.
 * 5) Blood Song – Re-released as Dream Slayer.
 * 6) Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll – No UK re-release.
 * 7) Brutes and Savages – No UK re-release.
 * 8) Cannibal (a.k.a. Ultimo Mondo Cannibale and Last Cannibal World) – Originally passed with heavy cuts for cinema. Released with 2m 46s of cuts in 2003.
 * 9) Cannibal World (a.k.a. Mondo Cannibale and The Cannibals) – No UK re-release.
 * 10) The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – Passed uncut for cinema in 1978. Released without cuts in 1987.
 * 11) The Child – Passed uncut for cinema. Released uncut in 2006.
 * 12) Christmas Evil (a.k.a. You Better Watch Out) – Released uncut in 2012 with a 15 rating.
 * 13) Communion (a.k.a. Alice Sweet Alice) – Passed uncut for cinema. Passed with 8s of cuts in 1998. Released uncut in 2014.
 * 14) Dawn of the Dead – Originally passed with heavy cuts for cinema. Passed with cuts for video in 1989 and 1997. Released uncut in 2003.
 * 15) Dawn of the Mummy – Passed with 27s of cuts for cinema. Passed with 1m 43s of cuts for video in 1987. Released uncut in 2003.
 * 16) Dead Kids (a.k.a. Strange Behavior) – Passed with 27s of cuts in 1993 and 2008.
 * 17) Death Weekend (a.k.a. The House by the Lake) – Passed with cuts for cinema. No UK re-release.
 * 18) Deep Red (a.k.a. Profondo Rosso) – Passed with 11s of cuts in 1993. The extended version was passed uncut in 2010.
 * 19) Demented – Released with 1m 19s of cuts in 1987.
 * 20) The Demons (a.k.a. Les Démons) – A composite version was passed uncut in 2008 and the original version was passed uncut in 2017.
 * 21) Don't Answer the Phone – Passed with cuts for cinema. An edited version was released without further cuts in 2005.
 * 22) Eaten Alive! – Passed with heavy cuts for cinema. Passed with heavy cuts for animal cruelty in 1987 and 1992.
 * 23) Enter the Devil (a.k.a. Disciples Of Death) – No UK re-release.
 * 24) The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein – Released uncut in the U.K. on 22nd Jan, 2018, with an "18" certificate.
 * 25) The Evil – No UK re-release.
 * 26) The Executioner (a.k.a. Massacre Mafia Style) – No UK re-release.
 * 27) Final Exam – Released uncut in 1986.
 * 28) Foxy Brown – Passed in edited form for cinema. Passed with 2m 48s of cuts in 1987. Released with previous cuts waived in 1998.
 * 29) Friday the 13th – The R-rated version was released without cuts in 1987. The full unrated version (previously released for cinema) was released uncut in 2003.
 * 30) Friday the 13th Part 2 – The R-rated version was passed uncut in 1987. Downgraded to an uncut 15 certificate in 2008.
 * 31) GBH (a.k.a. Grievous Bodily Harm) – No UK re-release.
 * 32) Graduation Day – Passed uncut in 1986. Downgraded to an uncut 15 certificate in 2003.
 * 33) Happy Birthday to Me – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1986. Downgraded to an uncut 15 certificate in 2004.
 * 34) The Headless Eyes – No UK re-release.
 * 35) Hell Prison (a.k.a. Escape from Hell) – No UK re-release.
 * 36) The Hills Have Eyes – Passed with cuts for cinema. Passed with 2s of cuts for video in 1987. Released uncut in 2003.
 * 37) Home Sweet Home – Released uncut in 2004.
 * 38) Honeymoon Horror – No UK re-release.
 * 39) Inseminoid – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1987. Downgraded to a 15 certificate in 2005.
 * 40) Invasion of the Blood Farmers – No UK re-release.
 * 41) The Killing Hour (a.k.a. The Clairvoyant) – Originally passed uncut for cinema. Passed with 1m 19s of cuts in 1986.
 * 42) The Last Horror Film (a.k.a. Fanatic) – Passed with cuts for cinema. An edited version was released in 2003.
 * 43) The Last Hunter – Passed uncut for cinema. Passed with 8s of cuts in 1988. Released uncut in 2002.
 * 44) The Love Butcher – No UK re-release.
 * 45) Mad Foxes – No UK re-release.
 * 46) Mark of the Devil – Passed with heavy cuts for cinema. Passed with cuts in 1998 and 2003. Released uncut in 2013.
 * 47) Martin – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1994.
 * 48) Massacre Mansion (a.k.a. Mansion of the Doomed) – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1992. Downgraded to an uncut 15 certificate in 2000.
 * 49) Mausoleum – Released uncut in 1987.
 * 50) Midnight – Passed uncut for cinema. An edited version was released in 1993. Full version passed uncut in 2011.
 * 51) Naked Fist (a.k.a. Firecracker) – Passed with 3m 53s of cuts for cinema. No UK re-release.
 * 52) The Nesting – Passed uncut in 1986.
 * 53) The New Adventures of Snow White (a.k.a. Grimm Fairy Tales for Adults) – No UK re-release.
 * 54) Nightbeast – Passed uncut in 1996.
 * 55) Night of the Living Dead – Passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 1987. Downgraded to a 15 certificate in 2007. Now in the public domain.
 * 56) Nightmare City (a.k.a. City of the Walking Dead) – Passed with 3m 5s of cuts in 1986. Released uncut in 2003.
 * 57) Oasis of the Zombies – Passed uncut in 2004 with a 15 certificate.
 * 58) Parasite – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1993.
 * 59) Phantasm – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1989. Downgraded to a 15 certificate in 2005.
 * 60) Pigs (a.k.a. Daddy's Deadly Darling) – Released by 88 Films in 2016. Unknown if cut.
 * 61) Prey – Passed with 11s of cuts for cinema and video. A print shortened for dialogue was passed uncut in 2004.
 * 62) Prom Night – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1987.
 * 63) Rabid – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1992.
 * 64) Rosemary's Killer (a.k.a. The Prowler) – Passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 2007.
 * 65) Savage Terror (a.k.a. Primitives) – No UK re-release.
 * 66) Scanners – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1987.
 * 67) Scream for Vengeance! – No UK re-release.
 * 68) Shogun Assassin – Passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 1999.
 * 69) Street Killers (a.k.a. Beast with a Gun) – No UK re-release.
 * 70) Suicide Cult (a.k.a. The Astrologer) – No UK re-release.
 * 71) Superstition (a.k.a. The Witch) – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1986.
 * 72) Suspiria – Passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 1998.
 * 73) Terror – Passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 1997.
 * 74) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — Refused a cinema certificate in 1975. Passed uncut in 1999.
 * 75) The Thing – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1987.
 * 76) Tomb of the Living Dead (a.k.a. Mad Doctor of Blood Island) – Passed with cuts for cinema. Released with 42s of animal cruelty cuts in 2003.
 * 77) The Toy Box – No UK re-release.
 * 78) Werewolf Woman – Passed with cuts for cinema. No UK re-release.
 * 79) Wrong Way – No UK re-release.
 * 80) Xtro – Passed uncut for cinema. Also passed uncut for video in 1987. Downgraded to an uncut 15 certificate in 2007.
 * 81) Zombie Holocaust – Passed uncut in 2000.
 * 82) Zombie Lake – Passed uncut in 2004.

Films banned by the BBFC but not classed as video nasties

 * Curfew — Banned for video in 1988. Released uncut in 2002.
 * Maniac — Banned for cinema in 1981 and again for video in 1998. Released with 58 seconds of cuts in 2002. Released uncut in 2022.
 * Mother's Day — Banned for cinema in 1980. Released uncut in 2015.
 * The New York Ripper — Banned for cinema in 1982 and re-exported to original distributor in Italy. Released with 29 seconds of cuts in 2002.
 * Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 – Denied a BBFC certificate in 1987. The original Silent Night, Deadly Night was never submitted for UK release until 2008, when it was released uncut with an 18 certificate.
 * Straw Dogs — Originally passed uncut for cinema. Withdrawn around the video nasty period but not actually included on the list. It was given an uncut theatrical re-release in 1995 but two subsequent attempts to pass the film for video in 1999 resulted in BBFC rejections. It was finally released uncut in 2002.

Other films seized by the police but not classed as video nasties
• Basket Case – Seized for similarity to other slasher films. Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Passed with an additional 35s of cuts in 1987. Released uncut in 1999.

• Blood for Dracula – Seized for association with and similarity to Flesh for Frankenstein. Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Released uncut in 1995.

• City of the Living Dead – Another horror film by Lucio Fulci, who had multiple films on the DPP list. Originally passed with cuts for cinema. Passed with 2m 21s of cuts in 1987. Released uncut in 2001.

• Macabre – Seized due to the cover art which displayed a severed head inside a refrigerator. Released uncut in 1987.

• Madman – Seized for similarity to other slasher films. Originally passed uncut for cinema. Released uncut in 2002.

• Night of the Seagulls – Seized for similarity to other zombie films and the explicit cover imagery. An alternative title to the film was Don't Go Out at Night, which may have been linked to the multiple Don't titles on the DPP list. Passed with 1m 6s of cuts in 1987. Released uncut in 2005.

• Terror Express – Seized for similarity to Night Train Murders. No UK re-release.

Other films

 * A Clockwork Orange – Sometimes mistakenly believed to have been banned by the BBFC, it was actually Stanley Kubrick himself who withdrew the film from exhibition in the UK in 1973 on police advice after receiving death threats toward himself and his family, as well as disliking reports found in the British Press that the film was responsible for copycat violence. Quoting Kubrick: "To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life. Furthermore, to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis, in a posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures". After Kubrick's death, the film was re-released uncut at cinemas in the UK in 2000, and thereafter on both VHS and DVD.
 * Child's Play 3 – The film became notorious in the United Kingdom when it was suggested it might have inspired the real-life murder of British child James Bulger (a suggestion rejected by officers investigating the case) and the murder of Suzanne Capper (the police and the British Board of Film Classification ruled out any connection between the movie and the murder).
 * The Exorcist – Although never officially cut or banned in the UK, several attempts to release the film on video were thwarted by BBFC censor James Ferman, who cited both the age of the possessed girl (as she was under 12, the film might have had significant appeal to underaged viewers) and reports of incidents of hysteria involving young women (leading to concerns that the film might cause severe emotional problems for those who believed in demonic possession) as obstacles to a home release. Following a successful theatrical re-release in 1998 and Ferman's retirement as censor in January 1999, the film was submitted for home video release for the first time in February 1999, and was passed uncut with an "18" certificate. The film had previously been released on video in 1981, uncertificated, by Warner Home Video.
 * Last House on Dead End Street – Also known as The Fun House, this film was probably the intended target when the BBFC added the similarly-entitled The Funhouse to the list. Passed uncut with an "18" certificate in 2006.
 * Scum – The original TV film was made by the BBC, but they later decided not to broadcast it owing to the violence and suicides in the film. It was quickly remade by most of the original production team and released in cinemas, and was released on VHS at the height of the Video Nasties controversy, quickly becoming associated with them in the media.
 * Mikey – The film was withdrawn from release in the United Kingdom following the James Bulger murder in Liverpool in 1993. The decision was made by the BBFC which refused to issue it with a UK release certificate in 1996. It remains prohibited in the UK.

Ireland
The moral concern extended to Ireland. In 1986, the Dáil Select Committee on Criminal Lawlessness and Vandalism issued a report "Controls on video nasties" recommending that the powers of the film censor's office be extended to videos. This was implemented by the Video Recordings Act in 1989.

title: Video nasty


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Willa Cather

Willa Sibert Cather (born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. Lewis is buried beside her in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire plot.

Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.

Early life and education

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather. The Cather family originated in Wales, the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a Gwynedd mountain. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher. By the time Cather turned twelve months old, the family had moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.

Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. Cather was closer to her brothers than to her sisters whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked very much."

At the urging of Charles Cather's parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. The farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia. Willa's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months, then moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time. Some of Cather's earliest work was first published in the Red Cloud Chief, the city's local paper, and Cather read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Wieners, who offered her free access to their extensive library in Red Cloud. At the same time, she made house calls with the local physician and decided to become a surgeon. For a short while, she signed her name as William, but this was quickly abandoned for Willa instead.

In 1890, at the age of sixteen, Cather graduated from Red Cloud High School. She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to enroll at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In her first year, her essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge. After this, she published columns for $1 apiece, saying that seeing her words printed on the page had "a kind of hypnotic effect", pushing her to continue writing. After this experience, she became a regular contributor to the Journal. In addition to her work with the local paper, Cather served as the main editor of The Hesperian, the university's student newspaper, and became a writer for the Lincoln Courier. While at the university, she learned mathematics from and was befriended by John J. Pershing, who later became General of the Armies and, like Cather, earned a Pulitzer Prize for his writing. She changed her plans from studying science with the goal of becoming a physician, instead graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1895.

Cather's time in Nebraska, still considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the prairie, and the various cultures of the immigrant and Native American families in the area.

Life and career
In 1896, Cather was hired to write for a women's magazine, Home Monthly, and moved to Pittsburgh. There, she wrote journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry. A year later, after the magazine was sold, she became a telegraph editor and critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication. In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and English composition at Central High School for one year; she then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she came to head the English department.

Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, Cather wrote short stories, including publishing "Tommy, the Unsentimental" in the Home Monthly, about a Nebraskan girl with a masculine name who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions." Her first book, a collection of poetry called April Twilights, was published in 1903. Shortly after this, in 1905, Cather's first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, was published. It contained some of her most famous stories, including "A Wagner Matinee", "The Sculptor's Funeral", and "Paul's Case".

After Cather was offered an editorial position at McClure's Magazine in 1906, she moved to New York City. Cather spent most of 1907 living in Boston, while working at McClure's, writing a series of exposés about the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, although freelance journalist Georgine Milmine was credited as the author. A 1993 letter discovered in the Christian Science church archives by Eddy biography Gillian Gill disclosed that Cather had (perhaps reluctantly) written articles 2 through 14 of the 14-part series. Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, but she had been unable to produce a manuscript independently, and McClure's employed Cather and a few other editors including Burton J. Hendrick to assist her. This biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months and then published in book form as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (attributed to author Georgina Milmine, only confirmed decades later as really Willa Cather).

McClure's also serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). While most reviews were favorable, such as The Atlantic calling the writing "deft and skillful", Cather herself soon saw the novel as weak and shallow.

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge with her three novels set in the Great Plains, which eventually became both popular and critical successes: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), which are—taken together—sometimes referred to as her "Prairie Trilogy". It is this succession of plains-based novels for which Cather was celebrated for her use of plainspoken language about ordinary people. Sinclair Lewis, for example, praised her work for making Nebraska available to the wider world for the first time. After writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that it was a failure in comparison to My Ántonia.

1920s
As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance of her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which devoted an advertising budget of only $300 to My Ántonia, and refused to pay for all the illustrations she commissioned for the book from Władysław T. Benda. What's more, the physical quality of the books was poor. That year, she turned to the young publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for supporting its authors through advertising campaigns. She also liked the look of its books and had been impressed with its edition of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson. She so enjoyed their style that all her Knopf books of the 1920s—save for one printing of her short story collection Youth and the Bright Medusa—matched in design on their second and subsequent printings.

By this time, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War I-based novel, One of Ours. She followed this up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, selling 86,500 copies in just two years, and which has been included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century. Two of her three other novels of the decade—A Lost Lady and The Professor's House—elevated her literary status dramatically. She was invited to give several hundred lectures to the public, earned significant royalties, and sold the movie rights to A Lost Lady. Her other novel of the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, received no widespread acclaim—and in fact, neither she nor her life partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention of it later in their lives.

Despite her success, she was the subject of much criticism, particularly surrounding One of Ours. Her close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, saw the novel as a betrayal of the realities of war, not understanding how to "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... and my own stark impressions of war as lived." Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with her portrayal of war, writing in a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere."

1930s
By the 1930s, an increasingly large share of critics began to dismiss her as overly romantic and nostalgic, unable to grapple with contemporary issues: Granville Hicks, for instance, charged Cather with escaping into an idealized past to avoid confronting the problems of the present. And it was particularly in the context of the hardships of the Great Depression in which her work was seen as lacking social relevance. Similarly, critics—and Cather herself —were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made into a film; the film had little resemblance to the novel.

Cather's lifelong conservative politics, appealing to critics such as Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, soured her reputation with younger, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and Edmund Wilson. Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well; in 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the United States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.

Although Cather made her last trip to Red Cloud in 1931 for a family gathering after her mother's death, she stayed in touch with her Red Cloud friends and sent money to Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years. In 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of short fiction, which contained "Neighbour Rosicky", one of her most highly regarded stories. That same summer, she moved into a new apartment on Park Avenue with Edith Lewis, and during a visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on her next novel, Lucy Gayheart. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1934.

Cather suffered two devastating losses in 1938. In June, her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack. Cather was too grief-stricken to attend the funeral. Four months later, Isabelle McClung died. Cather and McClung had lived together when Cather first arrived in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married and moved with her husband to Toronto, the two women remained devoted friends. Cather wrote that Isabelle was the person for whom she wrote all her books.

Final years
During the summer of 1940, Cather and Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, and Cather finished her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a book much darker in tone and subject matter than her previous works. While Sapphira is understood by readers as lacking a moral sense and failing to evoke empathy, the novel was a great critical and commercial success, with an advance printing of 25,000 copies. It was then adopted by the Book of the Month Club, which bought more than 200,000 copies. Her final story, "The Best Years", intended as a gift for her brother, was retrospective. It contained images or "keepsakes" from each of her twelve published novels and the short stories in Obscure Destinies.

Although an inflamed tendon in her hand hampered her writing, Cather managed to finish a substantial part of a novel set in Avignon, France. She had titled it Hard Punishments and placed it in the 14th century during the reign of Antipope Benedict XIV. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. The same year, she executed a will that prohibited the publication of her letters and dramatization of her works. In 1944, she received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a prestigious award given for an author's total accomplishments.

Cather was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 1945 and underwent a mastectomy on January 14, 1946. By early 1947, her cancer had metastasized to her liver, becoming stage IV cancer.On April 24, 1947, Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 73, in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan. After Cather's death, Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript of Hard Punishments according to Cather's instructions. She is buried at the southwest corner of Jaffrey, New Hampshire's Old Burying Ground,  a place she first visited when joining Isabelle McClung and her husband, violinist Jan Hambourg, at the Shattuck Inn. Lewis was buried alongside Cather some 25 years later.

Personal life
Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual identity. Some believe it impossible or anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction, while others disagree. Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather being a lesbian is rooted in treating same-sex desire "as an insult to Cather and her reputation", rather than a neutral historical perspective. Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was attracted to Edith Lewis, and in so doing, asked: "What kind of evidence is needed to establish this as a lesbian relationship? Photographs of the two of them in bed together? She was an integral part of Cather's life, creatively and personally." Beyond her own relationships with women, Cather's reliance on male characters has been used to support the idea of her same-sex attraction. Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in her art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".

In any event, throughout Cather's adult life, her closest relationships were with women. These included her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for prolonged visits; the opera singer Olive Fremstad; and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.

Cather's relationship with Lewis began in the early 1900s. They lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1908 until Cather's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They moved when the apartment was scheduled for demolition during the construction of the Broadway–Seventh Avenue New York City Subway line (now the ). While Lewis was selected as the literary trustee for Cather's estate, she was not merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral part of Cather's creative process.

Beginning in 1922, Cather spent summers on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove on the Bay of Fundy. This is where her short story "Before Breakfast" is set. She valued the seclusion of the island and did not mind that her cottage had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Anyone wishing to reach her could do so by telegraph or mail. In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to World War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she also began a long recuperation from gallbladder surgery in 1942 that restricted travel.

A resolutely private person, Cather destroyed many drafts, personal papers, and letters, asking others to do the same. While many complied, some did not. Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from the personal papers that remain. But in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Cather wrote to friends, family, and literary acquaintances such as Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after the death of Cather's nephew and second literary executor, Charles Cather. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed the complexity of her character and inner world. The letters do not disclose any intimate details about Cather's personal life, but they do "make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women." The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize her complete body of writing, including private correspondence and published work. As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made freely available to the public, in addition to transcription of her own published writing.

Writing influences
Cather admired Henry James's use of language and characterization. While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen—she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental. One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor. Jewett advised Cather of several things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even though Cather preferred using male perspectives), to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was dedicated to Jewett),   and to write fiction that explicitly represented romantic attraction between women. Cather was also influenced by the work of Katherine Mansfield, praising in an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships."

Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped much of her fiction. The Burlington Depot in Red Cloud brought in many strange and wonderful people to her small town. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and returned home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin." After a trip to Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia. Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.

During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent." Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, a historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931; it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944. The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.

Literary style and reception
Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form. Cather's work is often marked by—and criticized for —its nostalgic tone and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains. Consequently, a sense of place is integral to her work: notions of land, the frontier, pioneering and relationships with western landscapes are recurrent. Even when her heroines were placed in an urban environment, the influence of place was critical, and the way that power was displayed through room layout and furniture is evident in her novels like My Mortal Enemy. Though she hardly confined herself to writing exclusively about the Midwest, Cather is virtually inseparable from the Midwestern identity that she actively cultivated (even though she was not a "native" Midwesterner). While Cather is said to have significantly altered her literary approach in each of her novels, this stance is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques in her writing, such as stream of consciousness. At the same time, others have sought to place Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme effects of her apparently simple Romanticism or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

"She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted to stand midway between the journalists whose omniscient objectivity accumulate more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose use of subjective point of view stories distorts objective reality. She developed her theory on a middle ground, selecting facts from experience on the basis of feeling and then presenting the experience in a lucid, objective style."

The English novelist A. S. Byatt has written that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form to investigate the changes in the human condition over time. Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of both the beauty and terror of life. Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a significant influence on the author, most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants, identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" following her own feelings of exile living on the frontier. It is through their engagement with their environment that they gain their community. Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps the first to grant immigrants a respectable position in American literature.

Legacy

In 1962, Willa Cather was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

In 2023, a statue of Willa Cather was placed in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, as one of the statues from the State of Nebraska, replacing the statue of Julius Sterling Morton.

Libraries

 * Willa Cather Review at the Willa Cather Foundation
 * Special Collections & Archives at The National Willa Cather Center
 * Willa Cather Archive at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
 * at the Nebraska State Historical Society
 * Willa Cather Collection at Drew University
 * Willa Cather–Irene Miner Weisz Papers at the Newberry Library
 * Benjamin D. Hitz–Willa Cather Papers at the Newberry Library
 * Ann Safford Mandel collection of Willa Cather papers at the Mortimer Rare Book Collection

Online editions

 * Willa Cather at Poets' Corner
 * Willa Cather at Poets' Corner
 * Willa Cather at Poets' Corner
 * Willa Cather at Poets' Corner
 * Willa Cather at Poets' Corner
 * Willa Cather at Poets' Corner

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Willa Cather


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Le prix du danger

Le Prix du Danger (The Prize of Peril) is a 1983 French-Yugoslav science fiction movie, directed by Yves Boisset. It is based on Robert Sheckley's short story "The Prize of Peril", published in 1958.

Premise
In the most popular television game show of the near future, regular people volunteer to be hunted by a team of five pursuers who are also volunteers. If they survive, they get an enormous cash prize, but no one has managed to survive the game show. A new volunteer needs the money to support his family.

title: Le prix du danger