I have just watched a documentary called Ban The Sadist Videos! (available on Amazon Prime) about the fuss over video nasties during the 1980s and 1990s. Let’s just say it was a massive overreaction that kids might be traumatised by seeing scary movies. And yes I do have fond memories of watching The Damned performing the track Nasty on The Young ones during the 1980s.

This was despite the fact that many homes in the UK did not have children and the campaigners against such films did a survey that was skewed to say the least. And it was further boosted by faux media outrage whipped up by the tabloid press as well as the broadsheets.

However things escalated following the brutal murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables who were themselves still only children. There was a tenuous link to the fact that one of their parents had rented Child’s Play 3 featuring the sinister doll Chucky and that might have sent them over the edge. This was despite the fact that one of the accused was not at the family home at the time but that did not stop the tabloid press ramping up the moral outrage.

In an attempt to localise the story by the North West Evening Mail I was sent to a local video store in Barrow-in Furness. For the younger members of my audience videos were like cassette tapes but were a lot bigger and contained films not music (I do realise that cassettes are making a comeback presumably due to the hipster revival of that format, presumably as a backlash against the resurgence of vinyl).

For the record I do not subscribe to the doctrine that if you watch horror movies or play violent shoot ’em up video games you will automatically go on to be a mass murderer or a spree killer.

I decided to do a shot of the shop owner’s hands flicking through the available videos which was used quite well in the paper and I also got a head shot of the owner as she was quoted in the article. I suppose I could have taken a portrait of her in front of the shop but I reckon the end result was much better.

And here is a fun fact one of the videos in the shot was called Bad Taste which was a low budget New Zealand horror film by a then unknown Peter Jackson. Whatever happened to him eh?

From the North West Evening Mail on April 2, 1994.