Sam Raimi’s filmmaking 1981 debut, “The Evil Dead,” erupted onto the scene at the height of this furor, quickly climbing up the list to “number one video nasty” because of its success and notoriety.
The list, in conjunction with police initiative, led to raids on video-rental stores, with overzealous bobbies snatching up anything they felt might be offensive to the tastes and sentiments of the public. Shortly thereafter, Whitehouse and her mother-hen acolytes inspired the “video nasty” list (of actual, honest-to-god videotapes) issued by the British Director of Public Prosecutions. “Cannibal Holocaust” was perhaps, for Whitehouse and her mother-hen acolytes, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sergio Leone - whose spaghetti-western style of filmmaking served as inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” - wrote in a letter to Deodato, “What a movie! The second part is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.” His words would prove prophetic.
Though Whitehouse’s concerns had been building to a fever pitch throughout the ’60s and ’70s, they peaked with the release of the 1980 Italian horror film “Cannibal Holocaust,” directed by Ruggero Deodato. coined the delightful term “video nasty.”
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Her whining led directly to the United Kingdom’s Video Recordings Act of 1984 and the end of an era relatively free of censorship.