Video Nasties: The Complete List
The video nasties were the films the UK tried to make disappear: the Director of Public Prosecutions list that turned cheap horror tapes into contraband and, accidentally, into legend. This page tracks the list, cross-verified against the historical record, with the prosecuted and Section 3 titles noted per film.
From Cannibal Holocaust to The Evil Dead, the panic swept masterpieces and trash into the same dock: thirty-nine titles prosecuted, the rest seized and argued over, every one of them now a piece of censorship history.
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The panic that backfired
In the early 1980s the UK Director of Public Prosecutions circulated a list of video releases considered liable to deprave and corrupt. Dealers were raided, tapes were seized and thirty-nine titles were successfully prosecuted. The campaign meant to erase these films instead canonised them: nothing sells a horror film like a government ban.
Reading the list
Each film below is marked by its tier: the DPP 39 that were prosecuted, and the Section 3 titles that were seizable but never convicted. Most of the historical list is in the catalog already; the remaining few will join it as they are added.
The films on this list
Absurd 1981
Joe D'Amato's Italian slasher pits a near-indestructible killer against a small town, essentially reworking his own Anthropophagus for the splatter crowd. Its emergency-room set pieces earned it a place on the list.
The Beast in Heat 1977
A grimy entry in the Nazisploitation cycle that built its reputation on sheer bad-taste provocation. Its cartoonish atrocity made it a fixture of the banned list rather than any craft.
The Beyond 1981
Lucio Fulci's Louisiana gateway-to-hell nightmare trades plot for pure dread, all melting faces and dream logic. It is the crown jewel of his Gates of Hell trilogy and a high point of Italian splatter.
Blood Feast 1963
Herschell Gordon Lewis effectively invented the gore film here, with an Egyptian caterer harvesting body parts for a ritual feast. Crude and gleeful, it made carnage the whole point.
Bloody Moon 1981
Jess Franco's Spanish slasher stalks a language school with disco sleaze and a notorious stone-saw set piece. It is Franco chasing the post-Halloween market with characteristic disregard for taste.
The Burning 1981
A summer-camp slasher built around a disfigured caretaker's revenge, elevated by Tom Savini's effects and an early ensemble of future stars. Its raft massacre pushed it onto the list.
Cannibal Apocalypse 1980
Antonio Margheriti fuses the cannibal cycle with Vietnam-vet trauma, spreading a flesh-eating contagion through Atlanta. It is more urban war film than jungle atrocity.
Cannibal Ferox 1981
Umberto Lenzi's jungle atrocity leaned so hard on real animal cruelty and torture that it advertised itself as the most violent film ever made. Pure provocation, and duly prosecuted.
Cannibal Holocaust 1980
Ruggero Deodato's found-footage landmark remains the cannibal film's most disturbing peak, a media critique undermined by its own genuine animal killings. Banned, prosecuted and endlessly argued over.
The Cannibal Man 1972
Despite the lurid English title, this is a slow Spanish character study of a slaughterhouse worker whose first killing spirals into a lonely routine. More class-conscious drama than cannibal shocker.
Cannibal Terror 1980
A threadbare Euro-cannibal cheapie whose jungle is unmistakably suburban and whose tigers wander in from stock footage. It earned notoriety mostly by association with the cannibal cycle.
Contamination 1980
Luigi Cozzi's Alien-inspired shocker sends pulsating eggs and chest-bursting spores from Colombia to New York. Goblin's score powers a gooey slice of Italian science-fiction horror.
Dead & Buried 1981
A coastal town where the dead keep reappearing anchors this eerie, Dan O'Bannon-scripted mystery, with Stan Winston effects and a genuinely unsettling twist. Smarter than its nasty-list reputation suggests.
Devil Hunter 1980
Jess Franco's jungle-goddess cannibal picture is slow, sweaty and padded, notorious more for its listing than its content. A bulging-eyed cannibal god is its one enduring image.
Don't Go in the House 1979
A traumatized loner with a flamethrower and a steel room turns this into a grim Psycho variation about inherited abuse. Its immolation set piece drove the controversy.
Don't Go in the Woods 1981
A backwoods slasher with a wild mountain-man killer picking off hikers, rough around every edge. Its charm is its incompetence, its infamy the list.
Don't Look in the Basement 1973
Set in a mismanaged asylum where patients and staff blur, this Texas-shot chiller trades gore for a grimy sense of institutional rot. Drive-in bleakness on a shoestring.
The Driller Killer 1979
Abel Ferrara stars as a New York painter cracking under poverty and noise until a power drill becomes his release. Grimy no-wave portraiture as much as horror.
The Evil Dead 1981
Sam Raimi turns a cabin, a camera and relentless invention into one of horror's great sensory assaults. Its energy launched a franchise and made the nasties list look absurd.
Evilspeak 1981
Clint Howard's bullied cadet summons Satanic revenge through an early computer, climaxing in a berserk chapel bloodbath. The tech gimmick dates it; the finale earned the ban.
Exposé 1976
The only British-made film on the DPP list, a paranoid erotic thriller with Udo Kier as a blocked novelist. Sleaze and dread in an isolated farmhouse.
Faces of Death 1978
The infamous mondo compilation blending real and staged death footage, marketed as forbidden documentary. Its shock was mostly hype, its notoriety total.
Flesh for Frankenstein 1973
Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol's lurid, originally-3D Frankenstein revels in the Baron's grotesque eugenic lust. Camp, gore and art-world provocation in equal measure.
The Funhouse 1981
Tobe Hooper strands teens overnight in a carnival funhouse with a deformed killer, working the ride's mechanical grotesquerie for atmosphere. Its listing was one of the panic's odder overreaches.
Gestapo's Last Orgy 1977
Among the most extreme Nazisploitation films, a camp-set atrocity picture built to appall. Its place on the list is a place in bad-taste history.
The House by the Cemetery 1981
Lucio Fulci's New England haunted-house nightmare hides Dr. Freudstein in the cellar, all oozing decay and dream logic. A gory, illogical centerpiece of his early-1980s run.
House on the Edge of the Park 1980
Ruggero Deodato's home-invasion nasty pits David Hess against a party of bourgeois hosts, a mean companion piece to The Last House on the Left. Prolonged menace was its selling point and its problem.
Human Experiments 1979
A woman framed and committed to an asylum faces a doctor's mind-wiping experiments in this grim women-in-prison-adjacent shocker. More psychological cruelty than gore.
Inferno 1980
Dario Argento's fever-dream sequel to Suspiria drowns its Three Mothers mythology in color, water and impossible architecture. Plot dissolves; the sensory delirium is the point.
Island of Death 1976
A sun-drenched Greek travelogue turned depraved as a couple visit escalating atrocities on the locals. Mastorakis cynically front-loaded every taboo to guarantee notoriety.
Killer Nun 1979
Anita Ekberg stars as a morphine-addicted nun unraveling amid convent murders, mixing nunsploitation sacrilege with giallo mystery. Prestige casting for a very disreputable subgenre.
The Last House on the Left 1972
Wes Craven's debut weaponizes rape-revenge into a raw, near-unwatchable assault on the audience's nerves. Its cruelty made it a defining, endlessly banned nasty.
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue 1974
Jorge Grau's Anglo-Spanish zombie film blames the dead's return on agricultural radiation, sharpening its horror with eco-anxiety. Lush, gory and unusually intelligent.
Love Camp 7 1969
An early template for the Nazi-camp exploitation cycle, crude and grim. Its influence on the subgenre outweighs any merit.
Madhouse 1981
A deformed twin's birthday revenge drives this Italian-American shocker, complete with a killer dog and Grand Guignol excess. Nastier and stranger than its obscurity suggests.
Mardi Gras Massacre 1978
A New Orleans slasher recycling Blood Feast's ritual-murder template, with an Aztec-obsessed killer sacrificing women. Cheap, repetitive and duly prosecuted.
Night of the Bloody Apes 1969
A Mexican mad-science romp where an ape heart transplant turns a man into a rampaging beast, spiced with real surgical footage and lucha wrestling. Gonzo south-of-the-border pulp.
Night of the Demon 1980
A Bigfoot picture that swaps folklore for splatter, stringing gruesome vignettes onto a campfire-story frame. Its infamous castration scene made the list.
Possession 1981
Andrzej Zulawski's Berlin-set marital breakdown detonates into full metaphysical horror, with Isabelle Adjani's subway meltdown among cinema's most harrowing scenes. Its nasty listing was a category error; the film is a masterpiece.
The Slayer 1982
An island vacation turns lethal as a painter's nightmares bleed into reality, a moody dream-logic slasher that arguably prefigured A Nightmare on Elm Street. Better crafted than most of its list-mates.
The Toolbox Murders 1978
A masked killer works through an apartment building with the contents of a toolbox, front-loading its atrocities before shifting into a stranger kidnapping plot. Cameron Mitchell anchors the sleaze.
Unhinged 1982
A rain-soaked backwoods slasher steeped in Psycho-style family secrets, slow and grimy until its reveal. Its reputation rests almost entirely on the ban.
Visiting Hours 1982
A slick Canadian slasher stalking a journalist through a hospital, with Michael Ironside as a chillingly misogynist killer. More polished than the average nasty.
The Witch Who Came from the Sea 1976
A haunted, art-minded rarity in which a woman's childhood trauma erupts into violence against men, wrapped in dreamlike imagery. Far stranger and sadder than its lurid listing implies.
Women Behind Bars 1975
Jess Franco's women-in-prison entry delivers the subgenre's expected cruelty and sleaze with his usual zoom-happy indifference. Notorious by category more than by any single scene.
Zombie Flesh Eaters 1979
Lucio Fulci's Caribbean zombie epic gave the world a shark-versus-zombie duel and a splinter-to-the-eye that defined splatter. The film that made him a gore legend.
