Back in the 1980s, being a horror film fan in the UK was dark and miserable time. Though the classic Universals and Hammers were regularly to be found on television, those with a taste for something more current had to deal with the fact that an increasingly trigger-happy British Board of Film Censors were cutting and banning seemingly at whim. Video was the problem here, the fact that violent films hitherto unseen in the UK – they were either never released theatrically or if they were, they were often cut – were suddenly available for all to see in the comfort of their own homes.
The unregulated pioneering days of home video in Britain did offer genre fans a short window of opportunity when horror films from around the world, titles hitherto reduced to tantalising mentions in books and magazines, suddenly became widely available. But it wasn’t going to last and by 1982 the first rumblings of what would soon become the largely media-created “video nasties scandal” could be heard. Over the next two years, films would be banned, video shop owners and collectors fined, their stock/collections seized, and in the more extreme cases, distributors were imprisoned (David Hamilton Grant was sentenced to eighteen months behind bars when his company Oppidan, distributed an uncut version of Romano Scavolini’s Nightmare/Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981)).
The furore over these violent films forms the backdrop for Censor, the feature film debut from director Prano Bailey-Bond whose 2015 short Nasty covered similar territory. The film, co-written with Anthony Fletcher, takes the unusual route of exploring the period through the eyes of one of the censors (though Bailey-Bond and Fletcher deftly avoid ever naming the BBFC). Our protagonist is the traumatised Enid Baines (Niamh Algar, no stranger to the genre having already appeared in From the Dark (2014), Without Name (2016) and short film Strangers in the Night (2015)) who works for the unnamed censor board and sees her role as a moral guardian, sparing the British public the worst horrors of the films she watches (represented in the main title sequence by clips from the aforementioned Nightmare as well as Frightmare (1974), Frozen Scream (1975), The Driller Killer (1979) and Soultangler (1987)).
Enid is a diligent censor. “Eye gouging must go!” she writes emphatically in her pad and later tells a boorish male colleague, Sanderson (Nicholas Burns), who pretentiously evokes Shakespeare, Homer and Bunuel as a means to justify violence in entertainment, that “I’ve only trimmed the tiniest bit off the end of the genitals.” But she’s still suffering the guilt and trauma of the disappearance of her sister Nina (Amelie Child-Villiers) when they were children, feelings triggered when an actress, Alice Lee (Sophia La Porta), in the latest film she’s been asked to watch, Don’t Go in the Church, makes her think that it might be Nina grown up. To add to her woes, her parents (Clare Holman and Andrew Havil) are preparing after many years to sign paperwork declaring Nina dead and another film that Enid helped to classify, Deranged, has been linked to a real-life murder by a man dubbed “the Amnesia Killer” by the press who are, of course, quick to make a connection between film and crime. With members of the public phoning her up to abuse her and the press camped outside her home, Nina is soon “losing the plot” as one of her useless colleagues puts it and her dogged search for evidence of Nina leads her into a very dark place indeed.
“If violent films are supposed to drive a person to commit violent acts, what protects the Censor from losing control?” asked in an interview with the Cineuropa website and therein lies the central thesis of Censor. It was a question often asked of film fans at the time – if this screen violence was supposed to be turning us into homicidal maniacs, why was it not having any effect on those watching them for censorship reasons? – and in Censor, the fastidious Enid, so convinced that what she’s doing is right, “analysing this with such precision,” eventually becomes the very thing she fears the most. Whether her psychotic break is triggered by the violence she’s watching, the many stresses of her everyday life or the guilt she’s carrying around about Nina is never made clear but by the end she’s become an axe-wielding maniac completely divorced from reality. In that reality, one suspects that the ghouls from Fleet Street laying siege to the flat would have made great capital of the mental collapse of a film censor, pushing the angle that what she was asked to watch every day was the cause of her psychosis, never once questioning whether or not she was ever in a fit mental state to carry out that work.
There are hints throughout the film that Enid’s guilt stems from the fact that she either murdered or did nothing to prevent the death of her sister (“it’s all your fault!” her mother screams at her in flashback) though the ending doesn’t give anything away as Bailey-Bond ventures into surreal territory (she makes no bones about her love for the films of David Lynch). The plot of Don’t Go in the Church, the film which seems to be the final trigger in her breakdown, features a young girl murdering her sibling and the fact that the “Amnesia Killer” claims not to have been able to remember his murder of his own family leaves Enid wondering – “People construct stories to cope,” a co-worker. “You’d be surprised what the human brain can edit out when it can’t handle the truth.” The ending will leave you none the wiser – Enid is, after all, a classic unreliable narrator, so it’s impossible to tell how much of what we’re seeing (everything in the film is seen from Enid’s perspective) is actually happening. But the climax certainly invites a second watching of the film in search of clues.
The production design (by Paulina Rzeszowska) and photography (by Annika Summerson) nicely capture a down-at-heel 80s ambience and the “recreations” of fictional horror and action films of the period (“some of those scenes were so excessive”) are, if not quite perfect, then certainly convincing enough. Despite being set in the mid-1980s and nicely capturing the feel of the times, Bailey-Bond and Fletcher’s screenplay makes the film perfectly accessible to those not there at that particular time and place – a knowledge of the “video nasties” and the complex web of politics, hysteria and legislation that surrounded them isn’t necessary, though there is a wonderful frisson of nostalgia when Enid spots banned videotapes being offered from under the counter at the perfectly decorated Gerald’s Video. Back in the day, we all knew a Gerald, someone willing to discretely carry on renting the most desirable titles even after they’d been banned.
Special mention too should be made of Tim Harrison’s sound design and especially Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s excellent score, an eerie and immersive soundscape that commendably doesn’t try to emulate the scores of 80-s films. It’s a very modern and very unsettling score that didn’t initially meet Bailey-Bond’s requirements: “When I first heard Emilie’s music, it was not necessarily exactly what I imagined for the film,” she told Variety, “but there was something about it that just absolutely tuned into Enid’s trauma… Emilie does the little details in the music that just bring out those moments in the film that tune us into Enid, or just highlight a beat in a scene. I think she’s just so in tune with the character.”
Censor would make a fine double bill with Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012), another film in which exposure to screen violence causes its protagonist to lose grip on reality. It would also fit nicely with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) whose maxim “television is reality, and reality is less than television,” is echoed throughout Censor. With strong performances (Algar’s physical transformation throughout the film subtle but effective and Michael Smiley turns up briefly as a smarmy, misogynistic producer of “nasties“, an acknowledgement of the “MeToo” revelations), a wonderful score and a clammy, horribly immersive ambience, Censor is a clever, nuanced film that tips its hat to nostalgia but never panders to it, instead using a difficult and fractious time in British film culture to create an impressive study of madness, guilt and the potential of media effects. Repeat viewings will doubtless be even more revealing.
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