EXCLUSIVE: Severin Films and Horror Experts Join Forces for the Definitive “Video Nasties” Ranking!

Our friends over at Severin Films just kicked off their epic Summer Sale with prices slashed by 50% on most catalogue releases, along with a handful of brand new offerings.

One of the standout new arrivals this week is the controversial 1981 horror movie Nightmare – also known as Nightmares in a Damaged Brain – now available on 4K Ultra HD from Severin. The 1980s horror film has been scanned from the internegative and various foreign print sources to create the most complete version EVER assembled.

The film’s 4K UHD debut comes complete with a brand new roster of extras, including the first time Tom Savini has gone on camera about his controversial involvement!

Severin is also publishing a 193 page novelization of the film, written by Rue Morgue’s Michael Gingold, based on the original screenplay by Romano Scavolini.

Nightmare was famously named one of the “Video Nasties” back in the 1980s, a term associated with a period of panic and censorship in the UK during the rise of popularity of the video cassette. 72 films in total were censored and banned as part of the “Video Nasties” movement, and Severin Films has gotten together top horror experts to rank those 72 titles.

Exclusively being published here on Bloody Disgusting this afternoon is Severin’s definitive ranking of the 72 “Video Nasties,” with insights from multiple experts in this particular field.

The Severin Films team explained in an email to Bloody Disgusting, “As we continue to restore and release Video Nasties as part of our mission statement, it often frustrates us to see so much of the coverage around the phenomenon being reported by those with minimal knowledge of the situation. We decided to conduct our own poll amongst true Nasty experts to bury all the other listicles and copy/paste junk in a deep, dark grave.”

David Gregory, Co-Founder of Severin Films, elaborates, “Unbeknownst to me when I was trying to watch as many of these films as I could on video before they were mercilessly snatched away from us by our government after a couple of blissful years film viewing freedom, untarnished by censor interference from our nanny state, that this list and its bizarre accompanying national scandal would play a major part in my life’s journey. I was only 12 / 13 when the cull happened and to be honest if you’d asked me then I would have stated that it was the most important thing to be concerned about right now as the clock is ticking, far exceeding any school related interest or activity.

“But such an impression it made I’m still here licensing, restoring and releasing these movies when we get the rights or new elements surface and I keep commissioning documentaries about them or subjects relating to them and this peculiar era of Britishness. So when I see that ridiculous “Video nasties ranked!” clickbait article resurfacing time and again due to natural selection in my social algorithms I get irked. The occasion of our re-release of NIGHTMARE(S IN A DAMAGED BRAIN) and Sarah Appleton’s accompanying documentary DAMAGED: THE VERY BRITISH OBSCENITY OF DAVID HAMILTON-GRANT felt like the right time to consult a selection of venerable pundits to give a more informed clickbait appraisal of the forbidden 72. Harder than you might think to find a distinguished panel of experts who are both familiar with the ins and outs of that tabloid whipped hysteria to put them in that context but who also had seen ALL 72 of the films.

“So here is the rundown of the special few of the depraved and corrupted.”

But first… THE CONTRIBUTORS.

The panel of experts includes…

Marc Morris, Nucleus Films and co-author of The Art of the Nasty and Shock Horror – Astounding Artwork From The Video Nasty Era.

Art Ettinger, Ultra Violent Magazine: “What a crazy good list of movies. I had a really hard time ranking them. I don’t actively dislike ANY of these films. I tried not to think too hard and go with my gut while ranking them.”

John Martin, Writer. John Martin has been writing about horror since the early 80s in UK fanzines including Samhain and continues to write for The Dark Side to this day. He published one of the first books examining the video nasties scandal, “Seduction of the Gullible” and its follow up “The Son Of Seduction of the Gullible.”

Harvey Fenton, FAB Press: Harvey Fenton is the owner of the book publishing company FAB Press. FAB has been publishing lavish books on genre cinema since the 90s including books on definitive books on the works of Dario Argento, Abel Ferrara, Lucio Fulci, Ruggero Deodato, Mario Bava and Andy Milligan. FAB also published Kier-La Janisse’s “House Of Psychotic Women” and the recent massive volume on London’s Scala Cinema. Harvey’s work in this field began back in the 80s with his fanzine, Flesh & Blood.

Lovely Jon is a DJ and film/music obsessive who alongside Gareth Godard (Cherrystones) founded the influential exploitation audio visual sound system Jigoku. Jon is very much a ‘child of the nasties’, growing up at the time of the cultural video boom and intertwining moral backlash (at its most pronounced whilst he was working at his local video shop in Hertfordshire and stockpiling  tapes for himself). Jon has continued to represent the UK video scene throughout the decades as commentator and collector.

Warren Hart (most of the pics here are from his collection): “Child of the 70s, teenager of the 80s, it’s now exactly 40 years since I started this nasty obsession, to watch and collect, it was the attraction to the unattainable, I needed to have what I was being told I couldn’t… Things that haven’t changed are my #1 and #72. My #1, will always be The Evil Dead. It was the spark, the catalyst to watch, collect, and generally fill my mind everything 72, from when I first saw the teaser trailer on the TV, to it’s video release that motivated me to pester my old mam to rent a VCR, which she did, and The Evil Dead was our first rental, the first of what would become the 72.”

Joe Rubin, co-owner of American boutique disc label Vinegar Syndrome. Among their multitude of restorations are a number of video nasties including THE BOOGEY MAN, FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN, DON’T GO IN THE WOODS and FROZEN SCREAM.

Photo Credit: Warren Hart

Rebekah McKendry, PHD, Fangoria’s Colors of the Dark Podcast: “I’m Dr. Rebekah McKendry, and I’m proud to say I’ve seen all 72 video nasties. I first became enamored with the video nasty list after learning about them in the late 90s on The Young Ones TV show, and especially The Damned’s tribute song Video Nasty. As a teenager hearing about these films, I could only imagine what types of movies could be so extreme that a government decreed them illegal. What could be so detrimental to the human psyche that you could be arrested for just possessing a copy? I immediately knew I had to watch ALL of them, and I starting working my way through every video nasty title I could find at my local video store.

“I went onto to work for Fangoria and Blumhouse, and eventually got a PhD focused entirely on horror films, all the while continuously adding to my nasty viewing repertoire. And several years ago, I finally completed viewing the entire list.

“So looking back, did I find the most heinous abominations of cinema ever created? Did viewing all 72 of these extreme films leaved me a trembling shell of humanity? Nope, not a bit. I mostly found boundary-pushing, transgressive filmmakers who had a lot to say about politics, society, religion, and life.”

Photo Credit: Warren Hart

David Kerekes is author with David Slater of Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and The Video Nasties Panic of the 1980s, published by Headpress 2023. “At the top is The Devil Hunter but it could easily be Blood Rites or Axe or Don’t Go in the Woods… Alone!, films lacking the capacity to engage on a traditional art- emotional level and yet are compelling (to this viewer) for other reasons: they are cheap, demented, strange, obscure — aspects that facilitate the notion of ‘video nasties’ as something ‘other’, becoming collectively the thing that moral guardians had accused the ‘nasties’ of being all along. This is to say, in some perverse way, they are not films at all, but danger, psychotropic, unforgiving.”

David Slater is co-author of See No Evil – Banned Films and Video Controversy (2000), Killing for Culture – From Edison to Isis A New History of Death on Film (2016), and Cannibal Error – Anti film Propaganda and the Video Nasties Panic of the 1980s (2023).

Andrew Allard: “A lifelong film fan and video collector who rented most of these off the shelves before England bowed down to the censorial minority, very happy to see most of them available again in superior editions!”

Stephen Thrower is the acclaimed author of Beyond Terror: the Films of Lucio Fulci, the groundbreaking Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents and two volumes on the films of Jess Franco, Murderous Passions and Flowers of Perversion. He is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative historians of exploitation and underground cinema writing today. “My first video nasty was I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and I almost fainted during the infamous castration scene. Dizziness, nausea, buzzing in the ears… value for money! I watched it again the next morning and rewound the castration sequence over and over, a natural response when faced with something so overwhelming.

“Mary Whitehouse and James Ferman thought the pause and rewind controls were the devil’s love-buttons, but they were wrong. Films actually lose some of their power when you stop and start them: the spell weakens rather than doubles. Anyway, once I got over the shock of my first video nasty, I stopped fiddling with the remote control. I did, however, record films onto audio cassette to study later. LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, DEATH TRAP, DRILLER KILLER, DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE… I loved not only their soundtracks but the musicality of their dialogue too. Even today I can pretty much ‘sing along’ to the vocal cadences of Krug Stillo, crazy old Judd, long-suffering Reno, and schmucky little firebug Donny Kohler. The British tabloid press and the government tried to spoil our fun, but look how impotent they turned out to be! Within a year of the films being banned there was a roaring trade in copies, passed between eager fans. Devotees, including myself, published magazines celebrating these films and a whole ‘social network’ was born. Forty years later, with labels like Severin bringing the video nasties back to market in stunning new transfers, it’s not so much ‘the return of the repressed’ as the triumph of the repressed. The message? Don’t mess with horror fans!”

Photo Credit: Warren Hart

And without further ado… THE FINAL TALLY: THE DEFINITIVE RANKING OF ALL 72 “VIDEO NASTIES,” CAREFULLY SELECTED BY THE ABOVE EXPERTS.

1. ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS / ZOMBIE
2. THE BEYOND
3. TENEBRAE
4. EVIL DEAD
5. LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE / LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE
6. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST
7. LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT
8. INFERNO
9. ANDY WARHOL’S FRANKENSTEIN / FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN
10. POSSESSION
11. BLOOD BATH / BAY OF BLOOD
12. HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY
13. DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE
14. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE
15. CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE
16. DEAD AND BURIED
17. DRILLER KILLER
18. NIGHTMARE MAKER / BUTCHER BAKER NIGHTMARE MAKER
19. NIGHTMARES IN A DAMAGED BRAIN / NIGHTMARE
20. THE FUNHOUSE
21. LATE NIGHT TRAINS / NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS
22. DEATH TRAP / EATEN ALIVE
23. HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK
24. CANNIBAL MAN
25. CANNIBAL FEROX
26. FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE
27. NIGHT OF THE DEMON
28. BLOODY MOON
29. ISLAND OF DEATH
30. THE BURNING
31. CONTAMINATION
32. EVILSPEAK
33. WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
34. ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH / HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD
35. BLOOD FEAST
36. THE BOGEY MAN / THE BOOGEY MAN
37. THE KILLER NUN
38. ABSURD
39. ANTHROPOPHAGOUS
40. EXPOSE / HOUSE ON STRAW HILL
41. VISITING HOURS
42. GESTAPO’S LAST ORGY
43. TERROR EYES
44. TOOLBOX MURDERS
45. AXE
46. MADHOUSE
47. PRISONER OF THE CANNIBAL GOD / MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD
48. THE SLAYER
49. DON’T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT
50. NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES
51. PRANKS
52. DEEP RIVER SAVAGES / MAN FROM DEEP RIVER
53. WEREWOLF AND THE YETI
54. BEAST IN HEAT
55. UNHINGED
56. FOREST OF FEAR
57. SS EXPERIMENT CAMP
58. BLOOD RITES / THE GHASTLY ONES
59. HUMAN EXPERIMENTS
60. FACES OF DEATH
61. FROZEN SCREAM
62. DELIRIUM
63. DON’T GO IN THE WOODS
64. DEVIL HUNTER
65. DON’T GO NEAR THE PARK
66. SNUFF
67. MARDI GRAS MASSACRE
68. WOMEN BEHIND BARS
69. I MISS YOU HUGS AND KISSES
70. LOVE CAMP 7
71. CANNIBAL TERROR
72. REVENGE OF THE BOGEYMAN

Agree with this ranking? Disagree violently with this ranking? Sound off in the comments section below. And be sure to grab Nightmare on 4K UHD, available now from Severin Films!

Severin’s Summer Sale 2023 runs from June 30 – July 3.