Censor Director Prano Bailey-Bond Is Going to Shock You – Vulture
Photo: Courtesy of Magnet
Britain in the 80s was grasped by the talons of Thatcherism: a brand of right-wing politics that upheld the individual and traditional family values. Some (many!) decried it as fascist, a call that became all the more emphatic when the Thatcher government took on Britains industrious towns and cities, closing down mines, mostly in the north and Wales, and destroying entire families livelihoods.
For Prano Bailey-Bond, the first-time director behind Sundance hit Censor, its difficult to separate Britains turbulent contemporaneous politics from the panic around video nasties: gore-heavy, straight-to-VHS B-movies around which the tabloids rustled up a profound moral hysteria, egged on by the state. In Britain at that time, you have job losses, you have welfare being cut. People were living in poverty, she says. So theres going to be more unrest, and I think horror was an easy scapegoat for all the bad in the world it took pressure off politicians, off what was actually going on.
This political reality serves as a tangible through-line in Censor, which follows a relatively simple conceit. Enid, a film censor played by Niamh Algar, is on the front line in Britains war against the nasties; she decides whether theyre fit for public consumption.All the while, shes tormented by the mysterious loss of her sister: Once inseparable, she vanished without a trace when they were young. But when she sits down to rate a particularly graphic film by the notorious gore-hound Frederick North, things begin to spiral, her perception of reality and fiction blurring at an exponential rate. The crescendo Censor eventually hits offers one of the more unsettling dnouements in recent horror cinema.
With Censor being released this week, Vulture chatted with Bailey-Bond about moral panic, why we love watching films that indulge in the most grotesque of body horror, and whether the video nasties, despite their reputation, can be appreciated as art.
Film censorship happens everywhere, but the moral hysteria around video nasties was specific to England in the 80s. Can you tell us a little about that history?
The birth of VHS led to a boom in low-budget horror becoming available. In every country, these films could go directly to the home, be watched and rewatched potentially getting into the hands of children. For various reasons, the U.K.s reaction was one of the most conservative in western countries. Its a moral panic that emerged in the Thatcher era, this idea that these films were going to possess those who watched them, make them throw their moral compass out of the window, and do terrible things: garrote each other with shoelaces, attack each other with axes.
In the Daily Mail, there was an article called Pony Maniac Strikes Again, which was about a bunch of ponies who were attacked. And the police statement in this article said that the attacker was probably influenced by either video nasties or the full moon. So suddenly the real world becomes this supernatural place where were all howling at the moon, and growing hairs, and going out to attack ponies. Its amazing how the tabloid press was about to whip up this moral panic around these films.
There are moments in Censor where you contrast the political violence of the Thatcher era in the background of one scene, theres archival news footage of police cracking down on a miners strike, for example with the grotesque, but otherwise benign, horrors of the video nasties. Why is that?
Its what I see when I look at that footage. Because obviously in the background of all of this were the miners protesting about the mines being closed down and everybody losing their livelihoods. And you see police brutality in the footage thats not being highlighted or looked at as perhaps not the right way to deal with things, when you look back. But some kind of gory, probably campy special effects are supposed to infect someones brain and make them go out and murder somebody.
We dont watch a horror film and then completely lose all of our morals. The reason people do terrible things is not that simple. It comes from somewhere much deeper; it can come from how weve been treated in life and how we feel in our heads. Its such a simple explanation to just blame horror.
It feels like theres a direct line between this moral panic, happening in a very specific political moment, and, say, the hysteria around video games in America over the past decade or so. The idea that games like Grand Theft Auto lead to shootings
Absolutely, and thats sort of why I wanted to set the film in the past, so that you have an objective viewpoint. When we were developing the film, a few people said, Why dont you make it about a contemporary censor? But the period and what was going on is just too rich not to set it then. But you also have distance from it. You can go back and go, Well, in the 50s, it was comic books that were going to turn little boys into horrible big men. And then it was video nasties. And then it was video games. Its been Marilyn Manson; its been rap music.
Specifically with the VHS thing, I found it interesting to think about just how fragile we think we are, or how fragile our moral compasses are as people, that this new piece of technology is going to completely destroy our understanding of right and wrong. Were so scared of technology; were so scared of the things we create and what theyre going to do back to us.
Sometimes the fear of what theyre going to do causes more of a problem than the technology itself. I think youve got that in the fears around social media and what thats going to do to us and how that is warping our perception of reality, which is perhaps warped already, because then we can go into, What even is reality? And we wont go down that road. Maybe were just a frightened species.
What is it with our attraction to the morbid, the grotesque, and gore what attracts us to, say, people being torn limb by limb by zombies, beheadings, and disembowelment?
I think about this a lot. Some people love it, and some people just cant stand it. I know from my perspective its not so much about the gore. Theres something very physical about watching these kinds of films. I think horror is the most similar, of all film genres, to a roller-coaster ride. You can feel the electricity sometimes when youre watching a horror film, and I dont think you get that from other genres. For me, Im really interested in trying to understand why people do bad things. Im really interested in dark minds and picking them apart.
Its a funny one: My sister isnt really into horror, but she loves crime dramas, and, actually, women are the audience for a lot of serial-killer films. Sometimes I think, Is it because we want to protect ourselves? I dont think anyone wants to genuinely put themselves in these horrific situations in real life, but because we know its fiction, theres something very cathartic about it its an adrenaline rush at times, too. I dont have a hard-and-fast answer.Im still trying to work it out.
Theres an early line of dialogue where a film producer hes supposed to be a bit of an asshole, I think shows some artistic appreciation for an eye-gouging scene that Enid wants to cut: Its King Lears Gloucester, he contests. Its Un Chien Andalou. Looking back, do you think the nasties can be framed, and appreciated, as art?
I think some of them can. The video nasties, as a whole, are quite varied in terms of their art. Some of them are only known or spoken about now because they were banned; had they not been banned, I dont think wed be watching them. Some of them were impressively bad.
But some of them I do think of as art: You look at something like [Dario Argentos] Suspiria or [Matt Cimbers] The Witch Who Came From the Sea they are pieces of art, in my opinion. They have a real kind of vision behind them. And theyre quite sophisticated filmmaking in their own way. Its a real range. Theres the really schlocky ones, and there are some really fun, wild ones like Basket Case. But even then, theres art in Basket Case, you know.
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Censor Director Prano Bailey-Bond Is Going to Shock You - Vulture