A follow up to the mind boggling “Killing For Culture”, Kerekes and Slater’s exhaustive look into “Death on Film”, “See No Evil” eschews the elusive search for true snuff film and instead concentrates on the bizarre world of the UK video industry. I know, that doesn’t sound quite as exciting, but it is. In England, the video boom tested the limits of a free society’s tolerance for filmed sex and violence, resulting in the notorious “Video Nasty” scare, and by proxy, creating a vast network of splatter movie collectors and pirates. If you ever grumbled about censorship in America, then you’ll shut the fuck up after reading this book, because the UK has suffered far worse.

“See No Evil” is divided into three vast sections- “Video”, “Film”, and “Crime.” The first is a straight but compelling history of how the video industry started in the UK, from the various formats that initially flooded the market to the first attempts at video rental stores. This is precisely where things went wrong- English law had yet to figure in this new form of entertainment, and as far as Scotland Yard was concerned, videotape renters where bootleggers and thieves, and a clampdown began, with earnest. As a result, the more sordid of the few horror films then available were brought to light, and were immediately seen as some kind of moral hazard to God-fearing English citizens. So, they all got banned.

The “Film” section, which takes up the bulk of “See No Evil”, is an amazingly thorough guide to all the films that found themselves on the ‘banned’ list. Dubbed “Video Nasties” by the UK tabloid press, these low-budget little shockers suddenly became contraband, and many found themselves subject to search and seizure, and even jail, for owning them.
Crazy? Absolutely, and all too true. The “Film” section takes on a special significance, since the authors weren’t even allowed to watch these movies for many years. They did, of course, but still.

What’s especially interesting about this section is that many of the films that were banned were nothing more than bottom shelf dust collectors in US video stores. OK, so maybe “Fight for Your Life” and “Gestapo’s Last Orgy” really were pretty fucked up, but Tobe Hooper’s carny snoozefest “The Funhouse”? Goofy Mexican wrestler romp “Night of the Bloody Apes”? The entirely silly nail gun slasher “Toolbox Murders”? All, at one time, were banned in the UK, and with some reverence, the Davids describe the films, searching for whatever it was that the courts found so objectionable about them. In most cases, it was simply a distasteful video box cover, or a racy title, that was enough to turn a bad movie into a potentially hazardous weapon of aesthetic destruction.

The madness didn’t end there, either. In the third section of the book, “Crime”, the authors describe the many instances when horrific criminal acts where blamed, by the media, on movies. Of course, most where completely unrelated, which makes these stories of mass hysteria and fear mongering all the more alarming. When random nutcase Michael Ryan woke up one morning in August of 1987 and decided to go on a killing spree through the streets of Hungerford, ultimately shooting 16 people and then himself to death, the tabloids has a field day. He wore a flak jacket and had a cache of guns, so somehow or another, they blamed it on the Stallone grunts n’ bullets fest “Rambo”. Never mind that there wasn’t any evidence found that Ryan had even seen the film, never mind was influenced by it; the newspapers relentlessly played up the ‘video nasty’ angle, provoking a whole new wave of protests and film banning. Similar scenarios played out when various murders were blamed on “Child’s Play”, “Natural Born Killers”, and “Halloween”. Although it is obvious to the authors, as well as any other rational thinkers, that the horror movie blame-game angle was exploited because the films provided a handy scapegoat when it got too painful for an increasingly detached society to stare straight into the dead eyes of their own neighbors and families and see each other for what they really were- fucked up and scared of reality- these swells of movie-ban mania continued through the 90’s. They will most likely continue, as well, if the recent increase in gun-related murders in the UK is any indication.

“See No Evil” takes on an awfully big story here, and the masterful journalistic instincts of Kerekes’ and Slater manage to compress it all into an extremely taut, exhaustively researched 400 pages. Ultimately, this is a politically driven book, a blistering expose on the antiquated values and equally backwards laws of UK society. You will hardly notice, however, because it reads more like gruesome true crime, only with the extra punch of Italian zombie cannibal films. Without ever editorializing, the Davids paint a very scary picture of modern day society, one where people can still regress to Medieval superstition and blame the horrific death of a child at the hands of berserk toddlers on a movie about a murderous doll. Truth really is stranger than fiction, and “See No Evil” is an unflinching look at just how strange it can get.