I’m immune to 80s nostalgia. Modern entertainment seems to have an obsession with trying to make viewers fawn over that decade. Shows and movies try to target those who grew up in the 80s, or for those born afterwards, like myself, treat the era like it’s a period drama. It’s all big hair, gaudy jumpsuits, and Prince. But the reason why it often feels so fake and manipulative is that’s it’s a paper-thin portrayal. All style and soundtrack, no substance. New BBC comedy/drama/horror series Video Nasty could have been another show to fall into the trap of this Stranger Things sheen but is thankfully deeper and darker in its portrayal of the 1980s.
I’m a horror fan and a video nasty fan, with a favourite podcast of mine The Rotten Horror Picture Show recently covering a dozen of the once banned movies. That’s the angle that got me to watch Video Nasty, a six-part series which follows three Irish teens as they travel to England to find the last VHS tape they need for their illegal collection, only to get caught up in a horror story themselves. If you need a hacky, reductive soundbite it’s Derry Girls meets Driller Killer. Who wouldn’t want to watch that?
It’s a show which does play into the era in some standard ways. There’s an 80s soundtrack, including Echo & the Bunnymen, and some dialogue which feels a little too modern. Were ‘spoiler alert’ and ‘folk horror’ terms in the 1980s or more recent inventions? Yet the winky aspects are thankfully kept to a minimum. A horror story featuring horror movie fans who know all the tropes can be fun but can also easily slip into an insufferable self-indulgent meta realm. There’s just enough of it, with only one utterance of “This is the part in the film where…”
What helps set the show apart is that it has a very British/Irish sensibility. Due to the sheer quantity of American stories set in the 80s we’ve been subjected to, even I as a Brit immediately begin imagining US malls and suburbs when someone mentions the decade. It’s nice to balance the scales, offer a view of Britain during this era, which was decidedly less colourful. The British perspective feels somewhat refreshing. It’s not so much an era of excess like it was across the pond but suppression. Rather than the well-worn territory of the American satanic panic, the UK was in the grip of its own hysteria over video nasties, illegal tapes of banned horror movies. The show’s closest modern comparison is Prano Bailey-Bond’s brilliant film Censor.
Video Nasty strides genres, being intermittently funny, scary, and dramatic. One great gag involves the mishearing of ‘our souls’ as ‘arseholes,’ which also coincidentally cropped up in the recent Philomena Cunk special Cunk on Life. At times, it even feels like one of those BBC or Granada shows from the 70s and 80s that have developed their own legends: series that managed to disturb a generation despite being low budget and filmed in some random English village, like The Children of the Stones or The Changes.
Yet my favourite aspect of the series is its honesty about the era. It’s not a sunshine and rainbows 1980s – not a purely nostalgic lookback at how great everything was and oh, wouldn’t it be great to return to it. No, Video Nasty also explores the ugliness of the time. It deals with censorship most obviously but also racism and homophobia. And it does so subtly, realistically. It was a time where bigotry was casual. The two teenage boys at the centre of the show are outsiders. Their love of horror films, video nasties, make them outcasts but really that’s just a metaphor for the real ‘issues’ they suffer, one being black and the other gay.
Society represses them for being different, and their hunt for the final tape, clutched dramatically in the final episode after enduring so much, is a push back against an oppressive culture. It just so happens that this era also has great music and kitsch clothes, but that’s only a shell (I barely managed to resist making a shell suit pun here). Watch one of those John Hughes 80s teen comedies and wow, there’s some uncomfortable homophobic gags. This is the true 80s and the true definition of nostalgia: the pain from an old wound.
Video Nasty shows us just who the villain of this decade truly was: Mary Whitehouse. Her puritanical opinions helped outlaw these horror films, which seems baffling today, and repress society and those who were different. The show has a very Whitehouse-inspired figure and uses her as the villain, drenched in hypocrisy, humorously becoming a killer herself. Those who preach against certain actions always seem to fall back on what they condemn in order to enforce their ideals. For a modern American horror comparison, it reminded me of Ti West’s Maxxxine, where the villain doesn’t realise what a hypocrite they are. I love that the BBC, decades after being in Whitehouse’s Christian crosshairs, can make a show that is so firmly against the idea that violence onscreen causes real life violence, featuring puritanical controlling figures as the baddies.
Video Nasty ends with a classic horror movie sting. Our heroes are still being watched, not being able to truly escape. I don’t see this as a literal plot point; I’m not expecting a series 2. It’s more honesty. Racism isn’t solved and the gay character ends the show still closeted, the series resisting any dramatic reveal, instead with him watching his sister get off with the guy he likes and feeling unable to say anything. The conservative society is still there, ever controlling. Ah, yes, sweet 80s nostalgia (!)
