BBFC History: 1980

• establishment of stalk and slash genre
• generally much broader and liberal content including politically controversial material
• introduction of video recorders lead to a moral panic on "video nasties" concerned that children were going to watch adult only content as they did not have to be classified or "filtered " by BBFC. many films such as The Evil Dead were proscuted under obscene publications Act. this particualr film needed cuts to  violence and horror and eventually pleading guilty and was prosecuted and accquitted
• this massive issue lead to the Video Recordings Act in 1984 - which gave the BBFC responsibility for classifying all videos. this massively increased their workload as they had to classify previous and current titles.
• the Category system also got reformed as A was changed to PG, AA-15 and X-18. R18 was created for stronger sex films for exclusive members and licensed sex shops (which would have previously been unclassified). Uc was also created for videos to indicate that they were suitable for unsupervised young children. also a 12 category was created to bridge the gap between PG and 15, the first 12 film being Batman
• Caligua had massive issues when coming over from the US as it was very controversial and in danger of breeching UK law with sexually explicit material. many cuts were made to 6 months later to give it an X rating