451 - Panic on the TV! Do Violent Movies Create Violent Children?

Timesuck with Dan Cummins

Dan Cummins

True Crime, Society & Culture, Religion, Conspiracies, History, Biographies, Education, Adult Humor, Comedy, Dark Humor, Conspiracy, Cults

4.7 • 21.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2025

⏱️ 151 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we talk about moral panics. Specifically, the "Video Nasty" moral panic that happened in the UK in the early 1980s, and then again in the 1990s, when there was widespread fear that by kids watching horror movies with titles like Cannibal Holocaust, Flesh for Frankenstein, I Spit on Your Grave, and The Last House on the Left, they would literally be turned into rapists and killers. Was there any justification for this panic? Can hyper-violent or hyper-sexualized media in general erode the morality of children?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Satanic orgies with mutilated dead bodies, undead surgeons performing vivisection on screaming children,
0:08.3	living corpses gouging out the eyes of the innocent and slurping up their intestines,
0:13.2	rape victims disemboweling their attackers and carving out their genitals, deranged cannibals,
0:17.9	murdering pregnant women and eating their unborn fetuses, dismembered limbs,
0:22.2	rotten flesh, decapitated heads, demonic nimful maniacs, homicidal nuns, flesh-eating hillbillies,
0:28.1	and much, much more. That's the type of gore you'll find in a true video nasty.
0:33.9	In the 1980s, the term video nasty was used in the UK to refer to horror films deemed to be excessively gory, violent, and or sexual.
0:42.0	Films criticized by the press and eventually banned by Parliament for being well, so gosh dang, nasty.
0:49.3	The video nasties were considered by many, not to just be films made in poor tastes.
0:53.9	They were considered to be
0:55.0	legitimately evil, immoral, and above all, truly dangerous. Their distribution across the country
1:01.6	in the newly invented form of the video cassette posed an insurmountable threat to social order
1:06.3	itself in some minds. And they put at risk the very moral integrity of Britain citizens. They threatened
1:12.1	to tear apart the moral fabric of British society. Oh my heck. If a vulnerable child, God forbid,
1:20.0	happened to watch a video nasty, that film would corrupt their precious impressionable soul.
1:25.4	They could damn themselves to hell. They could be inspired to become
1:28.2	murderers and rapists and cannibals, exactly like the kind of people they saw on TV. And soon,
1:33.9	before long, the entire UK will be brought to irreparable ruin, or would it? The truth is,
1:40.7	the moral panic surrounding the video nasties was generated maintained and amplified almost entirely
1:45.4	by various politicians trying to get re-elected into parliament and journalists and editors trying to boost
1:50.7	their tabloid sales week after week year after year the press published sensational articles with
1:56.2	headlines like the rape of our children's minds protect our children now now, ban video sadism, sadism for six-year-olds,
	...

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