Prano Bailey-Bond
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Connections, in both directions
Immediately, writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond‘s debut (alongside co-writer Anthony Fletcher) hearkens not just to the ’80s horror films it faithfully evokes, but to similar homages like Peter Strickland’s excellent Berberian Sound Studio , both of them meta-textual meditations on the effect of horror on not just those who watch them, but those involved in their making.
At times feeling in the same vein as Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and with a haunting final scene right out of David Lynch, Censor is an effective and affecting character study.
The film has already caught comparisons to Peter Strickland’s seductive Berberian Sound Studio —it has a comparable grasp on the decade-specific look and vibe of cult trash.
This background gives the film some interesting historical context, not unlike Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio .
Laced together with eerie sound design and sleek imagery that slowly gives way to the VHS filter, “Censor” suggests an innovative blend of Peter Strickland’s giallo homage “Berberian Sound Studio” and “The Ring.”
It some ways, it reminded me of Berberian Sound Studio , which also loves genre film deeply.
Baily-Bond sets the speed to slowburn and, along with her cowriter Anthony Fletcher, peppers the script with digs at the era’s paranoia about a VHS copy of The Evil Dead turning the nation’s youth into serial killers.
Obviously, CENSOR is meant as a love letter to the horror films of the 1980s, many referenced in the film clips of the movies that the censors are watching and judging – like The Evil Dead , Nightmares In A Damaged Brain , and, first in line, The Driller Killer .
It’s only much later, when Enid’s sense of reality has become as warped as the picture on a fifth-gen pirate copy of The Evil Dead that surreal colour seeps in like the misty halogen glow of a Winding Refn or a Cosmatos.
When Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Abel Ferrerra’s The Driller Killer are your high-end examples you know deep seediness is afoot.
(Side Note: It’s a real bummer that for decades the only Britainers lucky enough to see the uncut versions of The Evil Dead or Tenebre were people who absolutely despised the films) Anyone looking for an excuse to vilify horror further can easily point to Enid and say “ Look!
These films, which included THE EVIL DEAD, DRILLER KILLER, and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, were subjected to extensive censorship dictated by an arbitrary group of censors.
As Enid trudges through the claustrophobic subway tunnels, the film evokes Possession ’s windy subways and the 4:3 aspect schlocky films the censors watch bring to mind films like The Driller Killer and Evil Dead .
When Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Abel Ferrerra’s The Driller Killer are your high-end examples you know deep seediness is afoot.
Censor tells a story set in the trash-horror film world of the 1980s—in Britain, the era of gut-ripping "video nasty": pictures like Cannibal Holocaust, The Driller Killer, and Gestapo's Last Orgy.
Uncut versions of previously banned or butchered-to-death works like I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, The Beyond or The Driller Killer were a button-push away.
One of the first “video nasties” was Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer , others include Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left , Cannibal Holocaust , and I Spit on Your Grave .
Then the press links a particularly brutal murder to a film that Enid approved for uncut release, causing her to become a hated figure (a nod to the real-world claims that the two boys that killed two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 were influenced by Child's Play 3).
A director who mutters stage directions like, “use the sickness that’s always been inside your,” approaching his muse while channeling Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom .
Censor tells a story set in the trash-horror film world of the 1980s—in Britain, the era of gut-ripping "video nasty": pictures like Cannibal Holocaust, The Driller Killer, and Gestapo's Last Orgy.
One of the first “video nasties” was Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer , others include Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left , Cannibal Holocaust , and I Spit on Your Grave .
Think Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer , or Cannibal Holocaust : eerie exercises in sociopathy that thrill their fans and terrify their detractors.
Alas, Censor goes on to dramatize Enid’s conflation of movie and reality in disappointingly clinical fashion complete with ironic visuals that recall the more ambiguous all-is-well climax of Blue Velvet.
Like Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991), which featured Arsinée Khanjian as a censor obsessed with pornography, Censor posits that repeated viewing of proscribed material, even by someone supposedly dispassionate and employed to judge such work professionally, could create an unhealthy appetite for the very stuff they’re meant to be regulating.
Las convergencias entre los peculiares mundos de las películas de bajo presupuesto o de género y temas de corte más personal han tenido exponentes tan notables como Blow Out (1981) o Body Double (1984), ambas de Brian de Palma.
Las convergencias entre los peculiares mundos de las películas de bajo presupuesto o de género y temas de corte más personal han tenido exponentes tan notables como Blow Out (1981) o Body Double (1984), ambas de Brian de Palma.
The film’s genre antecedents are numerous, but they include David Cronenberg’s unnerving Videodrome , about a man’s self-destructive attraction to a video signal specifically designed to provoke violent behavior, and Theodore Roszak’s novel Flicker , in which a film professor investigates the mind-altering work of an influential director with ties to a religious cult.
Bailey-Bond also mentions Suspiria by Dario Argento and the influence and love for that film is clear from the use of strongly colored lighting, reds, and aquamarine blues to indicate disturbing mental states and danger.
While the real “video nasties” list contained gems like Argento’s Suspiria and Cronenberg’s Scanners, Censor is more concerned with its deluge of tawdry, no-budget projects that traded on pure shock.
Why is Un Chien Andalou less offensive than, say, Hostel, for instance?
While some of her coworkers take their mission with a grain of salt (“What about Un Chien Andalou?” one asks), Enid genuinely believes she’s carrying out a public good.
Censor is a genuinely impressive debut feature for Bailey-Bond, a horror film with allusions to everything from The Ring to Berberian Sound Studio and Lost Highway .
There are certainly some Lost Highway elements at play here, with Enid preferring to remember things the way she would like, rather than how they actually happened.
Baily-Bond may be a few generations removed from having to hunt down U.K. bootlegs of The House by the Cemetery, but she clearly understands the appeal, and the shared secret aspect of savoring forbidden, subversive fruit.
Censor ’s video-store scene, with Enid procuring her dark cinematic drug of choice, shot me back like lightning to the grungy country store of my teenhood where my cousin and I, under the watchful eye of a Blood Beach poster, got our own too-young hands on Faces of Death and Cannibal Ferox , i.e. the horror dares of dumb boundary-pushing youth.
As a child of the video rental store era who was weaned on dogeared VHS copies of the Evil Dead trilogy and Re-Animator (uncut, NEVER R-rated), the story and aesthetic of the UK’s so-called “Video Nasty” era is like catnip to me.
She also crafts the finest smashed-TV-as-metaphor since the opening credits of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me .
The movement saw dozens of films prosecuted or outright banned—mostly focused on bat-house garbage you’ve never heard of, though some superlative genre flicks ( The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , Suspiria , The Last House on the Left ) were, lamentably, caught in the crosshairs.
The title sequence is like the gory companion to the kissing reel from “Cinema Paradiso”: a montage assembled from clips supposedly excised due to censorship.