Fleapit revisited:Censor.

"Catch, catch a horror taxi. I fell in love with a video nasty. Catch, catch a horror train. A freeze frame gonna drive you insane" - Nasty, The Damned

Cannibal Apocalypse, Zombie Flesh Eaters, I Spit On Your Grave, The Last House On The Left, Zombie Holocaust. The 1980s were, undoubtedly, the era of the video nasty and as with most other moral panics it all looks a bit silly looking back. Many of the kids I grew up with spent their evenings watching people having their eyes gouged, being put in microwaves, being hacked to death, and having their heads chopped up and we've all grown up completely normal.

Cough! What is surprising, however, is how fertile ground the era of the video nasty surely is for modern film makers and how long it has taken before somebody has taken up the mantle and made a film that manages to both combine the video nasty itself (it's not that nasty, it's only a 15) and a postmodern(ish) retrospective glance back at the era. 

Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond's debut feature film Censor does just that. It tells the tale of Enid (Niamh Algar - so good, recently, both in Shane Meadows' The Virtues and Emilia di Girolamo's Deceit), a censor who works for the BBFC during the height of the video nasty era and is tasked, along with her colleagues, of either accepting, rejecting, or cutting a seemingly endless succession of questionable quality horror videos.

Enid is fastidious, morally upright, sober, and dresses like a librarian (or, at least, an eighties idea of what a librarian looks like). Her colleagues call her Little Miss Perfect but within her there is a deep, deep sadness as regards the loss of her sister, Nina, as a child in an incident that she can barely recall but that possibly involves something very unpleasant.

Her parents, June (Clare Holman) and George (Andrew Havill), have accepted that Nina has died but Enid has yet to come to terms with her loss and believes that Nina has been kidnapped and is still alive. When a man kills his wife and children and cuts his wife's face off and eats it, in the unlikely setting of Brighouse, West Yorkshire, a frenzied tabloid scum, complemented by abusive phone callers, blame Enid for passing a film that contained a similar scene.

Despite the fact that the so called Amnesiac Killer (because he has no recollection of his crimes) has never seen said film. When sleazy film producer Doug Smart (an excellently creepy cameo from Michael Smiley) arrives at Enid's office, his behaviour towards her is as perplexing as it is uncomfortable. When she views a film made by one of his most renowned directors, Frederick North (Adrian Schiller), she becomes increasingly unsettled.

Has Enid stumbled upon the secret of her sister's disappearance, has she been worn down by a lifetime of watching rapes, murders, and other transgressive acts on screen, or is her mental health failing her? It is to Algar's, and Bailey-Bond's, credit that each scenario seems equally likely.

The latter third of the film is gorier, more traditional horror fayre, and plays on well known and exploited horror tropes like the 'last girl', dark woods, grisly axe men (Guillaume Delaunay's Beastman being a case in point) yet the film still works. It still manages to balance screamo horror moments (at least one of which had me nearly jump out of my fucking skin) with an almost tongue-in-cheek analytical approach to the genre.

Which, thankfully, is never done drily or academically but always with a clear love for horror and a passion for storytelling. As Enid's team, credit must go to Nicholas Burns (yes, Nathan Barley) as Sanderson, Danny Lee Wynter as shy Perkins who harbours a crush on Enid, former Grange Hill and Eastenders cast member Clare Perkins as Anne, and Felicity Montagu (yes, Alan Partridge's long suffering assistant, Lynn) as June but most of the acting credit should go to Algar as Enid herself.

Algar is rarely off the screen and is required to undergo a not insignificant transformation of character as Censor moves towards its uncertain finale. Filmed, in places, with an intentionally crackly lens and scored, jarringly but perfectly, by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (a new name to me but one, surely, to look out for), Censor captures the eighties in a way that only a film made over three decades later possibly could. It may not be the scariest, or goriest, film you've ever seen but it is gripping, disturbing, and compelling from start to finish. Careful coming out of that dark cinema.