"People think that I create the horror, but I don't. Horror is already out there, in all of us. It's in you."
This week marks the beginning of a new series entitled 'Meta-Horrors', starting with a discussion of the 2021 release CENSOR, the debut feature of British director Prano Bailey-Bond. Set in the mid-1980s at the height of the Video Nasties panic, the film follows Enid, a strait-laced censor who works for the BBFC, but who begins to find herself strangely compelled by one particular film she is asked to assess. Bailey-Bond’s film is a love letter to the genre and to the 1980s, lovingly shot on a mixture of film, Super8 and VHS, but with a grisly underbelly. Inspired by the real debates around horror and censorship in general that dominated political discourse in Thatcherite Britain, Bailey-Bond brings the question into the 21st century. Nick and Johanna discuss the question of the morality of horror and more, kicking off the beginning of an exciting foray into the elusive, kaleidoscopic world of metatextuality.
