The BBFC has been in existence for several decades now and they are in charge of protecting us against morally bankrupt film material that may deprave and corrupt us. Over the years the censors have had things quite tough on occasion - fighting the 1970s battle against The Devils, Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, The Exorcist and Last Tango in Paris. There was also the whole Video Nasties panic and the need for video reclassification. The original remit of this article was to write about controversial movie scenes that upset the censors. However, when I was doing my research, I came across films where not just one controversial scene appeared, but lots of controversial scenes appeared. In several cases, there is such a glut of controversial scenes, the entire film has to be banned, because censoring it will not lessen its brutal impact. So I have ended up with a list of films that have multiple censorship problems. I have chronicled their history, any BBFC comments on the nature of the films, and the contentious scenes that were banned. I would like to thank the melon farmer's website for technical details about censorship of the listed films.
10. Dawn Of The Dead (1978)
The story of zombie-based Armageddon and a small group of humans trying to escape extinction, George Romero's superb and highly influential undead movie has been given a hard time by the censors over the years. Back in the late 1970s when it was released, there was much debate over the violence perpetrated on the zombies. Would we become desensitised to it? James Ferman, chief of the BBFC wrote to the distributors claiming that excellent editing had saved the movie from its more gruesome excesses to a highly tight action-based movie where there is more emphasis on human suffering rather than the film being an out and out gorefest. The raid of the apartment in the beginning of the film had several cuts to it. One of which was an exploding head sequence. Several shots of zombie mayhem were cut - particularly in the scenes of the bikers taking over the Mall. Zombies munching on a biker's guts were cut. There were cuts to a biker in the blood pressure machine having his arm ripped off and cuts to Tom Savini slicing a zombie open with a machete. Stephen's death scene was chopped up. In 1989, the film was given an 18 certificate with further cuts equalling 12 seconds on top of the 3 minutes 46 seconds that the cinema release had. The cuts were mainly to reduce the violence against the zombies, which the BBFC presumably thought would lead to the desensitisation to violence among viewers. In 1997, a video release had another 6 seconds removed - principally in the SWAT team's sequences and also the shooting of two children by Peter. To complicate matters, there are multiple versions of the film in existence. The Director's Cut, European version, Dario Argento's version and the Theatrical version (with the latter said to be Romero's preferred version). The Theatrical version was released on Region 0 in 2011 with an 18 certificate. So quite a traumatic censorship history has Dawn of the Dead - a film initially considered too gory to be shown in its entirety less it corrupt the British viewing public.
