Prano Bailey-Bond’s 2021 horror Censor should be considered a masterpiece of modern horror. Not only for its insights into the violence in our daily ideological fantasies, but for its examination of how the defanging of cultural criticism helps to maintain a society of horrors.
In 2017, in another life, I was attempting to found a radical film festival in the east of England. That costly fool’s errand was a long and uncomfortable lesson, hard learned, in what not to do when founding an event of any kind. But there were also moments which supplied a blueprint for what would go on to become Indy Film Library.
Chief among those was the film programme. Every film exhibited was given a written analysis in the document, giving a unique take on the movies beyond their literal synopsis – and one of my favourites among the selection was NASTY, a short film about a picturesque nuclear family being dragged into a ghoulish VHS copy of The Evil Dad. Paying homage to the video-nasty sub-genre of the 1980s, the film touched upon the centuries of violence that went into establishing the apparently aspirational social norms at the heart of the scenario – something which prompted me to quote Slavoj Žižek’s famous line, “when fantasy becomes reality, this is nightmare”.
That film happened to be the work of Prano Bailey-Bond, who went on to make Censor – released in 2021. It’s not always guaranteed that an accomplished writer-director in short form will succeed in the leap to feature length cinema (and honestly, I don’t think it should be a shift everyone is expected to make in the first place, these are art forms of equally deserving of recognition for their craft and impact) – but it was a transition which seemed to suit Bailey-Bond perfectly.
Scaling up to an 84-minute run time, Censor finds the time and space to elaborate on many of the themes I felt were present in NASTY – with a narrative arc that once again put me in mind of that segment of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.
Spoilers ahead. (And if you haven’t watched Censor yet, Halloween is here – what the hell are you waiting for?)
Vertigo
In the fallout of the film’s release, I held back my own take. I think when a film is getting five-star write-ups from Mark Kermode, as well as recommendations from Peter Bradshaw, RogerEbert.com and Red Letter Media, there is only so much my ten cents will contribute.
But the one opinion I didn’t get, which I would probably have enjoyed above all others, was a take from Žižek. As far as I can see, Censor is a modern classic of cinematic psychoanalysis, with Bailey-Bond serving as contemporary horror’s answer to Hitchcock.
When talking about Vertigo in The Pervert’s Guide, Žižek says that when Judy (Kim Novak) – a lookalike for the deceased character of Madeleine (also Novak), is remodelled in her image by Scottie (James Stewart), so he can live out his fantasy of being with the late object of his desires – this is “like fantasy realised.”
“And, of course, we have a perfect name for fantasy realised. It’s called ‘nightmare’. Fantasy realised. What does this mean? Of course, it is always sustained by an extreme violence.”
In this case, Žižek explains that the violence of Vertigo is in Scottie’s determined and brutal refashioning of Judy – a real, living woman – into a fantasy object of a dead doppelganger. This is something he sees as a “process of mortification, which is also the mortification of woman’s desire.”
The living, breathing Judy, can only be approached sexually or emotionally by Scottie, if he can force her into the ideological role of someone who only exists as a memory – with no agency beyond his thoughts and impulses. “It is as if in order to have her, to desire her, to have sexual intercourse with her, with the woman, Scottie has to mortify her, to change her into a dead woman.”
While this analysis was aimed at the portrait of patriarchal dominance in Vertigo, and the ideological impotence and real-world violence which still underwrite its associative norms, it is something which still speaks deeply to Censor. In particular, its portrait of a woman desperately trying to reconstruct the shattered image of her apparently idyllic nuclear family.
The nuclear family is an ideological norm which provides the engine room of capitalism. Traditionally, its unpaid domestic labour of the woman enables more ruthless exploitation of the man in the workplace, while he becomes the overseer of his own home. This perceived state of nature is one which has been forged and maintained by generations of violence and alienation; something which is inherent in the very mythology used to excuse and disguise it. And at the heart of Censor is a quest to put the toothpaste back in the tube, after a revelation of that supreme violence causes the familial façade to crumble.
Set in the moral panic of 1980s Britain, Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) works as a titular Censor, waging a personal war against the emergent genre of video-nasty horrors she asserts are inciting violence across the country. As she sits through reel after reel of crimson-soaked film, Enid tirelessly takes notes of every sordid detail, insisting it is crucial she gets each decision “right” – recommending cuts, or out-right bans if the visuals could possibly be construed as gratuitous or celebratory of their gore.
During one innocuous viewing of the mysterious Don’t Go in the Church, flashbacks hint at just why Enid might take such a fastidious approach. A scene in the woods, where two children play a strange, ritualistic game, reminds her of the last time she saw her sister, Nina (Amelie Child-Villiers). After spinning around several times, the child standing in for Nina disappears into a nearby wooden shack, where a beastly figure holding an axe is waiting.
Further flashbacks trigger, harking back to Enid’s parents searching for Nina – culminating in a desperate, wretched sob. In the present day, we are told insistently that no body was ever recovered – and at a dinner, Enid’s parents inform her that because so long has passed, they have had Nina declared legally dead. They do not think they should go on waiting for a happy ending that they think will never come.
Enid refuses to accept this, however, and begins to obsess over Don’t Go in the Church – where she believes actor Alice Lee (Sophia La Porta) resembles a grown-up Nina. Theorising that director Frederick North abducted her sister, she uses information from her job at the British Board of Film Classification to locate the set where a sequel is being filmed – in a bid to confront North, and free her would-be sister.
It is hard to say whether that goes according to plan or not, in so far as the plan is so obviously detached from reality that it feels unlikely it was an earnest attempt at all. But in some ways, it does work, because the horrific occurrences on the set do enable Enid to reorient herself at the heart of that lost fantasy, which dissolved the day her sister disappeared.
Handed a real axe (something which, in a post-Rust world, does slightly diminish her responsibility in this scenario), and told to embrace her dark side, Enid – dressed as an adult-sized child – confronts the beast-man, who is holding Alice Lee, or Nina. While the scene is set up to be a literal retelling of what actually happened (the implications that Enid was at fault for her sister’s disappearance, and that her parents may have covered it up are not subtle), with the creature encouraging Enid to performative ‘murder’ her sister, she turns the axe on him in for real.
In this moment, Enid is rebuilding her own ideological facade. Of course, the violence endured by her sister could not have come from within her white-picket-fence, from a white, middle-class child raised by loving, hetero-normative parents. It must have originated from an external horror – one which in adulthood, she finally has the chance to banish forever. Like her day-job, preventing horror films from infecting the minds of good British citizens with murderous intention, Enid is able to externalise the shocking impulses in herself into a foreign body, which she has the power bury for good – and in service of the memory of her sister; boiled down to a mortified, ideological placeholder of the perfect victim.
And here, Enid’s attention turns to ‘Nina’ – a trembling, crying Alice Lee. With this spectacular explosion of violence, Enid is able to delude herself into seeing their final encounter as a loving reunion. The sacred entity of the nuclear family is remade – and Alice Lee is her dead sister. Whether all of the crackling VHS inserts showing us the real world versus Enid’s increasingly grotesque fantasy world were necessary is up for debate. But they do supply some wonderful moments of contrast. The façade crumbles as the blood-soaked ‘Nina’ is presented to her confused and upset parents. The fantasy has become reality, and it is very much a nightmare.
What was, what is, and what may still be
Censor is a magnificent achievement, and I regret having not spoken about it sooner. But there is one additional thing, which I probably wouldn’t have mentioned if I’d reviewed this three years ago. And that is what it may have to say about the inclusive and potentially subversive role cultural criticism could have in society.
Looking at the end of Enid’s story, in some senses, ‘violence’ directed at our own ideological limitations is not the worst instinct to have. That is also some classic Žižek. If we can find reflections of our most sinister traits in cinema, it can allow us a realm of the uncanny, where we can confront ourselves in a safe way. Why do we desire what we desire? What does it say about us? How do we move on?
It is when we externalise it, when we go in search of a convenient figure to point to, and avoid reckoning with our inner contradictions and darkest impulses. In both her work, and her DIY investigation, Enid commits to this – to foregoing any constructive internal dialogue that could help her examine her life, as it is or was, and look to build a future reality where love and happiness exist in any meaningful sense.
But Enid is not just a stand-in for a particular individual in her own right. She is an embodiment of a system which – while censorship and technology may have moved on – still constrict our understanding of the world. She and her colleagues at the British Board of Film Classification are a reflection of a dominant ideology that does not value culture, or cultural discourse. They are early signifiers of a media landscape that has been remade in the image of capitalism.
The team are academics, critics, psychologists – they recite Shakespeare and Freud while examining the films before them. But those opinions, ones which are used to say what is interesting about a film or helping people to access and explore it for themselves, are not the ones which capital values. The value for them, is using that knowledge to inform producers what they can get away with, what is permissible within the realms of the market, and what may inconvenience capital in a way that is impermissible.
The culture that has evolved since has seen the idea of censorship change, and values shift marginally – but the underlining feature remains in place deep into the 21st century. Cultural criticism is seen as unimportant, beyond ‘protecting’ people from bad experiences. This is why virtually every university across the UK commences its austerity programme – now that the money from international students is bottoming out – begins with the arts department. The discourse these departments generate is seen as taking up oxygen from more ‘value-adding’ topics, like another centre for MBA students.
But that’s a bad-faith argument, often made by people who very much understand it as such. Considering an arts degree, as Thatcher famously said, as a “luxury” is the marker of someone who has a lot to gain by hobbling media literacy and critical thinking in their jurisdiction. Because while helping people to think about the things they are watching might well be a better method of ensuring video nasties aren’t treated as a source of ‘inspiration’ for violent acts, applying the same tools for critical viewing to party political broadcasts and corporate press releases could be very troublesome indeed.
As such, talented and intelligent people who love art, and have the ability to help others engage with it, will continue to be funnelled into roles designed to reassert the normality of our mortified desires, and to strangle critical work at birth. Or take an axe to it.