I remember this time well. I'd went from being able to watch pretty much any horror movie to come out to suddenly not being allowed to watch The Evil Dead or The Hills Have Eyes. Most of them all throughout this period banned or otherwise were generally freely available, it was my parents who suddenly weren't letting me watch them which I hated as I was the only kid in school who hadn't seen The Evil Dead. I however did get to see movies like Death Wish, Shogun Assassin, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and so on. The reality was that the bans weren't really as widespread or as much of a problem as the article suggests and the whole thing was more of something whipped up by the gutter press.
I've watched a lot of the films that were affected by this in the years since (I was in my mid 20's before finally got to see the first Evil Dead, although I'd seen parts 2 and 3 long before that). With the exception of The Last House On The Left and possibly I Spit On Your Grave my reaction after watching was along the lines of *shrug* meh, what was all the fuss about?
In many cases what people thought were banned were actually the film would be submitted for classification, the board would say "Ok, we'll give you the age rating you want if you cut this and this out", which would then go back to the distributer who could say "We are fine with this being removed, but we want to keep this in because..." and it would go back and forth normally. However some movies after being asked for certain cuts would then not be resubmitted and the video would then somehow sneak out claiming to be a banned video nasty which would then of course be like a red rag to a bull in getting people to want to watch it and Mary Whitehouses moral crusade would kick up a stink about it, giving an otherwise forgetable movie tons of free advertising and publicity.
There was a lot of manipulation of people by both sides on this.
A quick link for anyone interested in what films were actually banned. If you look for the ones during this time there aren't actually that many and as I've said the ones that were people got to watch regardless mostly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_United_Kingdom
