The Act stated that videos for sale or hire must be classified, and the BBFC was given this role.
There still are guidelines in place to this day, though not as strict as in the early days of the Board. Scenes encouraging and promoting drug use, scenes showing use of nunchuks and other imitatable techniques, and scenes with gratuitous sexual violence are amongst those still amonst those issues which raise the greatest concern to the BBFC.
There's a little bit of history of censorship in Britain, but which films have courted controversy with their portrayal of violence?.
Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" (1994) can be looked at in two ways. Either you are watching the two main characters, serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), going on their killing spree, or, what Stone intended, the media coverage of their killings which they both court and create.
"Natural Born Killers" has an interesting message, that of the media glorification of criminals, almost as if Mickey and Mallory as a kind of celebrity, but one famous for killing rather than as being pop stars or TV presenters. The problem with this is, to some it may be that the status afforded to the couple is something almost to be aspired to.
It could be said that where the sane amongst us will see the movie has for what it is, a piece of "entertainment" or more accurately, a commentary on American society, the film has been blamed for many killings.
For example, the most famous case coming from "Natural Born Killers" is that of Nathan Martinez. He copied the style of the main character, shaving his hair and wearing similar glasses, and went on to kill his stepmother and half-sister. Many questions arise from this case. Did Martinez kill because of the film? Did it give him the idea? Was he abused as a child as Mickey was? Would he have killed anyway? Questions that I can't answer, but yet another case of "the media" choosing a scapegoat, and in this case rather than the music of the era or video games it's a film, to blame for the murders.
