Writing in 2007, Kate Egan observed that ‘over time and in different contexts’, the term ‘video nasties’ had been used to refer ‘to a set of film titles, a specific set of video versions, a set of historical events and a personal consumption experience’ (2007: 5). Here, Egan illustrates the inherent pluralism and mutability of the term, and while prior academic attention around the video nasties has largely prioritised the historical event, emphasising the moral panic, media effects, and censorship debates more generally, Egan's work shifts the conversation forward significantly by beginning to explore this history from a number of original and wideranging cultural perspectives, considering how the cultures of collecting and the personal consumptive practices that have grown out of the video nasties moment have altered what we mean by the term. Egan argues that ‘in all these examples […] the term “video nasty” remains constant, but what it refers to changes – focus is placed on different aspects of the videos, new objects, ideas and associations become attached or are detached from the category’ (2007: 6), and these ideas begin to shape how we understand the category. Building on Egan's work, in this chapter I will explore how a general acceptance of what the term video nasty signifies has facilitated the phrase taking on generic implications, evolving beyond simple journalistic rhetoric and media moral panic into a commercially viable distributive category; a pseudo-genre into which films not historically thought of as being video nasties can be included and excluded as part of a discursive evolution and economic strategy. To accomplish this, this chapter will begin by situating the video nasties within a broader discussion of the horror genre, examining how the category relates to other notable subgenres and considering how debates surrounding genre formation more generally might contribute to our understanding of the video nasties as a genre in its own right. It will examine how the term has evolved discursively from a finite list of films into a broader functional industrial category and will consider the political implications and what is at stake when we choose to use word genre to describe a category of film as politically loaded as the video nasties.