While it is important to acknowledge that there are a number of challenging films included in the videos that became known as the video nasties, it is equally important to recognise that none of them is without historical precedent, and all draw upon the established traditions of cinematic horror. Nevertheless, much is made of the supposed new threat that these films posed, this despite the fact that many of the films included in Department of Public Prosecutions (DPP) list pre-date their British video release by more than ten years. Indeed, the earliest example, Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), received its original American theatrical debut a full twenty years before its problematic introduction to the UK. Despite this, many of the criticisms that were first levied at the video nasties began from the flawed proposition that these films were something new, an idea that does not hold up to scrutiny. Setting aside the fact that many of the films were already over a decade old when they were released on video – for example, Blood Rites (1968), Love Camp 7 (1969), and Night of the Bloody Apes (1969) – thirty-one of the films included on the notorious DPP list had already received a British theatrical release prior to their introduction on video; that is, almost half of the list compiled by the DPP had already undergone the strict process of classification through the British Board of Film Censors in order to enable them to be released into the British marketplace in the years prior to their release on video. In spite of this, the Daily Star insisted that ‘Nasties are far removed from traditional suspense or horror films’ (Graham 1982); the Daily Mail claimed that ‘These videos are not spine chillers in a tradition that stretches back to Conan Doyle or Edgar Allen Poe’ (Author unknown 1983b). Even the Conservative MP Graham Bright pitched in, arguing that ‘all too many people believe that a nasty is something like a hotted-up Hammer movie, it isn't it is something entirely different’ (Petley 2011: 46).

Julian Petley has suggested that this idea that the films constituted a new threat is among the most serious of the misconceptions about the video nasties (2011: 45), misconceptions which have endured despite having no real basis in fact.