Throughout the previous chapters, I have demonstrated that there was little to differentiate the promotional strategies of the independent video distributors from the strategies employed in the other sectors during the same period. Most of the promotions for these films bear all of the usual hallmarks of mainstream promotional strategies seen elsewhere in other quarters of the industry. Aside from a couple of excessive examples, the evidence does not support the idea that these promotions were different enough so as to have garnered the attention that followed. However, the similarities between the rhetoric of the tabloid press and the rhetoric of traditional exploitation cinema do reveal an interesting parallel that begins to shift some of the emphasis away from the distributors themselves and towards the coverage of the campaign. Contemporary understandings of the category of the video nasties are largely retrospective constructions that combine the reductionist rhetoric of the press campaigns with the subsequent sustained attempts to capitalise on the notoriety of the films, and because of this the definitions and meanings associated with the term have become compounded over time.

The current understanding of the video nasties can be seen to have formed over two distinct periods; the first period runs from 1982 to 1990, from the time when the first reports began appearing in the press, up until the moment that the films began to be re-released to the sell-through video market. Throughout this period, the video nasties are defined by their legal status and are constructed as a social pariah. This has a commercial value, but opportunities to capitalise on the video nasties themselves are limited. The second period runs from around 1990 to the present day and follows the formation of the sell-through market, the introduction of DVD and Blu-ray, and the move away from physical media altogether, toward media streaming services. Here, through the gradual legalisation of the films, the video nasties become a commercially viable and valuable commodity, and the expectations of these different formats began to reshape the market. As I will argue, while the idea of what a video nasty is was formed in the first period, it is in the second period that the idea becomes a cohesive brand, and it is here that the term begins to take on generic characteristics, even taking on more ‘gentrified’ and ‘artistic’ associations.