Welcome to the home of pre-cert.co.uk, launched to tie-in with the release of our new book, Shock! Horror!: Astounding Artwork from the Video Nasty Era, which you can read about below, or simply follow this link to purchase a copy direct from the publisher.

So what is the aim of pre-cert.co.uk? Well, over the years numerous websites have appeared (and many have disappeared) - and all had the same goal, which was to list as many pre-cert tapes as possible. We feel nobody else could achieve what we had already been working on for well over 15 years, way before the internet and eBay were born.

Marc Morris and Francis Brewster have been painstakingly researching and databasing every tape known to have been issued on UK video up to the end of 1985, as this is when the final DPP 39 list was issued by the OPA. We've used various sources for these listings, mainly actually seeing the tape first-hand, and also by referring to trade magazines. We had originally planned on issuing the database as a CD-Rom, but the advent of the web changed this.

We have included listing for laserdiscs, CED discs, Betamax, V2000 and of course VHS. Titles can be searched for within our database, as can video label, director, actor etc which is powered by a MySQL Content Management System. This was custom programmed from scratch specifically for this website by our good friend Mark Wright in Holland, who is also a keen collector (and Perl programmer).

Pre-cert.co.uk now includes over 7,000 full colour video cover scans (these are admittedly at a reduced size due to limited server space). We may well be able to include larger scans in selected areas of the site - basically we're relying on you all for feedback and suggestions, and supporting the site by using our amazon links.

If you'd like to add a scan to pre-cert.co.uk, then please email us (our email addresses can be found at the bottom of the page) and we'll include it in the database.

Click here to order Shock! Horror!
Astounding Artwork from the Video Nasty Era

The place: Great Britain. The year: 1980. The dawn of the video age. With new video companies appearing on a weekly basis, competition for shelf space was fierce. Eye-catching video cover designs were essential to succeed in this saturated marketplace. Video was new, unregulated, and out of control. These were the outlaw years. As their malevolent influence spread across a previously innocent land, many of these videos were banned or otherwise suppressed by the Government of the day, terrified of the consequences of allowing the impressionable youth of the country to be exposed to the unimaginable horrors within...

The glory days of horror video cover design spanned barely five years, and the legal crackdown of 1984 swiftly removed the vast bulk of these crazy designs from rental shop shelves forever. Presented in this book are what we consider to be the most striking, outrageous, rare, valuable and highly sought-after cover designs from the halcyon days of horror! All covers are shown FULL SIZE and in FULL COLOUR. This important historical document will prove to be irresistible for horror fans everywhere.

What makes this book a truly essential item however, is the totally unique text, composed by the three authors through a combination of decades of personal experience as collectors, and backed up by unparalleled access to original archive material. Here you can read never-before revealed facts and figures about the whole pre-VRA era. Along the way the authors explode myths about banned videos, and provide the world's first ever complete and unexpurgated 'video nasty' timeline, charting which videos were seized and prosecuted, and exactly when these key events unfolded.

Here is just a small selection of the movies you can read about: Abducted, The Bell of Hell, Cataclysm, The Deadly Spawn, Evil Come Evil Go, Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, Grave of the Undead, Headless Eyes, Insanity, Just Before Dawn, Killer's Moon, The Last Horror Film, Massacre Mansion, Night After Night After Night, Oasis of the Zombies, Poor White Trash, Rituals, Savage Intruder, Track of the Moonbeast, Vampyres, The Witchmaker, Zombie Creeping Flesh ...and many more!