Description:
Considers the technological, economic and aesthetic histories of the early British video industry as part of the broader global film industry.
Brief description: Dr Mark McKenna is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Industries at Staffordshire University. He is the author of Nasty Business: The Marketing and Distribution of the Video Nasties (EUP, 2020), Snuff (LUP, 2023), Big Wednesday: Lamenting Lost Youth in the New Hollywood (Routledge, 2024) and Levelling Up the Screen Industries: Film & Television Production as Regenerative Strategy in Places Left Behind (forthcoming, Routledge, 2025). He is the co-editor of Horror Franchise Cinema (Routledge, 2021), Stars and Franchises: Identity, Image and Intellectual Property (forthcoming, EUP, 2025), and the author of the report Silicon Stoke - Developing Film TV and Other Content Production in North Staffordshire, which explored the opportunities for stimulating the growth of the screen industries set against the backdrop of the UK government's levelling-up agenda.
Review Quotes: Through the employment of a range of new perspectives, Nasty Business makes a major contribution to scholarship on the video nasties and the Video Recordings Act, as well as to industrial studies of the (British and global) video industry and its history.--Kate Egan, Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Northumbria University, and author of 'Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties.'