The end of the world as we know it?

This weekend, the notorious former video nasty The Evil Dead makes its uncut debut on British television as part of FilmFour's Extreme Cinema season. After two decades in the censorship wilderness, viewers are now finally able to see exactly what caused one examiner at the British Board of Film Classification to feel that their "bodily integrity had been attacked" by The Evil Dead, and to witness all the rubber-limb-hacking antics that led some courts to conclude that even the toned-down version of this knockabout romp could "deprave and corrupt" viewers. How times have changed.

Long considered too outrageous for uncut public consumption, The Evil Dead was branded the "No 1 nasty" in the early Eighties, and was instrumental in ushering in the controversial Video Recordings Act in 1984, along with other infamous "nasties" like The Driller Killer, Cannibal Holocaust and SS Experiment Camp. Today, its tortured censorship history stands as a testament to the changing face of British law, perfectly illustrating the arbitrariness of the Obscene Publications Act, the draconian absurdity of the Video Recordings Act, and the liberating power of the European Convention on Human Rights. No mean feat for a no-budget shocker financed by local dentists and hardware-store owners for a mere $50,000 (£35,000).

Directed by Sam Raimi (maker of the forthcoming Spider-Man movie), The Evil Dead is a stupidly simple tale of teenagers in a woodland cabin unleashing ancient demons which cause them to dismember each other with pencils, mallets and (naturally) chainsaws. It's a terrific film for horror aficionados who recognise in Raimi's feature debut a satirical homage to the traditions of The Three Stooges, with blood and guts standing in for custard pies. But for those less au fait with the conventions of the modern horror genre, The Evil Dead can seem an overwhelmingly unpleasant affair – hence the censorship problems.

According to British censorship historian Tom Dewe Matthews, former BBFC head James Ferman had considered passing The Evil Dead uncut when he first saw it in 1982, correctly viewing it as "a parody of horror". Sadly, a fellow examiner was less well disposed, being "nauseated" by the film. Thus, 18 cuts, totalling 49 seconds, were duly made before The Evil Dead was granted a cinema X certificate in October 1982. As Ferman later explained to me, "The difficulty with The Evil Dead is that the name of the game is excess in the first place. To cut something that's meant to be over the top, so that it's no longer too far over the top, is very difficult."

Difficult, not to say farcical, at least according to a frankly hilarious censors' report, which detailed the subsequent cuts as including "reducing the sight of a pencil being twisted in an ankle wound; reducing the sight of Shelly chewing off her own hand; reducing shots of Scotty chopping Shelly's legs off; and reducing Linda's trunk gushing blood after her head has been cut off". Sorry, but doesn't reading that make you want to watch the movie right now?

In February 1983, this severely truncated version of The Evil Dead was released by distributors Palace into cinemas, and also (more importantly) on to the then- unregulated rental video market, where it promptly became the subject of obscenity prosecutions, along with other uncertificated horror favourites like Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your Grave.

And this is where the story gets complicated. Under the terms of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, several tapes of The Evil Dead were forfeited, with many video dealers proving unwilling to fight prosecutions. Nevertheless, on 7 November 1983, a jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court unanimously found Palace not guilty of distributing obscene material. Other significant acquittals for The Evil Dead followed, such as that in May 1984, when Leeds Crown Court found Barker's Video Tape Centre similarly not guilty of obscenity infringements relating to the same title. But crucially, these few legal victories were to prove irrelevant once the Video Recordings Act was rushed through in 1984, and when duly submitted for now-mandatory video classification in 1985, The Evil Dead was quietly refused a certificate by the same censors who had granted it a cinema X rating three years earlier. Why?

According to the BBFC, the VRA forbade the certification of any material which may fall foul of obscenity laws, thereby effectively requiring the board to guarantee that no court could sustain an obscenity prosecution against a certificated title. As the BBFC's then-Deputy Director Margaret Ford told me following The Evil Dead's unofficial rejection, despite the not-guilty verdicts, "The Evil Dead has been found obscene in several courts, and our position is that, if a title has been found obscene under any section of the OPA, and it's got a case history, then it is incumbent upon us not to pass it. Indeed, we would be in breach of our duties to do so." James Ferman concurred, adding stoically that "the courts have the last word".

So the situation remained until March 1990, when the BBFC classified a version of The Evil Dead "significantly different" from that prosecuted in the early Eighties. With cuts now totalling nearly two minutes, this butchered version of The Evil Dead limped out on to video shelves minus footage from 22 separate "screen incidences", including the notorious "tree rape" sequence – a frankly daft episode in which a woman is violated by a zombie branch, which Raimi himself later described as "the product of an immature mind – mine!" Even the movie's animated Plasticine climax was cut to "reduce the on-screen disintegration of demonically possessed youths". Tony Hart, take note!

Speaking to me around the time of the 1990 re-submission, Raimi expressed his dismay at the ongoing massacring of his film, with which he had not been involved. "I think it's completely unacceptable that the Government determines what people can see," he stated. "But the real problem is not with The Evil Dead – the problem is that, once people allow the censors to determine what's right or wrong for them, then who's to say that a politically disturbing picture, one that differs from the view of the censors politically, shouldn't be censored? The people of Britain shouldn't allow them that power, because they'll soon find out that other rights are being taken from them one by one, until they have no right to speak out at all."

Fittingly, it was exactly these high-minded sentiments that underwrote Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which some observers believe indirectly facilitated a long overdue amnesty for The Evil Dead earlier this year. When the BBFC, under the new leadership of Independent-founder Andreas Whittam Smith, unveiled their newly liberalised classification guidelines in September 2000, they did so just three weeks before the Human Rights Act made "freedom of expression" a part of British law. Although the BBFC downplayed the coincidence, their bold declaration that "adults should be free to choose what they see, providing that it remains within the law, and is not potentially harmful to society" was clearly made with an awareness of the potential ramifications of Article 10. To test their newly liberal resolve, FilmFour's Adam Roberts promptly submitted an uncut American print of The Evil Dead for VRA classification, to see whether anything really had changed. In March 2001, this version duly passed uncut, finally allowing The Evil Dead to roam your video stores and TV screens without impediment.

If you're an ageing horror fan, you'll know that this was a milestone decision, a cause for genuine celebration. If you're an irate moral campaigner, "it's the end of civilisation as we know it". Long live The Evil Dead!

The UK TV premiere of 'The Evil Dead' (uncut) screens Saturday at 11pm