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Sheer Filth!: Bizarre Cinema, Weird Literature, Strange Music, Extreme Art
The most controversial and infamous British fanzine of the 1980s, SHEER FILTH returns in book form from FAB Press ― bigger, bolder and filthier than ever!
Published between 1987 and 1990, SHEER FILTH offered a heady mix of sleazy, sexy, shocking film and book reviews, wild music coverage, weird cartoons, incisive features and extraordinary interviews with legends of cult cinema and adult entertainment. Mixing serious analysis with wild enthusiasm, SHEER FILTH covered the stuff that other fanzines ignored ― everything from XXX-rated cinema to true crime novels, from sleazy rock 'n' roll to experimental movies and from pulp fiction to cutting-edge art.
Produced under the constant risk of prosecution under the UK's Obscene Publications Act, SHEER FILTH defiantly stood its ground in Thatcher's repressed Britain, bringing the world the first coverage of Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik, cult classic Death The Bed That Eats, Psychic TV's extraordinary First Transmission and much more, long before those films became mythical must-sees, and included interviews with legends like exploitation kingpin David F. Friedman, cult movie icon Johnny Legend and goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Editor David Flint co-founded Headpress, and under his guidance SHEER FILTH was the proving ground for aspiring journalists and authors who would go on to write for Ungawa, Divinity, Shock Xpress, Skin Two and Penthouse. SHEER FILTH ran for 9 ground-breaking issues. At long last, this 10th edition gathers together most of the original contents, remixed and remastered for a new generation, and also includes plenty of sensational previously unseen material.
Fans of horror, sleaze, exploitation, adult, underground and cult entertainment rejoice! The Filth is back!
Published between 1987 and 1990, SHEER FILTH offered a heady mix of sleazy, sexy, shocking film and book reviews, wild music coverage, weird cartoons, incisive features and extraordinary interviews with legends of cult cinema and adult entertainment. Mixing serious analysis with wild enthusiasm, SHEER FILTH covered the stuff that other fanzines ignored ― everything from XXX-rated cinema to true crime novels, from sleazy rock 'n' roll to experimental movies and from pulp fiction to cutting-edge art.
Produced under the constant risk of prosecution under the UK's Obscene Publications Act, SHEER FILTH defiantly stood its ground in Thatcher's repressed Britain, bringing the world the first coverage of Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik, cult classic Death The Bed That Eats, Psychic TV's extraordinary First Transmission and much more, long before those films became mythical must-sees, and included interviews with legends like exploitation kingpin David F. Friedman, cult movie icon Johnny Legend and goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Editor David Flint co-founded Headpress, and under his guidance SHEER FILTH was the proving ground for aspiring journalists and authors who would go on to write for Ungawa, Divinity, Shock Xpress, Skin Two and Penthouse. SHEER FILTH ran for 9 ground-breaking issues. At long last, this 10th edition gathers together most of the original contents, remixed and remastered for a new generation, and also includes plenty of sensational previously unseen material.
Fans of horror, sleaze, exploitation, adult, underground and cult entertainment rejoice! The Filth is back!
- GenresFilmArtMedia Tie InMusic
256 pages, Paperback
First published March 11, 2014
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80 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 27, 2021
Brought back many warm memories.
May 28, 2019
Sheer Filth! was a British pop culture fanzine which lasted for 9 issues published between 1987 and 1990. This volume repackages the articles and reviews from those issues together with some material later published in other magazines. England in the late ‘80s was in the grip of a moral panic about so-called “video nasties”. Film censorship had been tightened up in 1985 and many horror and exploitation films which had been fairly easily available in the early days of video rental ended up on a banned list. In this climate a rebellious fan community flourished with home-made zines as their voice.
While most of the well-known fanzines concentrated on horror cinema, David Flint’s Sheer Filth! also covered art, music and literature, and cinematically branched out into other areas from porn to art films.
What is wonderful about this volume is that it captures the fanzine scene as it was. Things are different today. At the time Flint did his interview with David F. Friedman, Something Weird Video were yet to start re-releasing his films on home video, and Friedman’s autobiography A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King was only just about to be published. Another interviewee Norman J. Warren is now gaining renewed appreciation as his films are released on blu-ray. Part of the thrill of these magazines was to read about something you hoped to be able to see that was not easily available. (And then there are those things you read about and were glad you didn’t see - videos by noise musicians who apparently got a puerile delight in accompany their unlistenable music with unwatchable images of corpse abuse.)
The book is well-illustrated with black-and-white photos, ad mats, etc. Beware though, some of the photos are X-rated. You can’t say the title of the book didn’t warn you.
There is nothing surprising about the fact that there is an article on Betty Page and one on Ed Wood, Jr.. What is surprising though is the serious four page review of a less well-known Robert Bresson film about nuns from 1943 - Les Anges du pêchê (aka The Angels of Sin).
There are, of course, plenty of capsule film reviews, but equally interesting are the book reviews of such oddities as Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon by Anthony Delano, Mirror Books, 1978 (a story which will be familiar to anyone who has seen Errol Morris’s documentary Tabloid, 2010) and The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records by G. L. Simons, Virgin, 1982.
Coverage of the world of porn includes reviews of The Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door (which gets savagely panned) and some films starring Italian porno parliamentarian Cicciolina, and an interview with Annie Sprinkle.
Annie Sprinkle isn’t the only sex therapist interviewed. One of the most interesting features is a talk with Tuppy Owens, founder of The Outsiders, a group where people with social or physical disabilities could find sexual partners. The Sex Maniac’s Ball was a major yearly party held to raise money for the group.
While you would no doubt find plenty of coverage of Pee-Wee Herman and Linnea Quigley elsewhere, only in a British sleaze fanzine from the late 1980s would you find a review of The Sexy Secrets of the Kissogram Girls (1985) (dir. Peter Kay).
Sheer Filth! is a delightful book to wallow in!
While most of the well-known fanzines concentrated on horror cinema, David Flint’s Sheer Filth! also covered art, music and literature, and cinematically branched out into other areas from porn to art films.
What is wonderful about this volume is that it captures the fanzine scene as it was. Things are different today. At the time Flint did his interview with David F. Friedman, Something Weird Video were yet to start re-releasing his films on home video, and Friedman’s autobiography A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King was only just about to be published. Another interviewee Norman J. Warren is now gaining renewed appreciation as his films are released on blu-ray. Part of the thrill of these magazines was to read about something you hoped to be able to see that was not easily available. (And then there are those things you read about and were glad you didn’t see - videos by noise musicians who apparently got a puerile delight in accompany their unlistenable music with unwatchable images of corpse abuse.)
The book is well-illustrated with black-and-white photos, ad mats, etc. Beware though, some of the photos are X-rated. You can’t say the title of the book didn’t warn you.
There is nothing surprising about the fact that there is an article on Betty Page and one on Ed Wood, Jr.. What is surprising though is the serious four page review of a less well-known Robert Bresson film about nuns from 1943 - Les Anges du pêchê (aka The Angels of Sin).
There are, of course, plenty of capsule film reviews, but equally interesting are the book reviews of such oddities as Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon by Anthony Delano, Mirror Books, 1978 (a story which will be familiar to anyone who has seen Errol Morris’s documentary Tabloid, 2010) and The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records by G. L. Simons, Virgin, 1982.
Coverage of the world of porn includes reviews of The Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door (which gets savagely panned) and some films starring Italian porno parliamentarian Cicciolina, and an interview with Annie Sprinkle.
Annie Sprinkle isn’t the only sex therapist interviewed. One of the most interesting features is a talk with Tuppy Owens, founder of The Outsiders, a group where people with social or physical disabilities could find sexual partners. The Sex Maniac’s Ball was a major yearly party held to raise money for the group.
While you would no doubt find plenty of coverage of Pee-Wee Herman and Linnea Quigley elsewhere, only in a British sleaze fanzine from the late 1980s would you find a review of The Sexy Secrets of the Kissogram Girls (1985) (dir. Peter Kay).
Sheer Filth! is a delightful book to wallow in!
November 17, 2024
Sheer Filth was a fanzine that ran between 1987 and 1990 in the glorious days before the WWW when shady shops sold genuine labours of love, or you sent bank notes to a P.O.Box somewhere in return for obscure ramblings on topics that would have given Mary Whitehouse an instant coronary. Sheer Filth dealt in pretty much what it said on the tin, the murky world of the dark arts of D.I.Y., no budget, low budget, film, sound, written word and really alternative art that was still just about struggling along underground after the heady days of the 60s, 70s and 80s and eventually giving birth to the highly respected Headpress. As is clear from reading this compilation of the Sheer Filth output, a lot of what floated around in the underground sewer had little or no objective merit, even in the realm of the "great because it is so a bad" category. However, as well as being a good guide to filth that probably is not worth hunting down there are also great introductions to things that are. Much of the content is at the extreme ends of horror, gore and sex, hence its relegation to the underground (although with a fanbase that probably exceeds the worst nightmares of the morality warrior).
SPK's video art "Despair" is covered, along with Physic TV, Coil. A piece by Phil Taylor looks at "Extremes in Art and Music" covering the "Vienna Group" , the Orgien Mysterien Theatres antics which probably have not been equalled. The piece goes on to skim through Come Org, Whitehouse and the early days of Power Electronics. There are interviews with Tuppy Owens, Pamela Green and Annie Sprinkle. Urotsukidoji is examined, an anime film I first encountered as a backdrop in club Quirky, here recommended as a "...forty minute megamix of diabolic erotica, perversion, gore and humour" , a fairly succinct summary. Films which have gone on to become cult classics like "Salon Kitty" and Robert Bresson's classic "The Angels of Sin" are examined. However, it is probably the stuff that has now flowed through the sewers and is now lost out to sea that this anthology is most interesting. Probably much of it will not be missed but anyone reading this with an interest in the subject and period will probably find something worth trawling for.
Sheer Filth, and this anthology are not for the easily offended, or perhaps in this day and age the not so easily offended either. It requires a bit of historic contextualisation and for the reader to make allowances for changing tastes and moralities. However, this remains a great record of the stuff sloshing about in the Sewer back then and a record of what was sloshing around back then.
SPK's video art "Despair" is covered, along with Physic TV, Coil. A piece by Phil Taylor looks at "Extremes in Art and Music" covering the "Vienna Group" , the Orgien Mysterien Theatres antics which probably have not been equalled. The piece goes on to skim through Come Org, Whitehouse and the early days of Power Electronics. There are interviews with Tuppy Owens, Pamela Green and Annie Sprinkle. Urotsukidoji is examined, an anime film I first encountered as a backdrop in club Quirky, here recommended as a "...forty minute megamix of diabolic erotica, perversion, gore and humour" , a fairly succinct summary. Films which have gone on to become cult classics like "Salon Kitty" and Robert Bresson's classic "The Angels of Sin" are examined. However, it is probably the stuff that has now flowed through the sewers and is now lost out to sea that this anthology is most interesting. Probably much of it will not be missed but anyone reading this with an interest in the subject and period will probably find something worth trawling for.
Sheer Filth, and this anthology are not for the easily offended, or perhaps in this day and age the not so easily offended either. It requires a bit of historic contextualisation and for the reader to make allowances for changing tastes and moralities. However, this remains a great record of the stuff sloshing about in the Sewer back then and a record of what was sloshing around back then.
December 5, 2025
This is a compilation of a magazine of the same name published by British writer/critic David Flint. If you're familiar with the Canadian publication Cinema Sewer, then you'll know what this is. I love CS and I loved this as well. Writing like this helps me curate watch lists. The book's (and magazines) focus is trash or low budget cinema. Here you'll find helpful reviews on low budget horror, porn, sci-fi, and other genres of movies. Great stuff!
March 24, 2021
Hit and miss collection of '80s British trash culture 'zine. Some great insight into contemporaneous reactions to video nasties and a unique canon of trash, but along with that there is a kind of weird reactionary vibe to some of the writing. A decent coffee table read, however, and some great further watching.
September 4, 2014
Every now and then a book comes along that provides a perfect snapshot of an era. Published between 1987 and 1989, the fanzine Sheer Filth offered a potent mix of bizarre and transgressive film and book reviews, strange and outré music coverage, extreme art, passionate (often rabid) feature articles and fascinating interviews with icons of cult film and entertainment.
Under the guiding hand of editor David Flint, Sheer Filth managed 9 issues before being put to bed in 1990; the editor went on to (in his words) “bigger, glossier projects” (which include the seminal Fab Press book Ten Years of Terror written with Harvey Fenton). But in those 9 issues Sheer Filth was the breeding ground for a number of prominent writers, who, like Flint, went on to bigger things; these writers included David Kerekes, John Hill and David Slater, amongst others; and the fanzine itself led to Headpress, Divinity and Sexadelic, also edited by Flint.
Fenton and Flint have collected together those 9 issues of Sheer Filth into one sleaze-tastic volume; it’s a glorious read, bringing with it an authentic whiff of late-1980s anti-censorship sexual politics.
Flint introduces the volume with a fascinating account of the rise of the fanzine in the wake of the Video Nasty furore and the tightening of censorship under Thatcher. Mags like Sheer Filth, Whiplash Smile, Bleeder’s Digest, and Rats in the Cellar in the UK provided sleaze fans with a glimpse of the forbidden and the obscure, stuff that the mainstream publications would never touch (Sheer Filth brought the world the first coverage of Jorg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik and of the now cult classic Deathbed). As Flint says in his introduction, “The fanzines were part of what felt like a movement… of transgressive culture”. Mags like Sheer Filth were a backlash against the moral conservatism of the 1980s: an attempt to blast open doors to a more open culture by celebrating taboo subject matter - revelling in a world of “Sixties garage punk, fetish clubs, horror film festivals, illicit porn, industrial music, underground cinema, true crime, performance art, occult dabbling, extreme literature and general weirdness.”
Sheer Filth provides a good dose of all of these things in its 240 pages: Cathal Tohill provides a comprehensive career retrospective of the Sultan of Sleaze, film producer David F. Friedman, complemented by an in-depth interview of the same by Flint; Dave Slater reviews the extreme circus of Archaos; David Kerekes visits an exhibition of transgressive films depicting the body in extremis at Manchester’s Cornerhouse; Ian Kerkhoff provides a scholarly account of Italian porn star/ first lady of the Italian Parliament, La Cicciolina, in action; Tohill catalogues the 1940s-60s cheesecake bondage movies of Irving Klaw; and there is much, much more besides.
In its celebration of graphic sleaze Sheer Filth has a certain nostalgic value in these access-all-areas internet times; but back in in the 1980s, Flint would have faced falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act with articles like ‘Some Reflections on the Disappearance of the Cumshot’. And lest we forget just how pernicious the moral reformers of the time really were, Flint reminds us of a House of Commons motion tabled in the early 1990s to widen the obscenity laws so as to prohibit the publication of De Sade’s Juliette – this was a novel written in 1797!
But Sheer Filth is an important book not just because it provides a record of the battles against censorship by the ‘unpopular’ culture of the 1980s-90s; it also preserves some rare and fascinating interviews that would otherwise be destined to sink without a trace. Within its pages, Flint interviews cult figures like Hershell G. Lewis (giving a rare interview on his nudie films); Buttgereit; Samuel Z. Arkoff, Brit horror maestro Norman J. Warren; old time ‘nudie cutie’ Pamela Green; and post porn modernist, Annie Sprinkle. And what mainstream magazine would feature French auteur Robert Bresson alongside Pee Wee Herman in its pages?
Flint and Fenton are to be congratulated for this wonderful compilation of Sheer Filth. More than just a catalogue of depravity: it’s an important cultural document. Let us hope similar fanzine collections (Headcheese and Chainsaws, anyone?) are forthcoming.
Under the guiding hand of editor David Flint, Sheer Filth managed 9 issues before being put to bed in 1990; the editor went on to (in his words) “bigger, glossier projects” (which include the seminal Fab Press book Ten Years of Terror written with Harvey Fenton). But in those 9 issues Sheer Filth was the breeding ground for a number of prominent writers, who, like Flint, went on to bigger things; these writers included David Kerekes, John Hill and David Slater, amongst others; and the fanzine itself led to Headpress, Divinity and Sexadelic, also edited by Flint.
Fenton and Flint have collected together those 9 issues of Sheer Filth into one sleaze-tastic volume; it’s a glorious read, bringing with it an authentic whiff of late-1980s anti-censorship sexual politics.
Flint introduces the volume with a fascinating account of the rise of the fanzine in the wake of the Video Nasty furore and the tightening of censorship under Thatcher. Mags like Sheer Filth, Whiplash Smile, Bleeder’s Digest, and Rats in the Cellar in the UK provided sleaze fans with a glimpse of the forbidden and the obscure, stuff that the mainstream publications would never touch (Sheer Filth brought the world the first coverage of Jorg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik and of the now cult classic Deathbed). As Flint says in his introduction, “The fanzines were part of what felt like a movement… of transgressive culture”. Mags like Sheer Filth were a backlash against the moral conservatism of the 1980s: an attempt to blast open doors to a more open culture by celebrating taboo subject matter - revelling in a world of “Sixties garage punk, fetish clubs, horror film festivals, illicit porn, industrial music, underground cinema, true crime, performance art, occult dabbling, extreme literature and general weirdness.”
Sheer Filth provides a good dose of all of these things in its 240 pages: Cathal Tohill provides a comprehensive career retrospective of the Sultan of Sleaze, film producer David F. Friedman, complemented by an in-depth interview of the same by Flint; Dave Slater reviews the extreme circus of Archaos; David Kerekes visits an exhibition of transgressive films depicting the body in extremis at Manchester’s Cornerhouse; Ian Kerkhoff provides a scholarly account of Italian porn star/ first lady of the Italian Parliament, La Cicciolina, in action; Tohill catalogues the 1940s-60s cheesecake bondage movies of Irving Klaw; and there is much, much more besides.
In its celebration of graphic sleaze Sheer Filth has a certain nostalgic value in these access-all-areas internet times; but back in in the 1980s, Flint would have faced falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act with articles like ‘Some Reflections on the Disappearance of the Cumshot’. And lest we forget just how pernicious the moral reformers of the time really were, Flint reminds us of a House of Commons motion tabled in the early 1990s to widen the obscenity laws so as to prohibit the publication of De Sade’s Juliette – this was a novel written in 1797!
But Sheer Filth is an important book not just because it provides a record of the battles against censorship by the ‘unpopular’ culture of the 1980s-90s; it also preserves some rare and fascinating interviews that would otherwise be destined to sink without a trace. Within its pages, Flint interviews cult figures like Hershell G. Lewis (giving a rare interview on his nudie films); Buttgereit; Samuel Z. Arkoff, Brit horror maestro Norman J. Warren; old time ‘nudie cutie’ Pamela Green; and post porn modernist, Annie Sprinkle. And what mainstream magazine would feature French auteur Robert Bresson alongside Pee Wee Herman in its pages?
Flint and Fenton are to be congratulated for this wonderful compilation of Sheer Filth. More than just a catalogue of depravity: it’s an important cultural document. Let us hope similar fanzine collections (Headcheese and Chainsaws, anyone?) are forthcoming.
May 10, 2015
I am, and always have been, a lover of sleaze, the weird and the bizarre. This lovely book collects together the contents of 1980s fanzine 'Sheer Filth!', a delightfully subversive celebration of smut, horror and weird entertainment.
The 70s and 80s are aesthetically my favourite decades and this volume reminds me why. But it also reminds me of the stupidity of the censorship laws of the time and just how repressive a place Britain really was in those days.
My viewing and reading list have both expanded considerably thanks to the contents of this book!
I cannot recommend this highly enough, not only for the nostalgia and the new discoveries, but also for the reminder of how dangerous and insidious censorship is.
The 70s and 80s are aesthetically my favourite decades and this volume reminds me why. But it also reminds me of the stupidity of the censorship laws of the time and just how repressive a place Britain really was in those days.
My viewing and reading list have both expanded considerably thanks to the contents of this book!
I cannot recommend this highly enough, not only for the nostalgia and the new discoveries, but also for the reminder of how dangerous and insidious censorship is.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews