Animal Farm (video)

The animal Farm video is an infamous videocassette containing scenes of explicit bestiality. It has nothing to do with the famous novel by George Orwell

History

In the early 1980s, during the British home video boom, a videocassette of indeterminate origin began to circulate in underground circles that became known simply as Animal Farm. It contained a plotless series of extremely graphic (and deeply disturbing) scenes of actual bestiality, including acts of intercourse and fellatio performed with pigs, horses and even chickens, as well as a scene in which a woman inserts live eels into her vagina.

The video was apparently smuggled through British customs in [1981] by an enterprising tourist. It eventually found its way under the counters of the more daring Soho stockists and was eventually prosecuted following a series of police raids - but not before countless bootlegs had gone into circulation. It was discovered that the video was actually comprised of several (some say as many as forty, others say as few as four) short XXX-rated films from the Danish company Color Climax, which had been producing a steady stream of bestiality features since the Danish government made all pornography legal in 1969. To keep up with the growing demand for video titles, Color Climax had taken to transferring their stocks of 8mm and 16mm films onto cassette, and it was these films - mostly starring Bodil Joensen - that comprised the notorious Animal Farm video, hence its generic title (which at no point appears on the screen) and shadowy origins.

In April 2006, the UK station Channel Four Television screened a fifty-minute documentary, ''The Search For Animal Farm'', as part of their ''Dark Side of Porn'' season. Several interviewees, including David Kerekes (co-author of Killing For Culture and See No Evil), author Phil Tonge, feminist writer Germaine Greer and British pornographer Ben Dover, all confessed to having seen bootlegs of Animal Farm in the eighties, but were apparently unaware that there was no such film - the entity referred to as such was merely a number of existing bestiality shorts tacked together. Tonge described the owner of the copy he saw as an "evil, evil scumbag" and recalled how several "hard lads" either "left the room" or "vomited", Dover remarked that owning the bootleg was a useful aid to games of one-upmanship, since nothing could top the onscreen depravity of Joensen and her co-stars, and the normally easy-going Kerekes was moved to remark that "you can only wallow in filth for so long, and Animal Farm represents the very bottom of the barrel". The documentary also told the sad story of Bodil Joensen, an obviously psychologically traumatized young woman whose brief notoriety as the queen of bestiality was followed by a downward spiral of alcohol abuse and prostitution before her death of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty, and featured an interview with the Danish pornographer Ole Ege, whose 1970 documentary A Summer's Day apparently formed at least some of the content of the Animal Farm bootleg.