Blue Movie

The term blue movie—literally "blue film"—referred to pornographic or highly erotic film productions in Britain and Australia until the 1980s. The expression likely derives from the bluish color reproduction of early sub-standard film prints that circulated in private screenings, or from the blue covers in which corresponding magazines and video cassettes were distributed. Today, the term has largely disappeared from professional film vocabulary, replaced by more precise genre designations.

Origin and Distribution

In Great Britain, blue movie was a common euphemism of the post-war era when censorship still strictly distinguished between "art" and "obscenity." The term also appeared in American underground cinema in the 1960s—Andy Warhol's Blue Movie (1969) deliberately played with its ambiguity. Unlike the German "Schmuddelfilm" (sleazy film), blue movie in English was more sober and less judgmental. With the liberalization of film censorship in the 1970s and the emergence of hardcore and softcore as distinct genre terms, the expression lost its precision and fell out of use—anyone speaking of a blue movie to a British distributor today would at best elicit a mild smile.

Distinction from Modern Genre Terms

Where blue movie once served as a collective term for anything not suitable for minors, film studies today makes sharp distinctions: Erotica (narratively embedded sexuality with artistic aspirations, as in the works of Tinto Brass or Catherine Breillat), Pornography (explicit sexual acts without narrative superstructure), and Sexploitation (low-budget genre cinema of the 1960s/70s with sensationalist subjects, such as the works of Russ Meyer). This internal differentiation did not exist in the era of blue movie—the term was a broad category that functioned in distribution and censorship practices but revealed little historically.

Why the Term is Still Relevant

For film historians, blue movie is a useful period color: the expression marks an era when sexual depictions on screen still had scandalous potential and were negotiated through euphemisms. In festival programming (e.g., in retrospectives by the British Film Institute), the term occasionally still appears curatorially. For today's screenwriters and producers, it is irrelevant—anyone negotiating a contract for "erotic content" or "nude scenes" uses more precise contractual clauses. In short: blue movie is a linguistic fossil that reveals more about the prudery of its time than about the films themselves.