Simon and I presented a paper on the remediation of cult texts in online communities on the first day of this year's Cine Excess conference. Despite presenting in a cinema, the paper went well and the generous response from fellow delegates was pleasing. Other papers today have looked at British censorship in the 1960s, the remake of Last House on the Left, the snuff movie myth, British camcorder horror and Cannibal Holocaust. Two papers were presented on the highly controversial A Serbian Film (2010).

FAB Press were on hand to launch a special reprint of their book Cannibal Holocaust: The Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato and Deodato was on hand to sign copies for fans.

The highlight of the day was Martin Barker's keynote on some recent BBFC funded research he and his team have carried out into a series of controversial films, notably Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park. Barker's point about the need to move away from psychological research and adopt a British cultural studies approach to researching controversial film was extremely valid. In what was a nice surprise, cult Italian actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice, aka John Morghen, turned up to translate for Deodato. A panel discussion with Deodato, Barker, a BBFC examiner and chair Julian Petley offered an insight into the BBFC's current practices.

The highlight of the day was the UK theatrical premiere of the new Shameless cut of Cannibal Holocaust, which has only received 14 seconds of cuts from the BBFC. Deodato passionately introduced the film and then Riz Ortolani's iconic theme boomed out of the cinema 's speaker system. Seeing this film on the big screen, albeit in a truncated version, will be a memory that I won't forget.