10 Horror Movie Deleted Scenes We Desperately Need To See
The censored skewerings, missing reels, and slasher scenes that weren't meant to be...
Let’s face it: A lot of deleted scenes belong in the bin where they end up.
No, studio executives aren't always geniuses, but anyone who has sat through a set of interminably talky action-free vignettes as a DVD "special" feature is likely to leave thinking two things. One, the format deserved to die in favour of streaming, and two, most deleted scenes consist of some arbitrary exposition which was sliced out for slowing down the all important momentum of the movie and providing nothing of note.
But every once in a while, over-zealous censors or a meddling studio will cut a sequence which was pure gold.
Particularly in the horror genre, where censors are infamously snip-happy and studios are happy to chop out any clever, subtle scares which don't act as obvious crowd pleasers, so the more delicately realized version of a director's vision can often times end up littering the floor of some editor's suite.
Thus viewers who love the genre are left with lists like this, providing an in-depth run-down of ten choice deleted scenes which horror fans the world over would give a limb to see, and which could have changed horror history.
10. My Bloody Valentine – The Lost Lovers
2009 saw Scream editor Patrick Lussier remake Canadian slasher My Bloody Valentine, and the cutter-turned-director did all he could to up the gore and nudity quotient in his R-rated re-do, throwing in some truly outrageous gore and an extended nude scene which managed to push the buttons of censors even in the lax post-torture porn era of the late noughties.
But he still couldn’t beat the original, tragically lost cut of this 1981 Canadian slasher flick.
Whilst many of its once-censored scenes have been recovered in the decades since, the original film's director lamented that an ambitious sequence which saw a pair of lovers skewered together by a mining drill is gone for good.
Without any footage surviving, it's perhaps best left to director George Mihalka himself to describe just what horror fans are missing from this excised scene:
"There was a scene with the two kids in the mine and they’re joined together forever... They’re just necking and Tom’s lying on top of [Harriet] and the miner comes in and puts the [drill] through him. She’s got her eyes closed and thinks he’s just being a little frisky. She opens her mouth and her eyes just widen as he bleeds into her mouth. Then the miner goes whoomp! And [stabs straight through] them both. That scene had to be taken out totally. It has disappeared and we’ll never see it."