10 Horror Movies That Unbelievably Cut What We Wanted To See
When horror movies left the true terror on the cutting room floor.
Even beyond shooting a film, the sheer number of processes and decisions that go into completing a movie are practically countless.
Directors can end up deliberating with editors, producers, and studio executives over single sequences or even single shots of a film, resulting in prime rib material being cut for one reason or another.
Though subtle horror can be great, the genre is typically best known for cathartically letting loose with terrifying set-pieces, uneasy suspense, and most of all, lashings of gore.
But sometimes films decide to shy away from the moment or money shot audiences are most eager to see, leaving them feeling a little unfulfilled no matter how great the overall movie might actually be.
These 10 films all decided to cut away from a potentially jaw-dropping moment, whether out of a misplaced sense of "modesty," due to budgetary constraints, or because the studio simply felt it was too extreme.
Whatever the reason, fans felt short-changed that the very thing they wanted to see was ripped out of the movie, obscured from view, and otherwise denied to them despite throwing down their hard-earned cash...
10. Nash Gets Ripped Apart - The Hitcher
Cult classic 1986 horror film The Hitcher boasts one of the most memorably twisted death scenes in the genre's history, at least in theory.
Deep into the movie's third act, female lead Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is abducted by murderous psychopath John Ryder (a brilliant Rutger Hauer), who ties her between two trucks.
Ryder is behind the wheel of one of the trucks, and in the event that he hits the gas, Nash will be ripped apart. He attempts to goad protagonist Jim (C. Thomas Howell) into shooting him, but when Jim refuses, Ryder hits the pedal, killing Nash.
Despite the film hardly shying away from gore up to this point, we never actually see Nash get torn in half, director Robert Harmon instead focusing on Nash's hands being pulled tight and her screams before fading to black.
While you can certainly argue that leaving audiences to imagine the grisly outcome is more effective, the sudden decision to deprive audiences of a gory death scene felt contradictory to the film's style and tone up to that point.
One of the film's producers ultimately even blamed its commercial disappointment on the decision not to show Nash's death:
"There's other gore in the movie, other killings, but this is the main one. It's the motivation for the hero. You can't show all the killings we showed and then not show the main one. It's cheating the audience."
The 2007 remake tried to rectify this by showing the gender-swapped outcome in all its nauseating glory, though that didn't much help its general reception.