10 Classic Movies The Directors Won't Stop Changing

Italian exploitation flicks of the 70s, filmed with multilingual casts for international audiences, such as spaghetti westerns and "giallo" serial killer thrillers, frequently ended up existing in multiple cuts. Dario Argento's Deep Red is both one of the masterpieces of the giallo genre and one of the worst offenders in regard to directorial reworking.

Released in Italy in March 1975 as Profondo Rosso, Argento's original Italian language cut ran to two hours.

By the time it reached America in 1976, however, it was 26 minutes shorter with a romantic subplot between the film's English lead David Hemmings and Argento's partner and Italian lead Daria Nicolodi removed completely and never even dubbed into English. Fortunately, like most of Argento's lurid expressionistic horrors, plot and character isn't exactly Deep Red's strong suit anyway.

While it has been suggested that these cuts were made by American distributors, Argento himself has pointed to the US theatrical edits as his own work. In the UK, however, Deep Red was only initially released on home video with cuts to scenes of animal cruelty (an "uncut" version of the English-language theatrical cut only came out in 2010 after Argento argued that a scene of a lizard impaled on a pin was an effects shot rather than an actual impaling).

In 1999 a "Director's Cut" was assembled for international release, more with Argento's approval than involvement, which was 126 minutes long. It's essentially the scenes cut by Argento for the original US release added back in (meaning that the language switches back to subtitled Italian for those scenes that never got dubbed) and with a slightly different final shot.