10 Horror Movie Endings You Can No Longer See

1986's comedy slasher April Fool's Day concludes with an infamously polarising plot twist, where it's revealed that the movie's events - of a serial killer slaughtering a mansion full of college students - was, you guessed it, an elaborate April Fool's Day prank laid on by the mansion's resident, Muffy (Deborah Foreman).

But director Fred Walton shot two other endings which have never seen the light of day - one in which Muffy is killed by her cousin Skip (Griffin O'Neal) after her friends leave the mansion, and a far more involved one which totally reconfigured the third act.

In a 2016 interview with Daily Dead, director Walton explained the more expansive original finale:

"Don Bach wrote a third act which had always been in the script... The kids take the ferry back to the mainland the next day (after the party scene), while Muffy remains behind to clean up the house. On the ferry, the kids decide to return immediately and pull an elaborate prank on Muffy to get back at her, to scare her as badly as she had scared them, which they do and it's all in good fun, of course.

The whole thing took about 20 additional minutes of screen time, so when the Paramount execs saw the director's cut, they decided to drop the third act. It's not that they didn't like it so much as they felt the party scene hit such a high note that it was the natural place to end the picture."

Despite dogged attempts to track down both unused endings to be included in the film's recent 2020 remaster, they've sadly never been recovered, nor evidently seen outside of Paramount screening rooms.