10 Movies That Were Nearly Lost Completely

In 1974, Alan Ormsby, best known for his no-budget collaborations with A Christmas Story director Bob Clark, split from his former companion to direct his own feature film about serial killer Ed Gein which was funded by an American concert promoter.

Deranged remains to this day one of the most accurate films about Gein and his murders, albeit his name was changed to Ezra Cobb. The movie gained a following throughout the years because it was one of the first to feature special effects created by Tom Savini, who went on to work with George Romero on Dawn Of The Dead right after this was completed.

However, Deranged was dogged with cutting and censorship upon its original release. In order to achieve an R-rating from the MPAA, many sequences were either cut down or removed entirely. This included a lengthy murder scene and a scene of Ezra dissecting a corpse. Nonetheless, it premiered in Los Angeles and, for unknown reasons, was deemed lost swiftly afterwards. Weirdly enough, a surviving print of the film appeared in Florida in the 1990s. Unfortunately, it was the heavily edited version, so the restoration team tracked down a German unrated and uncut version in order to restore the impressive effect work by Savini before releasing it to the public.