Director's Cuts Of Horror Films That Are Improvements Over The Originals

Released theatrically in 1990, Nightbreed was cut to shreds by 20th Century Fox before it was sent to the outside world. Viewers expected a film that mirrored the grotesque nature of Barker’s earlier film, Hellraiser, but instead, it had the tone of a slasher film that didn’t want to be a slasher. Barker says this is because 20th Century Fox didn’t get what he was trying to make and chopped 40 minutes out of the movie. 

Unfortunately, much of the footage that was cut out of Nightbreed was believed to have been lost forever. It was rediscovered in 2009 by Barker’s production company, and a few different cuts of the film came out afterward. First, “The Cabal Cut” of the film was pieced together from VHS tapes of the lost footage and a DVD transfer. This release prompted Barker to recut the film for Shout! Factory as the definitive version of the film. 

Barker’s final cut allows the audience to see what the director was going for, and it makes the film more coherent. Watching the original studio version and the director’s cut side by side shows that Fox seemingly cut the film up at random in order to dump it into theaters. In Barker’s intro to the film on the Blu-ray, he explains what went wrong with the original cut of the film: 

Unfortunately it got a lousy handling with the studios who didn’t like really the fact that I was making a movie about monsters that were heroes. And that was the whole point of the movie but unfortunately when it was gutted and taken out to an audience in a really messed up form nobody was able to really understand the whole passion...

Aliens is already a long movie. The theatrical cut sits at over two hours, and the special edition (which is James Cameron’s director’s cut) is two and a half hours of suspense, aliens, and space marine violence. After Cameron delivered his initial cut to the studio, they had him cut it down to its essential elements, which means that much of Ripley’s character development and the explanation about what happened to Newt’s parents were excised from the theatrical version. 

As with many of the films described here, both versions of Aliens are really good. The theatrical version manages to have a pace that never lets up in spite of its two-hour-plus run time, and the special edition has a depth and nuance that are rarely scene in the sci-fi/action genre. Of course, Cameron prefers his cut. On the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy DVD set, he explained:

I actually prefer this version to the released version, because, as it’s been best described by one of my friends, it’s 40 miles of bad road. I think it’s a longer, more intense and more suspenseful version of the film. The conventional wisdom then was: don’t make the film too long. But at two hours and 37 minutes, this is the ride that we intended you to take.

Peter Jackson was already a popular horror filmmaker in New Zealand when The Frighteners was released to critical acclaim in the US, although he hadn’t yet reached the heights of his career that accompanied his take on The Lord of the Rings. If he had, audiences likely would have been able to see the director’s cut of The Frighteners much earlier than 2005. The updated cut adds 14 minutes to the film and expands on the character’s relationships with one another, but Jackson was reticent to call it the “director’s cut.” In his Blu-ray intro he said: 

This version of The Frighteners is actually 14 minutes longer than the theatrical release. It’s the director’s cut, I guess, or special edition release. And this is the first time that that particular edition has been available on DVD. So, it’s very exciting for me to present this film to you in its extended form. 

According to Jake Busey, who plays serial slayer Johnny Bartlett, there’s a five-hour cut of the film sitting around somewhere that delves into the backstory of the ghosts, and even goes back in time to deepen the audience's understanding of the characters. In 2018, he told Bloody Disgusting: 

There was so much material, but... they may have cut it before they did the post. They may not have done all the animating and all that so it might not even be available but they filmed so much material on John Astin and his judge with the dog and the old west. He had this whole thing in the courtroom. He had a whole segment in his house and in the old west town. The movie goes back in time to the old west when he was really a judge and alive. There’s so much more with the ghosts, with Chi McBride. It was just way too much movie to try to cram into two hours. John Astin shot like a month’s worth of stuff that didn’t even make it into the film just because of time. It just got to be such a long-running thing, so they had to cut it down. You should definitely ask Peter for the five-hour director’s cut. 

Hot off the success of his first film, Cronos, Guillermo del Toro hopped into the director’s chair for Mimic, a film about mutated cockroaches that can act like their prey in order to trick them. According to del Toro, the movie was a nightmare to film, mostly because Miramax head Bob Weinstein continually questioned his abilities and threatened to take over filming. After del Toro finished the film, Weinstein cut it to his personal specifics. Del Toro later told The Independent: 

The only time I have experienced bad behavior, and it remains one of the worst experiences of my life, was in 1997, when I did Mimic for Miramax. It was a horrible, horrible, horrible experience.

In 2010, del Toro was able to recut the film closer to what he had in his head in 2007, something that he said “healed a lot of wounds.” Del Toro’s version of the film adds a few new scenes and it extends some of the more tense moments, but the most interesting thing that del Toro did was change some of the color filters that were used when the film moves into the underground lair of the roaches. While introducing the Blu-ray edit, del Toro said: 

This cut, which is great for me... is what could be rescued from what was made. And I’m very proud of it, I’m incredibly happy, it finally can be shown and I hope you will appreciate the difference between the theatrical version and this.