Alternate Cuts Of Horror Films We're Dying To See

Fans of Paul W.S. Anderson's sci-fi space nightmare Event Horizon know that the 1997 film is already brimming with shock-value gore. The movie follows the Lewis and Clark, a spaceship sent on a rescue mission. They are off to find the Event Horizon, a ship that reappeared after disappearing for seven years. The Event Horizon's creator, Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill), is a part of this rescue mission, and he explains that the ship has the ability to create an artificial black hole, which connects two points in spacetime and makes space and time travel that much faster. As they continue to approach the distressed ship, the Lewis and Clark crew learns that the Event Horizon crew might have opened something unholy, and literal Hell breaks loose.

Anderson censors little when it comes to creating this sci-fi horror. Crew members slowly lose their minds, seeing their loved ones in increasingly vicious and bloody hallucinations. According to Bloody Disgusting, a longer, more disturbing cut was shown to test audiences. Some alleged scenes in this director's cut include a much more graphic depiction of Weir's wife taking her life; a longer scene of Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) finding D.J. (Jason Isaacs) with his intestines strewn all over the place, and an overall much-more-horrific final fight between Weir and Miller. The infamous “blood orgy” glimpsed in the theatrical cut was apparently far more elaborate. Flashes of intense scenes, like of a woman getting screws drilled into her teeth, were also removed. Allegedly, test audiences were so horrified, they vomited and fainted in the theater.

Anderson says that the cut film was not archived well, but that hasn't stopped enthusiasts of what many call "Hellraiser in Space" from asking for its release in all its grainy, gory glory. There is an Event Horizon series set for Amazon, so maybe some of these gory ideas will finally make it to screen.

Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2 is often considered one of the greatest horror comedies ever made. The sequel to Raimi's The Evil Dead came out in 1987, six years after the original, and it picked up right where the first left off. Our hero, Ash (Bruce Campbell), is left by himself in the haunted woods, where ancient evil spirits have the ability to reanimate the deceased. A rare extended cut of the gory cult classic exists, but it was only made available in a very limited run - in Germany.

This elusive extended edition of Evil Dead 2 only runs 2 minutes and 39 seconds longer than the theatrical cut, and it appears that most of the seconds shaved off included some fairly disturbing imagery. This cut includes an extended scene of Linda (Denise Bixler) chasing Ash with the chainsaw and a demonized Ash biting off the head of an animal. The footage is difficult to come by, at least at a price that won't break the bank. 

Writer/director John Landis had the idea for An American Werewolf in London when he was only 19, but it wasn't until years later that he was able to put together the horror-comedy classic. Two American students, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), are making their way through rural Yorkshire when they are beset by a vicious beast. Jack perishes, but David makes it - although severely battered. David soon learns, thanks to a slowly decaying ghost-version of Jack, that he is infected with the werewolf curse and he should end his own life before inflicting pain or damage on anyone else. 

As Landis showed the then-genre-defying cut to friends and colleagues, he was convinced to tone down some of the nastier bits of the film. One scene that allegedly didn't sit well with audiences was a graphic depiction of a werewolf mauling transients. Landis doesn't believe that that particular scene exists on any celluloid or hard drive, but a much gorier extended cut is somewhere in the ether - although it is nearly impossible to find.

The second installment of the Jason Voorheevs saga, Friday The 13th Part 2, was meant not only to pile on the body count but the gore as well. The film takes place five years after the terrible events at Camp Crystal Lake, and a new group of camp counselors experiences the horror that is Jason Voorhees. One by one, the naive camp counselors are picked off in exceedingly grisly ways. The demise of two counselors - Jeff (Bill Randolph) and Sandra (Marta Kober) - was deemed too graphic by the MPAA. In the original cut, audiences see the lovers get impaled as they are fooling around. 

According to Slasher Studios, the MPAA deemed several other moments of the second installment in the Friday the 13th franchise too intense, including lingering, bloody shots, like when Jason shoves an ice pick into Alice's (Adrienne King) head. The sequel may have avoided an X rating, but it left fans somewhat dejected knowing that they would likely never see these gruesome scenes in all their gory glory. For those dying to see the double impalement, fans claim that the scene can be viewed during the loading screen of the 2017 Friday the 13th game.

Fans of the 1984 classic Ghostbusters were somewhat disappointed with the sequel's results. The studio, Columbia, was ready to capitalize off of the success of the first film, so several aspects of Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd's original script were left on the cutting room floor. Ghostbusters II was set to feature a lot more phantasmagoric hijinks than audiences got to see. Cut scenes include Ray (Dan Akroyd) endangering his team's lives after being hypnotized to do so and a hammy shot of Slimer just before the credits roll - which some people swear actually happened.

Some fans were so upset that, even years later, they worked hard to get a re-edited cut of the film. In September 2013, self-described writer-director Bradley Bjornstad put out a Kickstarter in hopes of re-editing the film as it should have been originally seen. Unfortunately, he only made roughly $4,700 of the $100,000 needed for the project. 

Before Tom Savini stepped into the director's chair for his 1990 reimaging of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, he had years of makeup effects experience. Fans of Savini expected his rendition of the classic zombie flick to be bloodier and full of body horror, but the MPAA was not having any of it. While the story itself stuck fairly close to that of the original - a woman named Barbara (Patricia Tallman) is visiting her deceased mother's grave with her brother when zombies arise. Her brother is slain, and she holes up in an old house with Ben (Tony Todd) and others as they plan their survival. 

In an interview with Daily Dead, Savini revealed that the MPAA rating board had him cut loads of gore, specifically shots of exit wounds:

They never even put it in. There’s a 25-minute documentary on the DVD of my Night of the Living Dead and it shows that footage—mainly exit wounds on people getting shot in the head. With my name and George’s on the movie, audiences expected a gore-fest, but it’s actually kind of sterile as far as the blood and gore.

Savini also noted that the studio, Columbia, made some cuts per the MPAA without notifying Savini. While the footage can be seen on this DVD, there is not a director's cut showing how Savini intended the film to be.