Horror movies are designed to push the boundaries of good taste. But sometimes, skittish censors, lightheaded audiences, and flesh-eating predators force certain cuts to be made.
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00:00 Horror movies are designed to push the boundaries of good taste, but sometimes skittish censors,
00:05 light-headed audiences, and flesh-eating predators force certain cuts to be made.
00:10 In the 1986 version of The Fly, eccentric scientist Seth Brundle is applying the finishing
00:14 touches to a pair of teleportation pods in his industrial apartment.
00:18 One evening, after an argument with his new girlfriend, Ronnie, a drunken Seth teleports
00:22 himself on a whim and emerges unscathed.
00:25 But he didn't notice the housefly in the pod's window.
00:28 He gradually realizes that his DNA has been spliced with the insects, and soon enough,
00:33 he gradually morphs into a hideous mutant hybrid creature.
00:36 Directed by David Cronenberg, The Fly is a powerful story about love and disease that
00:40 reached a mainstream audience without compromising Cronenberg's signature body horror style.
00:45 In fact, it features some of the most grotesque imagery of his career, from rashes and abnormal
00:49 body hair to exploding eyeballs and a ripped-off jaw.
00:52 However, there was one scene that proved too much for test audiences.
00:56 The scene eventually showed up on home video releases.
00:59 It depicted an increasingly deformed Seth using the telepods to fuse a cat with a baboon,
01:04 creating a monstrous entity that's one part feline and one part primate.
01:07 Disgusted by what he's done, Seth struggles with the ferocious mutant before bludgeoning
01:12 it to the death of a metal pipe.
01:13 There are two obvious problems with this scene.
01:16 First it's jarringly unsympathetic, even if Seth is losing his mind.
01:20 Second, the animatronics fail to rise to the occasion, as the creature looks like a bit
01:24 of a shag carpet.
01:29 Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival
01:33 on September 24, 1986, almost two months after the sixth installment of the Friday the 13th
01:39 series.
01:40 Moviegoers at the time could have been forgiven for seeing it as just another slasher film,
01:43 but Henry actually had little in common with Friday the 13th, or any other schlocky franchise
01:48 for that matter.
01:49 As director John McNaughton explained in a 1999 interview, "Our chief device was removing
01:53 fantasy because as long as you have the buffer of fantasy, then you have a level of comfort
01:58 and distance."
01:59 Indeed, there's certainly no comfort or distance in Henry, as it features scenes of
02:03 sexual assault, torture, and murder in a cold and realist style.
02:07 One could argue that this is an appropriate manner of depiction compared to its more frivolous
02:10 slasher contemporaries, but the censors had other concerns.
02:14 The British Board of Film Classification cut 62 seconds from the theatrical release, and
02:19 a further 51 seconds for the video release.
02:21 Four seconds were cut from a stabbing scene, 38 seconds from a bloody aftermath involving
02:26 a bottle in a woman's face, and 71 seconds from a disturbing home invasion.
02:36 French filmmaker Alexandre Aja had to cut 10 seconds of violence from his 2008 film
02:40 Mirrors to secure an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.
02:45 Later in Britain, the BBFC gave the film an 18 rating, owing to its strong gory content.
02:50 20th Century Fox wanted a more commercial 15 rating, so they agreed to cuts in four
02:54 instances.
02:55 The first cuts were made to a scene in which a security guard slits his own throat with
02:59 a glass shard, causing blood to spray from the deep wound.
03:02 Then there was the sight of a horrifically burned woman screaming in pain.
03:06 Cuts also came to perhaps the film's goriest moment, in which a woman's mouth is torn
03:10 apart in grotesque detail.
03:12 Finally, frames were removed from another throat-slashing scene towards the end of the
03:15 film.
03:16 These cuts pertain only to the theatrical version, as Mirrors was ultimately uncut for
03:20 its home video releases.
03:22 Legendary film critic Roger Ebert had a memorably strong reaction to the first Wolf Creek movie
03:26 back in 2005.
03:28 As he put it, "What the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?
03:32 If anyone you know says this is the one they want to see, my advice is, don't know that
03:36 person no more."
03:37 A majority of critics struck a similar tone, but that didn't stop the eventual release
03:41 of a sequel, as Wolf Creek 2 delivered another 100-plus minutes of Australian outback brutality.
03:47 The Australian Classification Board gave Wolf Creek 2 an R18+ rating, meaning that no one
03:52 below the age of 18 could view it in theaters.
03:54 As the board explained in their decision, "It is episodic and realistic, resulting
03:58 in copious, realistic blood-and-gore effects, and includes decapitation and dismemberment."
04:07 The movie's distributor, Roadshow Films, wasn't satisfied with this appraisal, but
04:11 what did they expect?
04:13 Wolf Creek 2 revels in the destruction of human anatomy and the many ways in which it
04:16 can be done.
04:17 Australian horror fans surely would have cried foul if it had received anything less, but
04:21 according to screenwriter Aaron Stearns, the distributors were looking for an audience
04:25 wider than just the most hardcore horror enthusiasts.
04:28 So several cuts were made to a revolting headshot, a decapitation, a full-body dismemberment,
04:33 and bloody wounds to one character's face and another's fingers.
04:37 The 2003 version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was never outright banned like the 1974 original,
04:43 but the Motion Picture Association of America did request two cuts to avoid an NC-17 rating.
04:48 First was a suicide by gunshot, as director Marcus Nisball had to reduce the blood and
04:53 remove the side of a severed ear.
04:54 He claimed that he was satisfied with this shot despite the cut.
04:57 As he put it, "In the actual cut, the blood is less red, which I think is actually much
05:01 scarier in a way.
05:02 I like that it's dark, and I never like blood that looks like syrup or ketchup or whatever."
05:07 However, Nisball was less enthusiastic about the cuts to a scene in which the villain Leatherface
05:11 hangs a victim from a dusty old chandelier, pulls the cord of his chainsaw, and cuts him
05:15 in half from the groin upwards.
05:17 The censors took their mop and bucket to this scene, removing all the mess and leaving Leatherface's
05:22 terrible act to viewers' imaginations.
05:24 As Nisball put it, "Two shots had to go out, which really don't show you all that much,
05:28 but somehow it leaves me wondering what had really happened to him by removing them."
05:33 Released in 1987, the original Hellraiser combined sex with violence in a way that troubled
05:37 the ratings board.
05:38 As writer-director Clive Barker recalled, "We did a version which had some spanking
05:42 in it, and the MPAA was not very appreciative of that.
05:45 They also told me I was allowed two consecutive buttock thrusts, but a third would be deemed
05:49 obscene."
05:50 "Go to hell!"
05:52 Cuts were also made to a murder scene with a hammer, as the number of strikes were reduced,
05:56 much like the buttock thrusts.
05:57 Also left out were images of one character's hand and an open, bloody abdomen.
06:01 Barker's most regretful cut occurred during the finale, in which the character of Frank
06:05 is torn apart by hooks and chains, as the ratings board took issue with how Frank licked
06:09 his lips in an odd, masochistic manner.
06:11 As Barker explained, "It was a much longer shot.
06:15 Body pieces went every place.
06:16 In another life, I would have let that run slightly longer, as it looked slightly truncated."
06:21 Mystery surrounds a scene involving a bloody piranha attack in the 1980 found-footage film
06:26 Cannibal Holocaust.
06:27 The moment was set to depict tribesmen tying an enemy to a log and lowering him into a
06:31 piranha-infested river, stripping everything below the waterline to the bone.
06:35 A still of this scene was used to market the film, but the full sequence proved to be elusive.
06:40 In 2021, Dread Central spoke to Callum Waddell, author of the book Cannibal Holocaust, Devil's
06:45 Advocates.
06:46 Waddell quoted Colombian actor Ronaldo Blanca, who said,
06:49 "I was there for that scene.
06:51 Director Ruggiero Diodato definitely shot it.
06:53 He called 'action,' and he called 'cut.'
06:55 And some of us had gathered around to watch it and we all applauded.
06:58 It was a brilliant effect."
06:59 This isn't the only moment that was cut from Cannibal Holocaust.
07:02 The film was so shocking that Italian authorities arrested Diodato for the murder of his actors,
07:07 an accusation he disproved by inviting the very much alive cast to court.
07:11 The movie was banned in 40 countries and remains prohibited or censored to this day, primarily
07:16 because of its scenes of real animal slaughter.
07:20 Gory cult-favorite Event Horizon was almost even gorier than what was shown in theaters.
07:24 The original cut ran over two hours long, thanks in part to reels of bloody imagery
07:28 that were so visceral that some test audience members fainted.
07:32 As director Paul W.S.
07:33 Anderson admitted on the DVD commentary,
07:35 "I was just enjoying the gruesomeness of it so much.
07:37 I just probably put way too much in there."
07:40 According to the film's effects supervisor, Anderson's early cut gave a more detailed
07:44 account of the Event Horizon massacre, as it featured graphic mutilation of teeth, legs,
07:48 and breasts.
07:49 As Anderson also noted in the commentary track,
07:51 "You can't underestimate the kind of shock this movie had.
07:54 People were really, really upset by it.
07:56 If we'd had more time to work on it, we could have kept a lot of the more gruesome aspects."
08:00 Ultimately, the Event Horizon that reached theaters was a much shorter 96-minute version
08:05 that passed the ratings board's approval without incident.
08:08 The first paranormal activity ends with a demon-possessed Katie hurling her boyfriend
08:12 Mika at the camera, but this wasn't the only possible conclusion.
08:15 In fact, director Oren Peli weighed up three other endings, and two of them were quite
08:20 brutal.
08:21 In the least violent one, a neighbor calls the cops, who arrive at the house and corner
08:24 the possessed Katie.
08:26 Her presence appears to sober her, but then a sudden door slam startles a cop, who shoots
08:30 her dead.
08:31 The other two endings are even more unsettling.
08:33 Technical concerns stop Peli from filming a scene in which Katie takes the camera and
08:37 bludgeons Mika to death in a point-of-view style.
08:40 It's hard to know whether audiences would have laughed or screamed at that.
08:43 However, Peli fully understood the intense reaction to the conclusion in which Katie
08:47 kills Mika downstairs, then enters the bedroom and slits her throat in front of the camera.
08:51 He chose the endings shown in theaters based in part on Steven Spielberg's suggestion.
08:56 (upbeat music)
08:59 (upbeat music)