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Event Horizon's hell footage was cut
The cut sequence
Event Horizon follows a ship that goes through a wormhole. When it comes back, the crew learns that the dimension it visited was basically hell. The scene showing it was filmed for about a week of graphic torture, including people having their teeth pulled out.
It was so bad that the filmmakers decided to boil it down to roughly 30 seconds. The theatrical cut gives only a glimpse, a quick little montage. A director's cut with more of the gruesome footage was planned but never released.
The lost footage
The footage was lost after the warehouse holding the outtakes was destroyed or burned down, or maybe after a storage bill went unpaid.
A comic book now tells the story of the original ship and what it went through, and some people online are considering using AI to recreate the lost footage.
Why do studios trim violent scenes before release?
In the US, the Motion Picture Association rates films, and an NC-17 rating bars anyone under 18. Many theater chains and newspapers have avoided NC-17 films, so studios often trim footage to reach an R rating, which lets younger viewers attend with a guardian. The NC-17 rating replaced the X rating in 1990. Event Horizon itself was released with an R rating.
Why do deleted scenes disappear for good?
Unused footage is rarely treated as an asset, so it often sat in warehouses with little cataloging. Early film stock was made of cellulose nitrate, which is highly flammable and can ignite on its own as it decays. A 1937 fire at a Fox vault in Little Ferry, New Jersey destroyed a large share of the studio's early negatives and prints. A 2013 Library of Congress study found that about 70 percent of American silent feature films are lost.
How do director's cuts reach audiences years later?
Home video made it practical for studios to sell alternate versions of a film. Blade Runner reached theaters in 1982, a director's cut followed in 1992, and Ridley Scott supervised a Final Cut in 2007. Each version restored or changed scenes from the earlier ones.
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