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Sometimes movies go too far even for their directors! Join us as we examine the most shocking deleted scenes that were deemed too violent for theaters. Our countdown includes disturbing moments from "Event Horizon," "The Black Cauldron," "The Butterfly Effect" and more! Do you think these scenes were too violent, or were the censors too thin-skinned?
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Set her up in number five.
00:01I'm going to go check on Tillingham.
00:03Welcome to WatchMojo.
00:05And today, we're looking at movie scenes that were deemed too violent for audiences.
00:10Although, some of these would resurface in director's cuts.
00:13There will be a few spoilers ahead.
00:15We were just trying to kind of get the right balance without tipping the movie also into an NC-17.
00:22Number 10.
00:23The Darkest Timeline.
00:25The Butterfly Effect.
00:30It's fitting that a film about rewriting the past would have four alternate endings.
00:44By far, the most depressing and stomach-churning sees protagonist, Evan, travel back to his mother's womb.
00:49Believing his loved ones will benefit from his absence, Evan uses his umbilical cord to prevent his birth.
00:56Save him!
00:57Now get enough oxygen.
00:59We're losing him!
01:00We're losing him!
01:00No!
01:01The image of Evan ending his life before it even begins is beyond disturbing.
01:06No!
01:08The fact that his sacrifice creates a more hopeful future for everyone else only makes the scene more unsettling, suggesting that the world would be a better place without him.
01:18It's a complex notion that the studio felt was more than viewers could handle.
01:22While the directors delivered a more optimistic ending for theaters, their preferred downer ending was restored on home media.
01:30I couldn't stand my dad.
01:33But I knew that if I went to live with my mom, I'd never see you again.
01:38Number 9.
01:40Peter Foley's Death.
01:41The Dark Knight Rises.
01:43Keep moving forward!
01:45Break him at the stairs!
01:48Christopher Nolan set the gold standard for gritty superhero movies with his Dark Knight trilogy.
01:53He still had to keep things in a PG-13 proximity.
01:57One axed scene challenged that rating.
02:00In The Dark Knight Rises, Gordon's second-in-command, Peter Foley, dies facing off against Talia al Ghul's army.
02:07Shoot them.
02:10Shoot them all.
02:17Despite the absence of blood, Foley is seemingly gunned down in the film, although his death was originally intended to be more graphic.
02:26According to actor Matthew Modine, his stunt double shot a scene in which he was run over, sending him 15 feet in the air before he hit the ground.
02:35Modine claims that Nolan told him that if the scene had been included, it would have got an NC-17 rating because it was so violent.
02:43Call everyone in.
02:44Every car patrol, peacock, Bop-32.
02:47Call them in now.
02:48I'm gonna do what Jim Gordon never could.
02:50What's that?
02:51I'm gonna take down the Batman.
02:52Number 8.
02:54Eric Gets Shot.
02:55Mac and Me.
02:56Are you gonna be okay?
02:58Guaranteed.
02:59Listen, I'm getting out at 9.
03:00Mr. Allen is bringing me home.
03:01Please be there, guys.
03:02We'll be there, Mom.
03:03Even if you've never watched this E.T. knockoff, chances are Paul Rudd and Conan familiarized you with the infamous scene where Eric falls from a cliff in his wheelchair.
03:13Oh, no!
03:14That's not even the worst thing that happens to Eric.
03:23In a bizarrely explosive climax, Eric gets caught in the crossfire, but the aliens have a cure for death.
03:30Eric!
03:31Eric!
03:31Eric!
03:31Eric!
03:32Eric!
03:32Eric!
03:33Eric!
03:33Eric!
03:33Eric!
03:34The scene is so poorly edited that the audience is left asking, wait, when did Eric get hit?
03:47In the original cut, we actually see Eric take a bullet to the chest, while this footage surfaced in some home media prints.
03:54It makes sense why the studio removed it from the theatrical cut following poor test screenings.
03:59Maybe they also would have replaced the guns with walkie-talkies.
04:03We're gonna lose him, Bill.
04:04They don't know how to drive, anyway!
04:06Drop him!
04:07Eric!
04:08Drop him!
04:09Drop him!
04:10No!
04:11No!
04:12No!
04:13No!
04:14No!
04:15No!
04:16No!
04:17No!
04:18No!
04:19No!
04:20No!
04:21No!
04:22No!
04:23No!
04:24No!
04:25No!
04:26No!
04:27No!
04:28No!
04:29No!
04:30No!
04:31No!
04:32No!
04:33No!
04:34No!
04:35No!
04:36No!
04:37No!
04:38No!
04:39No!
04:40No!
04:41No!
04:42No!
04:43No!
04:44No!
04:45No!
04:46No!
04:47No!
04:48No!
04:49No!
04:50No!
04:51No!
04:52No!
04:53No!
04:54No!
04:55No!
04:56No!
04:57No!
04:58No!
04:59No!
05:00No!
05:01No!
05:03Editor Joe Murphy expressed affection for the rat scene, calling it gory and crazy. During the
05:09editing process, though, they found that the rat regurgitating was so horrific that it actually
05:14kind of slowed down the horror of the sequence it was in. So not only was it too barbaric for
05:19barbarian, but the rat simply hurt the flow. 6. Brains and Eyeballs – From Beyond
05:49Please don't eat those. Director Stuart Gordon reportedly had to submit this
05:54body horror film 12 times to the MPAA to get it down from an NC-17 rating to an R.
06:01The police are here.
06:08Perhaps the most revolting scene that he trimmed down involved his wife, Carolyn Purdy Gordon,
06:15who played a doctor. She stumbles upon protagonist Dr. Tillinghast, chowing down on a juicy brain.
06:21Tillinghast proceeds to bite out her eye and suck out her brains through the now vacant socket.
06:39The director recalled a woman from the MPAA sitting him down saying,
06:44this is disgusting. With the release date looming, Gordon reluctantly cut about 30 seconds from this
06:49scene. Gordon said that they really took out some of the best stuff, which thankfully saw the light
06:55of day in future releases. 5. Don't Feed the Plants – Little Shop of Horrors
07:06Like its stage counterpart, the Little Shop of Horrors movie was destined for cult status.
07:19Some things work better on stage than in film, however. In theater, a musical can end tragically
07:25as long as the cast returns for a final bow. There's no curtain call in movies. So, for test
07:31audiences, there was no closure to be found when Audrey succumbed to her wounds. Seymour lost the
07:37final battle against Audrey too. And bloodthirsty alien plants took over the Earth.
07:49Despite the best efforts of director Frank Oz and screenwriter Howard Ashman, they relented that the
07:55film wouldn't be commercially successful without a cheerier ending. That's what audiences got in 1986,
08:02but the original ending was eventually revived in all of its ghastly glory.
08:254. Monkey Cat – The Fly
08:42You know that a movie has gone too far, when even David Cronenberg is like, yeah, let's cut that.
08:49Is it life or is it Memorax? It's too bad Ronnie missed it.
08:56Considering how much gnarly body horror that The Fly got away with, you might assume there was no
09:01line. This deleted scene wasn't just vile, however. It made Seth Brundle a slightly less
09:06sympathetic protagonist, attempting to stop his transformation into a fly.
09:27It didn't go well, prompting Brundle to destroy his latest creation with a lead pipe. The audience
09:41already had to sit through the demise of one baboon, whom Brundle was more empathetic toward. The
09:47filmmakers deemed the monkey-cat scene, needless animal cruelty that robbed Brundle of whatever
09:53humanity he had left.
10:073. Cauldron Born – The Black Cauldron
10:11Disney's first PG animated feature notoriously removed 12 minutes from its final cut. For years,
10:26there were rumors that the deleted footage would have resulted in a PG-13 or R rating. Further
10:32research suggests that many of these moments were cut due to pacing. However, there was at least one
10:52shot that likely would have pushed the film beyond the PG limits. During the Cauldron Born climax,
10:58the Horned King's undead army rises. While this scene was toned down for theaters, partially recovered
11:04artwork shows the Cauldron Born attacking henchmen. One man's flesh melts away in dreadful detail, leaving
11:11only bones.
11:32We may never get a director's cut of The Black Cauldron, but these stills might be the most violent imagery in
11:38Disney's entire animation library. We'll gladly take Kong's lair over the Spider Pit. In the 1933 classic,
12:05Kong sends several sailors plummeting from a log bridge into the pit below. The sequence was
12:11intended to go on longer, with giant insects and other stop-motion creatures attacking the men.
12:25It's been rumored that this scene was included in early screenings of King Kong, but it was
12:41supposedly more than audiences could bear. In any case, Marion C. Cooper felt the scene wasn't needed,
12:47scrapping it. Peter Jackson would include a Spider Pit sequence when he remade King Kong in 2005. Although,
12:54the original Spider Pit scene has been mostly lost outside of some stills and artwork,
12:59Jackson and his team employed their technical wizardry to recreate it.
13:031. Much of the gore
13:32Event Horizon
13:38Captain Justin just activated the door, it's on a 30-second delay.
13:41Justin!
13:41Although Event Horizon would ultimately be rated R. Audiences in 1997 didn't realize how much bloodier the
13:54theatrical cut could have been. Director Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt claim that some viewers
14:00fainted at test screenings, presumably due to the excessive gore.
14:15The suits at Paramount were also caught off guard, insisting that Anderson trim down the runtime,
14:20along with the brutality. With the film gaining a cult following, Anderson expressed interest in a
14:26director's cut.
14:27What you'll see is kind of an incomplete version. We kept the Burning Man pretty much for all of it.
14:32You'll see he transforms into Weir at one point, but in the version we tested, we actually mapped
14:39flames and bloody skin onto Weir, so he appeared to be the Burning Man.
14:44While some of the deleted scenes were recovered, others were lost without a trace. Reflecting on some of the footage that got cut,
14:51actor Jason Isaacs said, there are things that are definitely illegal to do now. Probably illegal to do then.
14:58And I prefer the version of the movie we ultimately ended up releasing where it's just a little more vague.
15:05We don't kind of like refer to hell so specifically. I think it's kind of clear,
15:09but I think it's cooler that we don't have to actually talk about it.
15:12Do you think these scenes were too violent, or were the censors too thin-skinned? Let us know in the comments.
15:21We'll see you next time.
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