The Event Horizon Director’s Cut No Longer Exists

Who remembers the 1990’s, when Paul W.S. Anderson made decent movies?  Mortal Kombat, Soldier or Event Horizon?  Well, the latter was once a longer, even more violent movie that when shown to test audiences, made some of them faint.  The studio told Anderson to cut the movie down, quickly.  Which he did.

Clips and screens from this gorier version have surfaced over the years, but apparently we’ll never see the full thing.

Speaking with Crave Online as part of a Facebook Live event to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, Anderson confirms that there has been plenty of talk about a longer ‘director’s cut’ version, but it’s not possible as the material has effectively vanished (the same problem William Friedkin has had trying to restore his original cut of “Cruising”). Anderson explains:

“There was a lot more that was shot that isn’t in the movie. But you’ll never see the messed up version because we made Event before the kind of DVD revolution. You know, DVD ushered in this era when you had to have additional footage, deleted scenes, things like that.

There was no call for that back when we were just doing VHS cassettes and LaserDiscs. So the material just wasn’t archived very well, and since the movie became a big cult classic, Paramount has asked us to come back in and do different versions and we looked for the material, and it just doesn’t exist.”

Pity.  But I don’t know why Anderson is saying this.  Four years ago he said that Lloyd Levin found the 130 min cut on VHS.