Paul W.S. Anderson Reflects on ‘Event Horizon’ and the Gruesome “Anderson Cut” We’ve Still Never Seen

One of the many infamous lost cuts of movies that may or may not be floating around out there is the Director’s Cut of Paul W.S. Anderson‘s Event Horizon, a longer and more gruesome version of the 1997 movie that reportedly so horrified both test audiences and Paramount that much of the footage was removed from the film, never to be seen again.

As explained over on Wikipedia, “Known deleted scenes include a meeting scene between Weir and people in charge of the mission in which they discuss Event Horizon, some dialogue of which remained present in the theatrical trailer; more backstory for Cooper and Justin, including a stronger explanation for Justin entering the black hole; a deleted backstory of the relationship between Starck and Miller; additional scenes explaining what the gateway to hell/black hole is; Miller finding a tooth floating in Event Horizon, a longer version of the scene in which Peters hallucinates that her son’s mangled legs are covered in maggots; a scene in which Weir hallucinates that Justin turns into his wife Claire; a bloodier version of Weir’s wife Claire’s suicide; a longer version of the scene where Miller finds D.J’s dead body with his guts on the table; and a longer version of the “Visions From Hell” scene during Miller’s final fight with Weir with more shots of Event Horizon crew being tortured.”

You may recall that Scream Factory is working on a Collector’s Edition Blu-ray of the film that’s coming next year, and they’re searching for any of that lost footage that they can restore for the release. Chatting with Bloody Disgusting’s Boo Crew Podcast this week, Anderson reflects on Event Horizon and suggests that *some* of the footage may indeed be out there.

“Event Horizon was a really unique experience because I got to create a haunted house essentially,” Anderson recalls. “That movie, we only shot outdoors for like 2 hours… everything else was on a soundstage, and everything else had to be created. Because you’re on this labyrinthine spaceship and it was really the first time I had the budget to kind of build something that elaborate, and create something that had a kind of unity to it. I was looking for a very… I think if you’re doing a space or sci-fi movie, you need to have a particular vision.”

He continues, “We wanted to create a gothic horror, so I went to the greatest gothic building that I knew, which was the Notre-Dame in Paris. We basically recreated the Notre-Dame in a computer and we took elements of it and we built a spaceship with elements from the cathedral. So it became unrecognizable. The whole thing had an underlying gothic feel to it. And that extended to all the corridors and rooms we built, they’re all done with gothic design elements. So it was a very specific approach but I think it gave that movie a very specific feel.”

And what about the famed “Anderson Cut” of Event Horizon, you ask?

“Bits and pieces of a lost cut of Event Horizon turn up, like on different VHS tapes there will be bits of scenes that are slightly different from earlier cuts,” Anderson explains. “But I think the truth is, when we delivered the first cut to Paramount, they were just horrified by the movie. It was much darker and scarier than they ever thought it was going to be. An executive actually said to me, ‘We’re the studio that makes Star Trek,’ as if somehow I was like besmirching Star Trek as well. It wasn’t bad enough that I had made this horrible movie. So the movie ended up being trimmed a lot, and unfortunately it was before DVD really popularized deleted scenes and things like that so there was no incentive for studios to keep that material.”

He adds, “I think bits and pieces might still be discovered, but I don’t think there’ll ever be a return to the original version unless there’s something we constructed now. Who knows, in the world of the Snyder Cut of Justice League, maybe there’s the Anderson Cut of Event Horizon. All I need is a few million dollars and buckets of blood.”

You can listen to The Boo Crew’s full chat with Paul W.S. Anderson below.