Not every chilling horror scene makes it to the big screen.
Whether for pacing reasons, keeping the MPAA rating at an accessible "R," or simply the
filmmakers going in a different direction, these scenes were left on the cutting room
floor — but they're no less terrifying on their own.
Here are some of the scariest deleted scenes from your favorite horror movies.
But beware...the spoilers!
The cocoon room
There were a lot of ideas that never came to fruition in Ridley Scott's Alien, but what
we were left with was still a groundbreaking extraterrestrial thriller — often imitated,
never quite matched.
The plot follows a commercial space crew awoken from stasis after receiving a signal from
an alien craft.
They're overrun by the bloodthirsty extra-terrestrial monster, with Officer Ripley emerging as the
central heroine and only survivor.
One of the deleted scenes from the film might've answered a few questions left about the alien
— and escalated the fear factor.
In this cocoon room scene, Ripley happens upon the trapped bodies of the deceased Brett
and the still-alive Dallas, whose whereabouts were otherwise unknown after they ran into
the creature in the original cut.
As an act of mercy, Ripley has to fire-blast Dallas, which is pretty raw, even for Alien.
The baboon cat
The Fly is a seminal piece of horror, with or without its scariest deleted scene.
The sci-fi thriller followed Seth Brundle as he became a victim of his own oddball scientific
experiments.
He slowly morphed into a human-fly hybrid that was desperate to save his new species...by
making a baby with his human girlfriend.
In this deleted scene, even though Brundle's teleportation experience has clearly altered
his own DNA, he's still splicing animals together in his lab.
This time, it's a baboon and a house cat, which when combined becomes a two-headed,
sharp-toothed beast that goes on the attack and has to be exterminated.
It might've been a bit too obvious as foreshadowing if left in, but the scene definitely doesn't
offer much hope for Brundle's own future as a fellow lab mutant.
"I'm scared."
Uh, yeah.
Visions of Hell
Event Horizon is filled with stomach-churning imagery.
The movie followed a space crew as they attempted to make contact with a vessel that was temporarily
lost to a black hole, and layered itself with disturbing visuals before jumping headlong
into a living nightmare.
But as sinister as the scenes of this space inferno already are, the movie's original
vision of the bad place was even more disturbing.
"A dimension of pure chaos.
Pure evil."
In this deleted scene, Dr. William Weir has been fully transformed into the slash-faced
demon that haunts the ship and its remaining crew, and Captain Miller is chased down and
treated to an extreme vision of the other side.
Impaled, limb-ripped bodies are on display as the living are tied down and tortured.
The plights of these human souls may differ slightly, but the suffering is universal.
Given the graphic nature of this footage, it's not hard to see why an abbreviated version
was ultimately what made it into theaters.
Even Dante might've shuddered at the sight of this much underworldly punishment.
Dr. Satan's last lunge
With The Devil's Rejects, writer-director Rob Zombie took a decidedly different approach
to the macabre than he did with its predecessor, House of 1000 Corpses.
Rather than relying on gruesome imagery in the loathsome lair of the Firefly family,
the movie leaned harder on a slow burn of emotional torture and depravity as it followed
the three lead escapees through one final round of destruction.
For that reason, this deleted scene wasn't a good fit.
In the clip, we meet Dr. Satan again.
The character's twisted experimental surgeries featured prominently in the first film, and
in Rejects he's been captured by the authorities.
But he isn't as subdued as they think.
His unsuspecting nurse gets her throat ripped out after he awakens from his feigned coma,
and the move is so quick that the police and medical personnel can do nothing to stop her
from bleeding out on the hospital floor.
The tilted room
The adaptation of Stephen King's 1408 follows skeptical haunted house story author as he
rents out a deadly hotel room that's claimed the lives of dozens of occupants over the
last century.
What happens next is a bit formulaic, but is bolstered by sensory immersion with enough
paranormal surprises and emotional scenes to stick.
In this deleted scene, Jon Cusack's estranged wife has been summoned to the hotel by his
supernatural doppelgänger, and he's powerless to stop her from trying to enter the room.
As he tries to get close to prevent her from joining him, the room tilts to a degree that
disables him from reaching the door.
For all the elemental frights the room provided, this had to be the most disorienting, despite
being deleted.
The final cut
The theatrically released ending of Paranormal Activity was pretty upsetting.
In the film, Katie and Micah are a young couple who've moved to the wrong house at the wrong
time and can't shake the terrorizing spirits that came with it.
Despite their best efforts to exorcise the evil spirits from their home, Katie is eventually
possessed by the demon spirit, and appears to end Micah by summoning him downstairs and
then hurling his bloody body at the camera they'd been using to document their haunting.
She then shuffles onscreen, looks at the camera, and offers a smile that makes it clear she's
given herself over to evil.
In the original ending, though, Katie returns to the bedroom in what appears to be a trance
and sits rocking on the floor as time passes.
Eventually, the police show up, find Micah's body, and make their way upstairs to Katie.
She snaps out of her trance, but police believe she's a threat and shoot her.
The scariest version, though, is the alternate ending, when instead of launching Micah's
body at the camera, she returns to the frame herself, covered in blood and holding her
kitchen knife which she then uses on herself.
Chance are this one was passed over because it would've ended the hit franchise before
it began, but still.
What a way to go.
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