I found this story intriguing, so I followed up a bit. It seems other sources dispute the Cracked version. Den of Geek had a long article on this subject, in which they claim:
- The footage was not “lost,” but had been shipped to the salt mine for storage.
- The scenes were deemed “unworthy” simply because the film stock had deteriorated. (The Cracked verbiage does not state outright, but implies that the scenes were never included in a special edition because of their “unworthy” content.)
The unused footage was packaged off to a Transylvanian salt mine for storage, so when he came looking for the footage it was in such poor shape it was no longer usable. Anderson himself has recently reaffirmed this, seemingly dashing any hope of the lost footage re-emerging from a black hole, like the titular ship itself.
There is a third version of the story told by director Anderson in a 2022 interview:
The problem with the deleted material is that we were right before the DVD revolution when Event Horizon was released. We were going out on VHS in ancillaries. And on VHS there was no room for all of these deleted scenes, there was no reason for the studio to keep it. Now if we’d made the movie a couple of years later, they’d have been all over the deleted scenes. But by the time DVD had happened, and the audience for the movie started demanding special editions, they hadn’t archived a lot of that stuff. So it’s just not there. I think to really reinstitute what the old cut was, you’d need to probably do what they did with the Snyder Cut where you have to go and shoot some material again.
He makes no mention of the salt mine. He simply says the footage “is just not there.”
The deeper I dug into the source of the “salt mine” story, the more dead-ends I found. The salt mine tale is a claim that many have repeated, but I could not determine how the tale originated, nor could I find any first person account. I followed links that claimed Anderson’s confirmation of the story, then found no such confirmation. My current suspicion is that the entire story is bullshit, but I’m open to abandon that suspicion based on further evidence.
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FOOTNOTE 1: what exactly is in that footage?
Den of Geek’s article also explains in general terms what was in the footage.
One fan went into great detail comparing the theatrical version to the existing deleted scenes to the lost deleted scenes.
If you want to totally geek out on this topic, here is the script.
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FOOTNOTE 2: Additional nudity in the deleted material?
Not much.
Holly Chant was topless in the official release:
Emily Booth is topless for very few frames in the known deleted footage:
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FOOTNOTE 3: Is it a good film?
I called it a brilliant genre flick, albeit one not without flaws, but I added that it had close to zero crossover appeal. From what I have read, my guess is that Anderson’s original cut would have been even more popular with genre fans, but would have had even less crossover appeal.
Roger Ebert awarded only two stars, summed up by a witty comment: “The screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding.”
We both compared it to Solaris. (We referred to the Tarkovsky version. Event Horizon came out before Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris.) I summed it up as “Solaris with action scenes,” which I meant as a compliment.
