On the heels of the announcement of their catalog restoration program, Hammer Studios has made an appeal to film collectors and archives for scenes that have been trimmed from six of their films.
The cuts were made by British censors at the time due to their gruesome nature. The studio has admitted that they did not keep the excised footage, but holds out hope that uncut prints sent to other countries might be found.
According to an interview with the BBC, Peter Naish, Hammer’s senior vice-president of distribution, held out hope that collectors could be the ones to restore the missing footage.
We’re fairly sure they exist in private collections, instead of official archives. There’s a network of Hammer fans and collectors who snap these things up, so we need to scour the whole world and appeal to the fans at large to see what we can come up with.
For Naish, the big prize would be to find a scene from 196-‘s The Curse Of Frankenstein, in which a severed head is dropped into a vat of acid.
I think that one’s iconic – that would be the one people would most want to see. But if we can find any others, that would be great.
The studio is looking for the following footage –
- The Reptile – an extended “knife in neck/snake bite” scene
- The Curse of Frankenstein – the “eyeball” and “head in acid bath” scenes
- The Mummy – “under-dressed maidens”, “tongue-cutting” and/or the “tongue wriggling” scenes
- Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell – extended “glass-in-throat” and “body falling into grave” scenes
- Rasputin: The Mad Monk – extended fight scene
- The Viking Queen – extended, more explicit version
