Fans of Christopher Lee’s cult classic “Dracula” will soon be able to view long-lost footage of the film deemed so terrifying that they were removed from the original cut.
Deadline reported that a full three minutes of footage from the 1958 original was cut after the gory, sexually suggestive scenes caused audiences in Japan to faint. The omitted footage was located in a Warner Bros. warehouse decades after the film was released — and has only ever been viewed by audiences in Japan.
1968: Christopher Lee as Dracula, from the film ‘Dracula Has Risen From The Grave’, directed by Freddie Francis for Hammer. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
The restored 4K footage, to be released in time for Halloween, includes part of a scene showing Dracula’s fangs dripping with blood from a victim’s neck as well as a sexually suggestive clip where the vampire descends upon a woman he’s going to bite. Dracula’s gory death scene is also included.
Hammer Films CEO John Gore said, “We managed to get the uncut original Christopher Lee Dracula. So we’ve just been remastering that now. So there’s like three minutes missing.”
“It was the fangs that scared them,” referring to the original response to the film.
“People were screaming, which was the point,” he said.
Gore continued, “So Warner Brothers, they have this massive, massive storage near LAX where everything from the 1920s onwards is there. I mean, there’s like 10 Batmobiles and God knows what. And they found the director’s cut of the original 1958 Dracula.”
“So we will be unlocking that and the world will get to see the bits they weren’t seeing, which is mostly to do with how Dracula dies at the end,” he said.
circa 1968: Christopher Lee and Veronica Carlson in ‘Dracula Has Risen From The Grave’, a Hammer film directed by Freddie Francis. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
Shedding more light on what fans can expect to see in a few short months, Gore continued, “So they had to trim a bit of the sexual stuff and then how he’s destroyed at the end. They cut quite a lot out because they went, ‘It’s too gruesome.’ And now that’s back in. All the crucial points that were axed are now back in.”
“Bringing Dracula back to audiences in 4K goes far beyond a piece of film restoration work,” Gore said. (RELATED: Morgan Wallen Takes His Rage Out On A Piano On Stage In Denver)
“This is the recovery of a piece of British film history that audiences believed had been lost forever.”
Speaking to the impact of the classic film on pop culture as a whole, Gore said, “Seeing Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together again in such extraordinary detail is a reminder of just how powerful this film remains nearly 70 years after its original release.”