Rob Zombie’s sleek, grotesque, and stylish 2003 cult classic, House of 1000 Corpses, left lots of film on the cutting room floor due to Zombie needing to make necessary cuts in order to achieve an R-rating for his movie. His original intention was to release the additional footage as a director’s cut of the film, which would have been an unrated cut like he did with his 2007 remake of Halloween, but now Zombie says that will never happen.
In some ways, House of 1000 Corpses’ bad luck may seem like par for the course. Despite being beloved by fans, Zombie has said that he considers the film to be a “calamitous mess.” The film, which harkened back to 1970s style exploitation film style and the Grindhouse era, reached cult classic status almost immediately due to its charming band of merry murderers known as the Firefly family. House of 1000 Corpses was Rob Zombie’s directorial debut film, and started quite a promising career for the rock star. The film got two sequels, The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and 3 From Hell (2019), which also followed members of the Firefly family: Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig).
While Zombie was doing the press circuit for his film 31, the director dashed fans’ hopes about ever seeing the director’s cut of House of 1000 Corpses which had been mentioned back in 2003 when he gave details about some of his cut footage.
House Of 1000 Corpses Lost Footage Explained
House of 1000 Corpses was originally refused release by Universal, who were convinced the film would receive an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. Zombie had to make major cuts to the more violent sequences in the film, and in some cases, shot scenes twice to appease Universal - one regular version, and one less violent version of the same scene. Eventually, the film was picked up by Lionsgate as its distributor, but further cuts had to be made in order for it to achieve its desired R-rating. At one time, it was reported that approximately 40 minutes were cut from the film in total, which would make for an incredible extended supercut of House of 1000 Corpses if Zombie were to re-cut and release some of the scenes that were removed entirely and some of the bloodier scenes that had been replaced with less violent ones.
The director’s cut would have been 105 minutes long instead of the 89 minute theatrical version. Some of the scenes that didn’t make the cut included a much gorier death for “Fish Boy” (Rainn Wilson), and a sequence where Grandpa Hugo was revealed to be Dr. Satan, which was the original intent for the character. This deleted scene would have included Dr. Satan and Denise (Erin Daniels) after she found his test subjects eating Jerry (Chris Hardwick). Zombie has also said that several more in-depth, sexually explicit and violent sequences involving Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) would have been included as well. According to some reports, the full version was shown once at an Argentinian film festival back in 2003, but then the contents were lost forever.
How this happened, nobody - not even Zombie - seems quite sure. In an interview with Fangoria, Zombie said that he doesn’t think the full version will ever see the light of day. According to Zombie, “I don’t think anyone knows where any of it is, truthfully… when they put together the DVD, which was 13 years ago, we couldn’t find anything because they had shot 200 interviews in the time since the shoot.” Apparently, there were make-up tests, behind the scenes footage, and other items involved with productions that were part of House of 1000 Corpses lost footage, but it’s likely that the version fans currently have is all that will ever exist in a finalized version.
Next: House Of 1000 Corpses: Who Is Dr. Wolfenstein?
