Missing Episode / Film

Works entirely lost

• Many, many old silent and early sound films (including those of superstars like Theda Bara, Clara Bow, and Baby Peggy) are now considered lost (partially or completely), simply because — in an era well prior to ancillary opportunities like 8mm cinema, TV, or home video — it didn't make financial sense for the studios to care about keeping them around. The prints that do remain are usually those that were preserved in private collections. Theda Bara appeared in over two dozen films but only four have survived. According to Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, 90% of all American films made before 1929 are lost forever, while the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent movies are lost forever.
  • It hardly helps that nitrate-based film stock (used until 1951) is notorious for its chemical instability and flammability— film vault fires have destroyed the last known copies of many films. (Most of Theda Bara's career was burned up in a 1937 vault fire.) Also, the film stock contained enough silver to give studios a financial incentive to send "useless" and dangerous old negatives and prints for rendering. And the way many of the films were copied for distribution - with an optical printer - means that each pass to create a new copy actually damaged the original negatives somewhat. That's why a lot of the movies from this period (if they're not just impossible to find) are pretty bad copies. You could only get about a thousand copies out of one set of original negatives.^note Later practice was to strike an interpositive (positive image on negative film) from the original camera negative, and make dupe negatives from the interpositive. These dupe negatives could be used to run off multiple prints for cinemas without risking the original negative.
  • Some of the early Academy Award winners and nominees are missing, including a Best Picture nominee (The Patriot), and a Best Actor-winning performance (The Way of All Flesh).
• The fate of many silent-era and early sound-era films is currently being repeated with many American independent films of the 1980s and '90s. One of the downsides of that era's indie filmmakers seeking financial control over their films is that, just as with early Hollywood films, it didn't make financial sense for them (being working artists without the backing of the major studios or the sort of government film commission found in other countries) to preserve the original reels. Furthermore, just as many old Hollywood films were shot on nitrate-based film stock that was both highly flammable and valuable for its silver content, many indie films from the '80s and '90s were shot on commercial formats that weren't designed with preservation in mind, such as magnetic tape and other early digital video technologies.
• The British Film Institute has compiled a list of The 75 Most Wanted lost British films. The list includes The Mountain Eagle (1926) — the only lost feature film of Alfred Hitchcock. Also included in the list are the films that served as the screen debuts for legendary actors John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Errol Flynn, and Patricia Kirkwood, and an early film role of Ian McKellen. The list also stretches well into the late 20th century, with the most recent films dating from the early 1970s — the 1971 drama Nobody Ordered Love (which was so poorly promoted and received that the director withdrew it and ordered all prints destroyed at his death in 1977), and the 1972 sexploitation comedy The Cherry Picker starring Lulu and Spike Milligan (bootlegs of which do circulate, but the master prints are lost).^note  When the list was compiled in 2010, the 1983 farce Where Is Parsifal? starring Peter Lawford (in his final film role), Orson Welles, and Tony Curtis was the most recent film on it, but it was never truly "lost", having instead been withdrawn before its UK release but having seen home video releases in such countries as Italy and the Netherlands. The film's director personally donated his copy to the BFI, and it is now available on Netflix. The 1974 horror film Symptoms was the second most recent film on the original list, but the negative was recovered by the BFI in 2014.
  • In addition to The Mountain Eagle, two early Alfred Hitchcock films, Number 13 (1922; unfinished) and An Elastic Affair (1930) - both shorts - are lost.
• This is a common occurrence in VCR-era porn (late 1970s - through early 1990s), where entire film series would simply fade away due to lack of interest and the cash-grab tendencies of many producers. Another common cause of vanishing porn titles is the discovery of an underage performer, in which case every copy of the film in question is found and destroyed or erased as child porn. Traci Lords is an infamous case of this (though several bootlegs of her latter "work" are available via European copies, from countries where the A.O.C. for porn is 17 instead of 18), to the point where the only surviving early work of hers available in the United States where she wasn't Unpersoned from the work due to her age at the time is Traci, I Love You (which she made after her 18th birthday).
• "Underlying literary properties" (legalese for the play/book/other copyrighted material on which the movie is based) is an annoyingly common reason for films to be unavailable. If the moviemakers didn't properly secure the rights, the rights generally revert to the original "property's" author, and if the author or his or her estate doesn't want to cooperate, they can mandate that the film's distribution be limited, or completely forbidden:
  • The 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess is probably the most prominent title in this state of limbo.
  • Sometimes estates can be persuaded to cooperate. In recent years, TCM lawyers have persuaded the literary executors of Margaret Kennedy to allow the general release of 1943's The Constant Nymph, and the estate of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to allow the release of 1933's Night Flight.
  • This is the real reason that The Day the Clown Cried (mentioned below) was never released. By the time filming was completed, the rights had expired. They ended up reverting to the screenwriters, who were so horrified and embarrassed by the result that they refused to make any sort of deal that would allow the film to be released.
  • This has also held up any release of the somewhat obscure Errol Flynn movie The Perfect Specimen, a rare screwball comedy that has Flynn (alongside Joan Blondell) Playing Against Type as a spineless milquetoast.
• A bunch of theatrical horror films that saw limited releases in the 70s and 80s are now lost. These include such titles as Alien Flesh Eaters, Ripsaw Rapes, Halls of Exorcism, Face of Darkness, and The Female Beast. A lot of these movies are theorized to be obscure retitlings of other movies (Halls of Exorcism and Face of Darkness could easily be retitlings of House of Exorcism and Faces of Death) while others such as Transformations: A Sandwich of Nightmares are actually lost movies.

• Prior to The Birth of a Nation, Charles Giblyn's 1913 The Battle of Gettysburg was the longest and most expensive movie about The American Civil War. Today, it appears to be a lost film. Birth of a Nation itself had a sequel, The Fall of a Nation, which flopped upon release and is now considered lost.
• Black Water Transit is a 2009 movie by Tony Kaye (of American History X fame) that got withheld from release by the producers and studio heads. All that survives is a poster.
• In 1987, gold manufacturer Santo Rigatsuo directed a sci-fi B-Movie called Blood Circus which he also starred in and produced for $2 million. The movie involves the U.S. and Soviets teaming up to fight off an alien invasion by hosting a wrestling tournament, with one of the wrestlers being a pre-WWE Brent Albright. The film only screened for a few days at local Baltimore theaters before vanishing, with the only elements proving its existence being IMDB reviews from those who saw it and a musical sequence with Santo himself that was meant to promote his jewelry. It wasn't until 2008 when Santo announced that a copy of the movie was found and attempted to auction it off on eBay to no avail,^note  possibly having to do with the original starting bid being $21 million with a buy it now the price of $750 million leaving any chance for the film's release uncertain.
• The first film adaptation of The Blue Lagoon, released in 1923, the only one that received positive reviews upon release, is currently regarded as a lost film. The sole remaining print, obtained by Herbert Wilcox in 1929 for the purpose of a remake, met its demise in a fire at the British and Dominions Imperial Studios on February 9, 1936. Adding to the unfortunate turn of events, Wilcox managed to eliminate all existing copies of the 1923 film, creating a regrettable tragedy.
• The 1988 Slasher Film Carnage Hall, is about a man in an Albert Einstein mask killing the residents of a male dormitory. Shot on video by college students, aside from one report it doesn't appear to have extant copies.
• The 1930 film The Cat Creeps was an adaptation of The Cat and the Canary, and the first Universal Horror movie to be filmed with sound. As with Dracula (1931), a Spanish-language version of the movie (La Voluntad del muerto) was filmed simultaneously. Both versions are lost, though snippets of The Cat Creeps appear in the 1932 Universal comedy short Boo!.
• In an October 1980 edition of Box Office Magazine it was announced that Boon Collins of Wild Rose Studios was going to produce a movie titled The Cellar. Nothing else has been heard.
• Charles Band and Full Moon Features apparently has many cases along with those he didn't even make.
• Four of the Charlie Chan movies from the 1930s, Charlie Chan Carries On, Charlie Chan's Chance, Charlie Chan's Greatest Case, and Charlie Chan's Courage, are lost (though Charlie Chan Carries On survives in a Spanish-language version, Eran Trece).
• Children of Loneliness (1937) was an exploitation melodrama film written and directed by Richard C. Kahn. Said to be inspired by the 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, the picture is also notable for being one of the first exploitation films to explore the subject of homosexuality. No footage of this movie has surfaced anywhere aside from a promotional poster◊.
• Cleopatra, a 1917 film, is thought of to be one of the most elaborate and expensive films ever created. Prior to 2023 only 20 seconds of the film had been found, as it was censored by Moral Guardians and the last remaining copies were destroyed in a fire. In 2023 an additional 40 seconds of material was unexpectedly found giving us approximately one minute of known surviving material from a two-hour long movie.
• The 1933 Pre-Code comedy Convention City was taken out of circulation shortly after its release due to its very racy content. The most recent known screening was in a Spanish theater in 1942. The script still exists and there have reportedly been readings of it at film festivals. Also, B-Roll footage of Atlantic City that was used for the movie has been found.
• Good luck finding a copy of Day Of The Tiger, the ultra-violent early 80s kung-fu film. After the audience's reaction (disgust and horror) to its limited screening, the original distributor attempted to destroy all copies of the film to appease their theaters, and it's unclear if they succeeded or not. Most of the time, you'll just find small clips mistaken for parts of The Story Of Ricky. Its sequel, at least, can be found in torrents. The film is so rare that it's increasingly believed to be a hoax. The only information anyone has on it is from a Reddit post.
• Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried is about a clown who insults Hitler and ends up a Pied Piper to the children of a Jewish concentration camp. People are split on whether keeping it suppressed is a good thing or not. Apart from the question of good taste, the project's legal ownership is disputed. The film remains unfinished; post-production work was never completed. The film negatives were eventually admitted into the Library of Congress in August of 2015, but under the condition that the film couldn't be screened for ten years. However, as stated before, the legal ownership dispute (plus the fact that some of the parties in said dispute, including Lewis, are dead) still leaves the film indefinitely lost.
• A low-budget, straight-to-video zombie film titled Dead End was produced around 1985 but it is now considered lost due to the fact that none of the original VHS tapes (which were supposedly sold at horror conventions) are known to still exist. Those who saw the film have provided detailed and consistent accounts of its extraordinarily graphic violence and twisted sense of humor (a zombie mailman stuffs body parts into mailboxes while another drags a dead dog on a leash toward a fire hydrant and expects it to urinate), making it something of a holy grail for zombie fans. Unfortunately, not even a single still frame remains, and the director himself has admitted that he does not know where a copy might exist, meaning it will likely never be viewed again. Many suspect that the film was merely a hoax planted into IMDb, given the surrounding evidence.
• Dracula's Death (1921) was a Hungarian movie that was the first film to feature Dracula, beating F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu by a year. The movie was re-released in an edited version in Hungary in 1923 and disappeared afterward. However, a novelization of the movie was published in Hungary, and the story had nothing to do with Bram Stoker's novel; only the name Dracula was used. Dracula is not even a vampire in this story, but rather a demon, who terrorizes a woman in a mental asylum in a castle in Switzerland.
• David Lynch's daughter Jennifer Lynch was working on a movie titled A Fall From Grace. It had a poster released along with a trailer; it was supposed to come out in 2015 but either got canceled or went unreleased.
• The only way to watch the action movie Fight and Revenge was to be in the theaters it played in 1997.
• Firelight, the first full-length film directed by then 17-year-old Steven Spielberg, was only screened once at his local theatre in 1964. Apparently, when he moved to Hollywood in The '70s, he made the mistake of loaning the print to an unscrupulous producer who then vanished with it.
• Curtis Hanson made in the 1970s a horror movie called God Bless Dr. Shagetz, whose only public footage is in recut form in the 1987 direct-to-video Evil Town. The negatives are purpotedly still with the producer of Evil Town.
• The Gold Diggers of Broadway, an early Warner Bros. movie musical, has only a few surviving elements, including clips of "Tiptoe Thru' the Tulips" and most of the finale. It was a remake of a 1923 silent version which is entirely lost.
• Some of Kevin Spacey's last projects, including Gore, a biopic about Gore Vidal, might never be released as a result of being hit with sexual misconduct accusations as part of the Weinstein effect in 2017.
• The Graduation Party was mooted to be Paul Lynch's follow-up to his slasher classic Prom Night (1980). It centered around marooned teenagers being menaced on a remote island by a killer played by Joe Spinell. Starburst Magazine called it "Prom Night meets The Blue Lagoon (1980)". It's unknown if any footage was ever shot for it. If there was any footage, it's now lost.
• The 1917 film The Gulf Between is considered the oldest all-technicolor film. Only tidbits are known to still exist.
• A sequel to Gutterballs titled Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep was released in 2015 to moderate praise by horror movie fans who saw it when it debuted at festivals. It vanished with no sign of a DVD release and remains lost to this day.
• The Taiwanese film Hai Mo, released in 1975, is believed to be lost. A poster for the film is pretty much the only thing that has survived. Going by the poster illustrations and the English title "Sea of Monsters", it seems the plot revolved around sea monsters of some sort.
• The first two film adaptations of Hercule Poirot, (adapted from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Black Coffee) starring Austin Trevor as the Belgian detective have not survived to the present day. A third film based on Lord Edgware Dies still exists, however.
• The "Gay Jesus" film HIM (actually about a man who has sexual fantasies about Jesus) is sometimes thought to be mythical. Evidence for the film's existence (in the form of contemporary newspaper and magazine clippings) has been collected to show that the film at least did exist, but if any prints have survived, their location is unknown, and they're not in public circulation.

• Humor Risk (also called Humorisk) is a 1921 silent film notable for being the Marx Brothers' real screen debut. Accounts vary on how exactly it became lost, with one claiming that Groucho hated the result of their first venture on the screen so much that he and his brothers got their hands on all copies of the film and its negatives and destroyed them. It would take eight years (and the invention of talkies) before the Brothers returned to the movies.

• Not one, but two Japanese adaptations of King Kong:
  • The 1938 film King Kong Appears in Edo (featuring an unauthorized use of RKO's Kong character) appears to have been one of the first, if not the first, Japanese Kaiju films. Reports differ on whether the ape (reportedly only called Kong in the title) was a giant or merely implied to be so in publicity while being a more human-scale yeti-like creature in the film itself. Never shown outside of its original theatrical run in Japan, all prints of the film appear to have been lost during World War II or the postwar occupation. All that remains are movie posters (incorporating stills from the film).
  • Wasei Kingu Kongu, a silent short from 1933, is supposedly lost for similar reasons. Stills remain of this one too. Although the film itself remains lost, details about the film's script have emerged. Apparently, it was a promotional tie-in to the 1933 RKO film, made with RKO's approval. The film is actually not a monster movie, but a comedy about an actor who begins playing King Kong on the vaudeville stage following the In-Universe release and popularity of King Kong.

• In the summer of 1987, Carlos Tobalinias was working on a movie titled The Kulies which was released in 1988. It quickly vanished from theaters after Carlos's death in March of 1989. B-movie distributor Vinegar Syndrome got the rights to Carlos's films in 2017. They found a print of The Kulies that sadly was damaged beyond use making restoration impossible.

• Land of Oz:
  • The first film adaptation of Land of Oz books from 1908, The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, is considered a historically important yet lost film. It was the first silent film to feature an intended musical score (rather than musicians improvising) and was the first all-color film. It was a blockbuster however was cut short after a few months due to being too expensive to show (due to it involving play elements alongside being a film). Only a few screencaps exist and the film itself is missing. The 1910 film was once thought to be the same film, but once that surfaced it became clear that it was a completely different adaptation.
  • The two sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) are both missing.
• The Beatles documentary Let It Be was last legally released in 1981 (Laser Disc and VHS). Odds are, it will never be legally released again in its original form. (There is dissonance between what viewers will expect to see and what Apple Corps wants to show.) Paul McCartney told Rolling Stone in 2016 that he wants the film to be released, correctly noting that he should be the main objector among the Apple Corps stakeholders because he "doesn't come off well" in it. It wasn't until fifty years after its original release that it received an HD remaster and recut by Peter Jackson in preparation for the 2021 documentary mini-series The Beatles: Get Back intended to dispel the idea that the Let It Be sessions were purely acrimonious.
• Life Without Soul (1915) is the second film adaptation of Frankenstein, and a lost film.
• The last known copy of London After Midnight was destroyed (along with hundreds of other silent films) in 1967 when the vault it was stored in caught fire. A reconstruction using surviving stills and the original script was put together in 2002. Browning remade the film in 1935 as Mark of the Vampire, which was pared down from 80 minutes to 61 minutes prior to distribution; the cut footage is believed lost.
• The original cut of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, as well as the hour or so raw footage that was excised for the final release, is lost forever - and we do mean forever; the excised footage was rendered for the silver nitrate. It's been said that Welles received a copy of the original cut, but where it is right now if it actually happened, is anybody's guess.
• A movie called The Mall was announced at Cannes in 1981. It had a poster made for it and even a plot synopsis made: A group of teenagers partying at a mall after everyone else has left (similar to the later released Chopping Mall) are picked off one by one by a deranged killer who's escaped from an asylum after murdering his parents and has made the mall his home. George P. Cosmatos was set to direct and pitched a few scenes. It's unknown what happened to this movie as it was never finished, although it's possible that footage exists.
• A 1976 Swedish adaptation of The Metamorphosis, though it has at least one copy in possession of the Swedish Film Institute.
• The 1982 Filipino religious drama film Milagro sa Porta Vaga (lit. Miracle at Porta Vaga) starring the late child actress Julie Vega remains lost to this day. No footage has surfaced apart from a promotional poster and a still◊ from the movie, much to the dismay of a confraternity in Cavite City dedicated to the titular Marian image of Porta Vaga, stating:
  It is sad to know that no copy exists of this film. One of the Cofradia de la Virgen de la Soledad de Porta Vaga, Inc.'s goals was to obtain a copy of this film to aid in spreading our devotion.
• In 1988, a movie called Music City Blues was announced, starring Catherine Bach (aka Daisy Duke) and Country Music singer Larry Boone. The film was abruptly canceled due to lack of funding, per a 1989 news article in The Tennesseean, and no traces of it are known to exist.
• In 1953 Disney established the Buena Vista Film Distribution Company, a division of the studio that was set up to allow them to distribute their own films and shorts independent of the other major studios. However, they were still contractually obligated to release one more animated film for RKO Pictures, who up until that point had distributed all of their movies. Disney was worried about Howard Hughes' somewhat chaotic leadership of RKO and wanted to sever their ties with the studio as soon as they could. Their solution was to quickly edit together and release a package film titled Music Land (no relation to the 1935 short of the same name), which was comprised of shorts from other package films Make Mine Music (1946) and Melody Time (1948). Though the shorts were the same, the film included a new intro and ending, as well as new transitions between the shorts. This was technically enough to classify the film as a new movie entirely, and it allowed Disney to complete their contract with RKO two years before the release of their next animated film Lady and the Tramp. Music Land itself has not been released in any form since 1953, and it was removed from the Disney Animated Canon entirely in 1985.
• A 1975 movie, Never The Twain (not to be confused with an eponymous British show), centering around a man who gets possessed by the ghost of Mark Twain and goes to the Miss World Nude Pageant, supposedly inspired by an incident that happened to lead actor Ed Trostle. All proof of it is a poster.
• There exist reports of a heavily-edited American network television version of Once Upon a Time in America, based on the director's cut and the American theatrical cut, that was made and first aired in the early-to-mid 1990s. It ran for almost three hours long (without commercials), and while retaining the non-chronological order of the director's cut, had also removed many key scenes that had violence or graphic content, as well as having all profanity and references to drugs exiled from the broadcast version. This version was supposedly intended as a one-off showing, and despite apparently being re-aired by local stations (and according to one source, AMC) via syndication, no copies of this cut are known to exist.
• This seems to be the fate of Roberto Busó-Garcìa's Paging Emma, as it only played at two theaters in Puerto Rico, but didn't interest distributors and vanished.
• In 1985 Brian De Palma was approached by Orion Pictures to make a horror film entitled The Piece Maker. However, the project was canceled due to the studio performing poorly at the box office that year. Only a trailer survives.
• In 1981 a movie based off of the novel The Pike was announced. However, its production was never finished and only production still photos survive.
• The first film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera was made in 1916, starring the Swedish actor Nils Olaf Chrisander and the Norwegian actress Aud Egede-Nissen. There is no evidence of the film's existence save references in other media.
• In 1985 Gary Coleman starred in a made-for-TV movie called Playing with Fire, a clear attempt to cash in on Firestarter where he played a teenage arsonist. It was badly received and while rumored to have copies shown in schools for educational purposes, only two promos remain of footage.
• The 1930 Fred Astaire/Irving Berlin film Puttin' On The Ritz. Very few parts of the film remain, unfortunately, and not even in its original color.
• 1912's Saved from the Titanic is noteworthy for three reasons: It has historical significance as the first fiction film to be made about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it was released to cinemas just 31 days after the disaster, and it starred an actual survivor of the event: An actress and model named Dorothy Gibson, who was effectively coerced into doing the film and retired from show business shortly afterward due to the trauma of the experience. The film's prints were destroyed in a fire in 1914 and the film is lost.
• At least a couple of old Shaw Brothers movies; no surprise, considering the studios made over 1000 films before its closure in 1997:
  • One of the Shaw Brothers' earliest films, Tiger Boy, which starred Jimmy Wang Yu and was the directorial debut of the legendary director Chang Cheh, is permanently lost after a single theatrical showing in Hong Kong. Reportedly the film made it to another theater in Singapore and was a box office success at the time, but today all that remains of the film are black-and-white magazine stills.
  • There was a Shaw movie filmed in 1970, titled The Drinking Knight, which went through two different directors and a whole lot of Troubled Production before it was eventually cancelled. The only remaining traces of this film are production stills.
• The first ever Sherlock Holmes film, A Study in Scarlet, released in 1914, has yet to be rediscovered.
• The Song of the Flame, the first film from Warner Bros. to incorporate widescreen footage, is better known as the first film to be accompanied by a Looney Tune on the big screen. Only its soundtrack survives.
• In 1974 Bruce Cardozo made a Spider-Man fan film entitled Spider-Man Versus Kraven the Hunter that apparently was endorsed by Marvel itself, to the point its only public proof are screenshots from an article in Foom magazine. It was last shown at a convention in 2005, a decade prior to Cardoso's death.
• In the early 1930s, Warner Bros. created a series of five live-action shorts called Spooney Melodies, which were precursors to the animated Merrie Melodies. Only the first short, Cryin' for the Carolines, survives today; it can be viewed on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection's first and sixth volumes. The other four are completely lost.
• In 1907, Melbourne impresario Charles Tait made The Story of the Kelly Gang, Australia's first big-budget film & among the contenders for the world's first feature-length film (sometimes erroneously cited as the first). Less than 20 minutes of the 60-minute film has survived, the rest lost to decay.
• In 1932, the husband-and-wife team of Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Vera Tsenkhanovskaya embarked on their most ambitious project yet - an animated opera based on the Alexander Pushkin fairy tale The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda, featuring a score by renowned composer Dmitri Shostakovich and an art style heavily influenced by contemporary Russian Telegraph Agency posters. Unfortunately, the film suffered from one hell of a Troubled Production, with Shostakovich bailing on the project after seeing several of his works, including the film's score, publicly denounced in a Pravda article. Since the film now had no score, it was never completed and placed in storage at the Lenfilm archive in Saint Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, where the majority of the footage was then lost when the Germans bombed the archive during the Siege of Leningrad. All that remains of the film is a two-and-a-half-minute segment from the marketplace scene, showing various merchants showcasing their wares.
• Two films of exploitation director Todd Sheets found this fate, The Kansas City Blender Massacre and Chainsaw Tales, even if he made copies of the original tapes.
• Teenagers from Outer Space director Tom Graeff made four other movies prior to Teenagers' release, but since his suicide in 1970 they've completely disappeared. While his first film was eventually found, his other three remain missing and it's unlikely they'll ever be found.
  • His first missing short was called The Orange Coast College Story and was commissioned by Orange Coast College with Vincent Price providing narration.
  • Then there was his 1955 feature debut called The Noble Experiment, which was a comedy he stared at opposite of an unnamed local beauty queen. The film's poor reviews would foreshadow the reception of Teenagers a few years later.
  • Finally there was his short art film Island Sunrise which doesn't have any info on it whatsoever.
• All prints of the first werewolf movie, 1913's The Werewolf, are believed to have been destroyed in a 1924 fire. The movie featured a Navajo female werewolf.
• Errol Flynn spent $500,000 of his own money to produce his comeback feature William Tell. Most of the money went to building an Alpine resort set, and he only had enough money left to shoot 30 minutes of the film. He screened the footage at the Venice Film Festival, but bouts with dysentery and diarrhea kept him from meeting with investors for any meaningful lengths of time. Desperate, he staged a fake paralysis from a fall in his hotel room, hoping to secure a large insurance settlement. When this failed, he abandoned the project and spent the rest of his career playing drunks before dying of heart failure at the age of 50. None of the film's footage has been found, and the only evidence of the film remaining is the Alpine resort set, which is now a popular tourist attraction.

Works Partially Lost

• When Black Rage was released on VHS in 1988 about 11 minutes of footage was edited out for unknown reasons, resulting in rather blatant jumps in the middle of several scenes. Since then the additional footage has yet to turn up and it possibly never will given how rare the 1988 edit already was.
• Krzysztof Kieślowski finished work on Blind Chance in 1981, but the film had to wait until 1987 to receive its premiere, and even then, several scenes were cut by Polish censors. When Tor Film Studios produced a digital restoration of the film in 2012, all but one of the cuts were reversed; the footage of the exception, which showed protagonist Witek being beaten by police for resisting arrest, was too badly degraded to restore. Only the audio survives.
• Canzo Empyrean, a bizarre movie (apparently a GI Joe fan film) involving an AIDS sex apocalypse, has received a limited release in Africa and Russia and then disappeared. Aside from trailers and info from the film's website, no complete copy of the movie has surfaced online. Recently, a 45-minute compilation of various scenes was released online. According to the uploader, there are at least two more hours of footage still missing.
• Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern) (1919), likely the first pro-LGBTQ+ film ever made, was banned by the Nazis and nearly every copy was destroyed. A partial print was found in the 1970s and the film has since been reconstructed and released, but about two-thirds of the footage is still lost.
• Dracula (1931), in its original release, had an epilogue in which Edward Van Sloan (Van Helsing) addressed the audience. The epilogue starts out sounding like a reassuring This Is a Work of Fiction message until at the last moment he subverts it with "There really are such things as vampires!" The epilogue was cut from the 1936 re-release due to fears of offending religious groups by endorsing the supernatural and is now lost, barring a literal two seconds of footage that appears in a Dracula tribute documentary [1].
• The full 130 minute cut of Event Horizon. Test audience reactions to the full cut were less than stellar, with some people reportedly fainting at the extreme amounts of gore. Director Paul W.S Anderson acquiesced into cutting the film down to a much more digestible 90 minutes and the result tanked at the box office and was critically eviscerated. The full uncut version, which contained an even longer version of the notorious “Blood orgy” scene, remained lost for years until a highly deteriorated copy surfaced in a Transylvania salt mine. As it turns out, that copy was reportedly so badly damaged, that a full uncut release has been deemed impossible. Still, a few deleted scenes managed to appear on the DVD, including a longer, significantly more graphic version of the final Hell Hallucinations. Yet even these scenes are very bad quality and have no sound.
• The original roadshow print of Fantasia is long lost; the best attempt to restore it not only omits an offending image of a black centaur in one segment, but it also uses Corey Burton's voice to dub that of Deems Taylor because the original audio has greatly deteriorated to the point of becoming irretrievable.
• The documentary/movie Grizzly Man has an Apocalyptic Log that depicts an audio recording of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend's deaths from a bear. In the movie, the coroner in the case describes the contents of the recording, and Werner Herzog, the director, is shown listening to it. He tells the owner of the clip to destroy it. It’s currently locked away in a safe deposit box, with no intention of being released. Present in Grizzly Man's theatrical cut, but missing from the DVD release, is a clip from Treadwell's interview with David Letterman in which Letterman jokes about him being eaten by a bear.
• It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was edited down from its original 3 1/2 hour length for worldwide distribution following its original release, and the cut footage was discarded and believed lost for years. Thanks to a batch of the discarded footage being found in a condemned warehouse and the efforts of Stanley Kramer, 20 minutes of footage were re-edited back into the film for the 1991 Laserdisc release. The film's first DVD release (in a white cover and now out-of-print) has the footage on Side B. The second release (in a blue cover) does not have this footage. In 2014, The Criterion Collection released a reconstructed/restored version of the original release on DVD and Blu-Ray. 3 or 4 minutes are still missing, but it is still the closest we'll get to the original.
• Several of Stanley Kubrick's films have trimmed content that has yet to be recovered:
  • His first feature, Fear and Desire, was a shoestring production funded by donations from Kubrick's family and friends. Paul Mazursky, who himself went on to a successful directing career, played a leading role. Kubrick was embarrassed by it, so he bought up as many copies as he could and discouraged screenings of the movie while he was alive. It was finally released in October 2012.
  • The Shining had an epilogue, in which Ullman tells Wendy that they have been unable to locate Jack's frozen corpse and gives Jack's tennis ball to Danny. This actually played in theaters but was cut by Kubrick a week after the film's release. (Maybe for the best, as Roger Ebert pointed out because the scene left the rest of the movie open to Plot Holes.) It's not been seen since.
  • The uncut version of 2001: A Space Odyssey has not been seen anywhere since its premiere engagements. Warner Bros. discovered 17 minutes of the footage in 2010; they have no intention of reinserting the footage back into the film in keeping with Kubrick's intentions, but whether they'll be included as extras in an upcoming video release is anyone's guess at this point.
• The Land Before Time has eleven minutes cut from the final film for being too scary and intense. All that remains of those eleven minutes are some stills and production sketches.
• The rumored three-hour-long version of The Last House on Dead End Street. Apparently, the movie, originally called The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell, caused mass hysteria when it was originally released, so it was re-edited to be less violent.
• The 1937 adaptation of Lost Horizon had a running time of 132 minutes in its first release. When restored in 1973, only 125 minutes of film could be found, but they did have the entire soundtrack. The restored version shows publicity photos and stills in place of the missing film elements.
• The 1932 pre-Code musical Love Me Tonight, notable for featuring the first use of Rodgers and Hart's "Isn't it Romantic?", was cut by eight minutes when The Hays Code went into effect in 1934; among the footage cut was a sequence featuring Myrna Loy in a negligee that was deemed too suggestive. The missing sequences have never been recovered, so only the Code-compliant version exists today.
• Due to poor preservation methods and heavy re-cutting for foreign markets, roughly a quarter of the original theatrical cut of the 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis was considered lost for decades. The first serious effort to reconstruct the film began in 2001, using footage discovered in archives around the world; released on home video in 2003, it came up about half an hour short of the original. In 2008, a complete (but heavily damaged) copy was found at a film museum in Argentina, spurring a new project to restore the film. The resulting effort, released on home video in 2010, includes all but two scenes (roughly five minutes' worth of running time) and is considered to be the most complete version of Metropolis since its original premiere in Germany.
• The Phantom of the Opera (1925) had already been re-cut several times before the 1925 version was released, with additional scenes being shot by Edward Sedgewick after the original director Rupert Julian left the production. It's this version that was found in 2011. The original Rupert Julian cut, which was much closer to the book and featured the original novel ending where the Phantom lets Christine go and then dies of a broken heart, is still missing.
• Due to Creator Backlash, Mary Pickford tried to forcibly make the 1923 film Rosita into this. In the 1970s a Soviet copy was found. It was a really poor-quality looking, presumably bootleg, copy from the 1920s. Attempts to restore it were made and now the film looks as good as any other silent film. A few rolls are still missing, however.
• The 1916 film Snow White is the earliest film adaptation of Snow White. It also inspired Walt Disney to create his animated adaptation. It was considered lost until a Dutch copy was found in 1992. Even then, it's still missing several scenes such as when Snow White eats the Poisoned Apple.
• The 1954 remake of A Star Is Born originally ran for 182 minutes, but the studio, Warner Bros., cut it down to 154 minutes before release. In 1983 a restoration was made that runs 176 minutes. However for several scenes, only the audio survived, so stills were used in place of the missing footage.
• During the production of Return of the Jedi, assistant director David Tomblin filmed a comedic promotional short called Return Of The Ewok with Warwick Davis playing both himself and Wicket the Ewok. It starts as a straightforward documentary about Davis preparing for his role as Wicket W. Warrick in the film but turns into a metafictional story about him meeting characters from the movie and actually turning into Wicket. George Lucas personally paid for this strange experiment, but the money ran out before Tomblin could finish the final edit or get the rights for the Supertramp songs used in the film and it was never officially released. The original 16mm print was lost, but Tomblin made a VHS copy as a gift for Davis, which he donated to Lucasfilm. The only public screenings have been at the Celebration Fan Convention, as well as the British National Space Centre. Some clips have appeared as part of DVD/Blu-Ray bonus content ^note  In particular, the blooper reel Easter Egg on Return of the Jedi's DVD and the "Warwick & Sons" featurette on the Blu-ray for The Rise of Skywalker and a condensed four-minute edit was briefly available on the old Star Wars website for members of the now-defunct Hyperspace fan club. Bootleg reconstructions circulated on the Internet.
• After Erich von Stroheim was catapulted to the forefront of Hollywood directors in the early 1920s, he learned the difficult way how little control he had over the final cuts of his ambitious projects, most of which had hours of footage excised by the studios and later destroyed.
  • The initial cut of Foolish Wives is said to have been anywhere from six to ten hours long and intended to be shown across two evenings, but Universal Studios adamantly opposed this idea and trimmed it down to less than two hours. Most of the cut footage is long gone, and even the "restored" version is just under two and a half hours.
  • One of cinema's greatest tragedies is the fate of Greed. Its original cut was a whopping nine hours long, and considered by those who were fortunate enough to see it to be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, the studio ordered it chopped down without Stroheim's involvement, and the cut pieces were destroyed. Thus, most of that footage has been lost. Even the Turner Classic Movies four-hour cut replaces a lot of the footage with still photos just to keep the story intact.
  • The original end sequence of The Merry Widow (1925) was shot in two-tone Technicolor, but the print has since been lost, and only the black and white version survives today.
  • The Wedding March was originally the first part of a duology, the second half of which was entitled The Honeymoon and followed the first film's Love Dodecahedron to its tragic conclusion. The initial cut of The Wedding March was four and a half hours long, and after von Stroheim refused to cut it further, Paramount brought in Josef von Sternberg to edit it down to a manageable length. The version of The Wedding March that circulates today is less than two hours long, but it is still more fortunate than The Honeymoon, the only known print of which was destroyed in a French warehouse fire in 1959.^note  Its initial cut was about three and a half hours long, but the version that eventually saw release was less than two hours, the first half of which recapped the events of The Wedding March with footage from that film.
• A few reels of the 1920 film The Symbol of the Unconquered are missing. This includes the climax where the Ku Klux Klan is kicked out of town (or, likely, killed) and a black man attacks them with a brick.
• The 3D versions of Top Banana and Southwest Passage, as well as the uncut version of the former.
• The first half of a lost 1923 Hitchcock melodrama, The White Shadow, was discovered in the New Zealand Film Archives. The second half of the film remains lost.
• The Wicker Man (1973) had something like twelve minutes of footage removed after an early screening. With the possible exception of the original Media-Home Entertainment release, they've never been seen since. Christopher Lee, who considered this one of his best films, was NOT happy about this. A 2001 home video release restored some of these scenes, including the original opening scene - from a clearly inferior print, but still.
• Yume Yume No Ato (in English, Dream After Dream) was a French-Japanese co-production directed by fashion designer Kenzo Takada, a romance/fantasy film about a wandering young man who gets in a Love Triangle with two sisters living in a mysterious castle. It's perhaps best known for the fact that Journey (Band) did the soundtrack—in fact, their album Dream After Dream is supposed to be the soundtrack for this film. After a theatrical run in both France and Japan, and a couple of Japanese TV broadcasts, it was never seen again. In an interview with the Nikkei, Takada said that the film's Troubled Production (including a heat wave that struck the filming locations in Morocco and the language barriers between the French cast and Japanese crew) and negative reception at the Parisian premiere led to him disowning the film. A mostly complete VHS rip of the film's Japanese dub, taken from one of the film's TV airings, appeared on YouTube in 2022, but it's in low quality and is missing 30 minutes.

Recovered

• One of Robert Carradine's last films was a movie titled The 13th Alley, a slasher movie set at a bowling alley. It played in a few theaters, leading to a particularly scathing review from Dread Central, and the DVD was available on its website which has since been deleted, though it was on private torrent sites and finally in 2022 a copy was uploaded to the Internet Archive
• The 1972 Israeli countercultural film An American Hippie in Israel was believed to be lost until 2007, when film historian Yaniv Edelstein managed to locate a copy in the possession of one of the film's cast members. Upon its rediscovery, it was screened in Tel Aviv and quickly gained a cult following similar to that of The Room (2003).
• A 1981 US-made Spanish horror film entitled Atrapados didn't strike a distribution deal in spite of awesome reviews when it premiered at local festivals. But the director himself uploaded it to YouTube.
• The majority of Baby Peggy's films as well as production records for it have unfortunately been lost to time, though a handful of Baby Peggy shorts, including Playmates, Miles of Smiles and Sweetie, have surfaced and have since been preserved by film archives around the world. In addition, Peggy's 1924 film Our Pet had been re-discovered in Japan in 2016.
• The 1962 Hong Kong film Big and Little Wong Tin Bar, featuring the young Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung in their film debuts, was long considered lost, with only a 9-minute opening clip and a 5-minute stretch of dialogue surviving. The complete film was rediscovered in 2016 and has since been posted to YouTube.
• The surprisingly prophetic 1924 film, The City Without Jews, which was Exactly What It Sayson The Tin and predicted the rise of Nazism and antisemitism, was thought lost until a badly damaged copy was found in Austria in 1989 and a more complete copy was found in a Paris flea market in 2015. In its time it was surprisingly successful, but was banned due to the highly negative right-wing reaction to it (it helped the right wing have significant influence in Austria at the time).
• Deadly Lessons, filmed in 2003/4 under the title of The Legend of Simon Conjurer starred Jon Voight and was supposedly released to a limited number of theaters in 2006 before fading into obscurity without any release on DVD, Blu-ray, or even Netflix. After the So Bad, It's Good trailer caught the attention of the internet, curious sleuths tried to find the bizarre film to no avail, leading to speculation that the whole thing was a weird hoax and only the trailer existed. The film was quietly released to streaming platforms in September 2014 under the Deadly Lessons title.
• Following a limited theatrical release, the 1974 horror film Deranged fell into obscurity for over two decades, with the original negatives believed by many to be lost. The film was eventually rediscovered in Florida sometime around 1993 and released on home video by American International Pictures' then-parent company MGM.
• A 1982 Slasher titled Early Frost was thought to be lost for years until it was recovered in 2020.
• Yet another "lost movie": the infamous 1994 Roger Corman produced The Fantastic Four. The story began when Constantin Film optioned the rights to make a Fantastic Four feature film with a planned budget of $40 million. Unfortunately, they couldn't raise the money on time and the option was about to expire so they brought Corman on board who reduced the budget to $1.5 million and made it within a one-month shooting schedule which should give you a good estimate of its quality. From that point onward, accounts differ. According to Stan Lee, Constantin Film never planned to release the movie and made it only to keep the rights and basically blackmail Marvel into giving them a substantial sum in exchange for the movie never seeing the light of day (depending on the legend, Marvel either locked the movie in a vault or had Avi Arad himself burn the negatives), whereas Roger Corman claims one of the other producers managed to raise the intended money, bought the distribution rights from Corman via a clause in his contract and simply chose not to release it. 9 years later, Constantin Film produced the now well-known 2005 Fantastic Four and the rest is history. For a long time, one of the few ways you could see the movie was via bootleg copies sold at comic book conventions, but lately it's been uploaded to YouTube, and recaps are also available. A documentary about the making and subsequent legacy of the film was also released in 2016 and includes numerous clips.
• The 1987 film adaptation of Flowers in the Attic originally ended with Malcolm Foxworth still being alive for Corrine's wedding, and the grandmother attempting to kill the remaining Dollanganger children with a knife only for John the caretaker to perform a Heroic Sacrifice and allow the children to be free. The studio cut the original ending and filmed a new one without the film's director, which pleased neither critics nor fans. For years the only parts of the original ending to have surfaced were photos, but in 2018 it was announced that Arrow Video would be releasing the film on Blu-ray with the original ending as a bonus feature. They later released the Blu-ray in the U.S. in 2019.
• The Keepers, a 1991 Soviet adaptation of the first part of The Lord of the Rings was considered lost after a single broadcast, but in March 2021, the studio found a copy and uploaded it to YouTube.
• Charles Burnett's 1978 student film Killer of Sheep was made to wild acclaim by every critic who saw it, but could not be released commercially because the rights to the soundtrack, filled with blues legends, were way too expensive. For nearly 30 years it remained almost unseen while appearing on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" list and other lists of critical masterpieces. It finally got a home video release in 2007 after a fundraising campaign scraped together the money for the soundtrack.
• For years it was speculated whether or not a home video release of the long lost American theatrical cut of Once Upon a Time in America existed at one point until in 2020 it was confirmed there was indeed a very limited 1985 (likely rental only) VHS release which has since been recovered and uploaded to the Internet Archive.
• Orson Welles:
  • The Other Side of the Wind, one of his last projects, starring John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. Welles shot all the footage he wanted and started editing it before the negative was seized during the Iranian Revolution. (The Shah's brother-in-law had helped pay for it.) After the new government decided it didn't have any value to them, it was locked away in a vault in Paris while various legal rights were worked out. Welles had edited about 40 minutes of footage before it was taken away. There were various efforts to complete it that were either blocked by his daughter Beatrice or by legal decisions. Showtime supposedly bought the rights to the project in the late 90s but never released a version of the film. Various people (including Bogdanovich) were granted access to the negative and tried to complete the editing. By the mid-2010s, it was supposedly "96% complete" (and just needed some post-production work, including a score) but gathering dust in a vault for decades due to these legal squabbles. Netflix bought the rights to the film in March 2017, and released it in late 2018.
  • Welles' early comedy film Too Much Johnson, made even before Citizen Kane, was never even publicly screened. Given the title, this is almost for the best. However, a work print was discovered in 2013 and it was put online in 2014 (and aired on Turner Classic Movies in 2015).
• Carl Dreyer's original cut of The Passion of Joan of Arc was believed to be lost after the master negative was destroyed in a fire just a few weeks after the film's release in 1928, though he would reconstruct a facsimile of his original cut using alternate and unused takes (this, too, was destroyed in a fire the following year, but not before enough copies were made to allow continued distribution). Dreyer died in 1968 believing his film was lost forever. It wasn't until 1981 that copies of the original negative were found in, of all places, an insane asylum in Norway. It's unknown how they came to be there — there are no records of any copies of the film being shipped to Norway — but historians believe that the director of the asylum in the 1920s — who was also a professional historian — may have requested a special copy.
• The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a horror movie that had an incredibly limited run in theaters, and the director refuses to release it in public in any way (it doesn't help that the studio that financed it is only just recovering from its recent bankruptcy). For a while the only way to find it was through pirated copies online, though for a little bit, it was legally available via Direct TV On Demand back in 2014... until that was taken down not too long after it was released. Eventually, it was given a direct-to-video release from Shout! Factory in 2017.
• One of the first Best Picture nominees, The Racket, was also missing for years...and when it was found, it sadly turned out to be just a standard gangster film.
• One of El Santo's many films, Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula (Santo in Dracula's Treasure) (1968), had an alternate version entitled El Vampiro y el Sexo ("The Vampire and Sex"). Additional scenes featured nude or topless vampire seductresses (fortunately or unfortunately, the heroic luchador himself did not engage in any sexual activity). This version of the film, intended for more liberal audiences outside Mexico, apparently had a limited release (newspaper ads exist for showings in New York-area Spanish language theaters), then disappeared, but stills of nude vampire ladies from the "sexy" version provided evidence of its existence. It was finally discovered by the producer's grand-niece and publicly screened in Guadalajara in July 2011.
• The second ever Sherlock Holmes movie, released in 1916 and simply titled Sherlock Holmes, was thought lost forever, until it was found mislabeled in the French Film Archive in Paris in 2014. This is especially important since it stars William Gillette, the man who first performed Sherlock Holmes on stage over a thousand times and became the Trope Codifier for many Sherlock-isms like "Elementary, dear Watson" and him smoking a Calabash pipe (he needed a pipe that could be seen from the back row). So in many ways, this is the first time ever we are able to see the original Sherlock Holmes!
• In a rarer example of a deliberately missing movie, the Disney film Song of the South is more or less impossible to see through legal channels (at least in the US; it was available in a few other countries on video, including south of the border and in Europe), as Disney fears the wrath of those who might have reasonable objections to a film full of friendly, happy sharecroppers in the Deep South during Reconstruction. These days, it's largely remembered only because it produced the Breakaway Pop Hit "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah."
  • By how often "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" was used in modern Disney canon until The New '20s (including showing the original clip in sing-a-long videos), it seems like a lot of people inside Disney want to finally just release the film and get it over with. Until it was announced that the ride would be thematically changed to The Princess and the Frog, it was the source of the Splash Mountain ride at various Disney parks (which is one of the most popular rides, if the lines are anything to go by), leaving many younger riders confused about what the hell the ride is based on (plus, the Brer Rabbit part of the film is quite good).
  • Back when they actually aired Walt Disney cartoons on the Disney Channel, the Brer Rabbit segments would occasionally be aired by themselves, usually to fill time between a movie and a regular show. Thanks to some clever editing they came off as stand-alone cartoons and not parts of a larger film.
• While The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi have true theatrical cuts available on standard definition home video, the original theatrical cut for Star Wars was thought lost until originaltrilogy.com came along. All of the home video releases contain either the 1981 Episode IV crawl or audio revisionism. It's also claimed due to George Lucas the original negatives being deteriorated and destroyed. This began with some of the original Star Wars re-releases in theaters to introduce "Episode IV: A New Hope" which is not original to '77. Part of this is supposedly due to Lucas having Old Shame over the fact that there were several elements of the films that weren't as good as he hoped (including effects and specific scenes) - he considers the altered versions his "true" vision. However, actual original prints of Star Wars would be found as the unrestored 16mm print was used for the Puggo Grande fan project then a 35mm print was located for the Silver Screen Edition and 4K77 fan restorations.
• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which retells Karen's life story using Barbie dolls, was forced out of circulation by Richard Carpenter, and all prints were ordered destroyed. It's readily available over the Internet, however, and a 16mm print was screened at Bard College (the alma mater of the film's director, Todd Haynes) as recently as 2011.
• The original version of the 2003 Disney documentary The Sweatbox, which is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the music for The Emperor's New Groove. The process of scoring the film's soundtrack (composed by Sting) was held in a cramped sound stage that was nicknamed "The Sweatbox", but grew in nature to encompass the state of the film's troubled production. The documentary (directed by Sting's wife Trudi) chronicled the change during the production from its original title Kingdom of the Sun to the final product, and the filmmakers' growing horror when they realized the original version was terrible. The documentary was screened for a limited time at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002 in order to qualify for consideration for the Academy Awards, but it has been barred from release (perhaps indefinitely) by Disney. The workprint was available on YouTube... for about a day before the uploader removed it. But that was long enough for many people to get a copy.
• The Thief and the Cobbler is a rather interesting example here. Richard Williams spent decades trying to make this an animated classic, yet it was screwed up by the many executives that held on to the film. The original cut was left on the shelf for decades due to Williams having to deal with other works being made. Eventually, he managed to get further work done and tried to license the film to Warner Bros. for release, but Williams couldn't finish it in time, and Disney had its own A Thousand and One Nights story in development. As a result, WB terminated the deal and the executives forced Williams out of the project. Soon afterward, the project suffered heavy editing and outsourcing in order for the film to be completed faster, and was released to heavy panning by animation lovers and critics across the board. This made Williams extremely devastated, leaving his career in ruins. The original, unfinished left unseen for decades until it was finally shown, half remastered, as the "Recobbled Cut", retaining most of the elements of the original print and some scenes that were never even finished.
• 1922's The Toll of the Sea is considered the second oldest technicolor film. It was considered lost until it resurfaced in 1985. It's complete except for the very last scene. Fortunately, it was just a shot of an ocean, and thus a new scene was shot to complete the film.
• The 1989 found-footage horror film UFO Abduction was scheduled for a Direct to Video release, but a fire at Axiom Films' distribution warehouse destroyed nearly every copy before it could be released. At least one copy, however, did find its way into ufologist circles shorn of its opening and closing credits, where it came to be known as the "McPherson tape" and circulated as a real Alien Abduction caught on video, with the warehouse fire treated as a cover story. This renewed attention got the film's writer/director Dean Alioto the chance to remake it in 1998 with an actual budget as Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, and in 2018 he finally gave it a proper release on DVD and digital download.
• Catch My Soul, a musical version of Othello starring Richie Havens and directed by Patrick McGoohan was released in the early 1970s to terrible reviews (not helped by, according to legend, one of the producers "finding God" and adding fifteen minutes of religious imagery much to McGoohan's chagrin). It was retitled Santa Fe Satan before disappearing completely. Vinegar Syndrome released the film on Blu-ray in 2015. It's now out of print. The soundtrack can often be found for sale on eBay, though.

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