Scream Factory’s Lost ‘Halloween 5’ Footage Restoration
For years, the ultimate Halloween fan’s wish list consisted of an original Halloween 6 producers cut, and the original opening to Halloween 5. With the producers cut now very much part of the Halloween family on Blu-ray, Scream Factory have been busy reinstating those missing Halloween 5 reels that contain Dr. Death’s opening, creating a fan bingo card full house.
The search for this footage started back in 2019, when The Official Halloween Website started to track down missing reels that were shot during the films production.
What’re we up to? In search of that ‘lost’ footage from #Halloween 5… #MichaelMyers 🎃🔪 pic.twitter.com/Mz6ltkhuiO
— HalloweenMovies™ (@Halloweenmovies) February 11, 2019
In the 1989 sequel, Michael Myers washes up near the home of an old hermit, but in the original shooting script, this character was called Dr. Death, and he ties in to the larger sub-plot of Thorn. He performs rituals and heals Michael, and we even see him tattooing the Thorn sign on his wrist. For fans of the original run, Michaels reveal of this tattoo, which appeared out of know where, always felt a little forced. The Dr. Death scenes would have really cleared that up.
Scream factory has not only restored this entire sequence, but also some of gorier death sequences that had to be cut to get an R rating.
- NEW long-lost alternate opening sequence featuring the appearance of Dr. Death
- NEW extra snippets of gore cut to obtain an R-Rating
The man responsible for this restoration work is Michael Felsher, who explains the process over on his page on facebook.
“I was given the very enjoyable challenge of editing together the lost “Dr. Death” sequence from HALLOWEEN 5 that will be featured on the new Ultra HD package coming soon from Scream Factory. Basically I was delivered a series of raw takes scanned direct from the negative trims and using a shooting script, as well as some existing footage from the theatrical cut, I was able to put together what amounts to a new opening sequence for the film.”
Felsher went into more detail
“Most H5 fans know that the existing Mountain Man character was a re-shoot added in to replace Dr. Death, and it was interesting to discover that a lot of shots used in the theatrical cut for his “lair” were just shots taken from the original Dr. Death shoot which I was able to repurpose for the restored scene. Another big challenge was that there was no audio for any of this. The production sound was either MIA or perhaps this scene was shot MOS at the time, I don’t know. So a big part of my job was to create an audio mix for this scene, so when you watch it, every sound you hear with Dr. Death on-screen was created here at my desk.”
We’ll definitely be grabbing these five 4K releases, which are all set for release on October 5th, with the additions to Halloween 5 being worth the price alone.
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Will you be grabbing a copy? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram! You can also carry on the convo with me personally on Twitter @Lallen_UK
Stay in, Stay Safe, Love Horror!
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