Mike Cecchini

Jul 14, 2017

Clive Barker's Nightbreed movie is getting an even longer extended cut…

A few years back, Scream Factory in the US finally gave fans the fully loaded release that Nightbreed fans have been clamouring for for years. Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut brought in an additional 40 minutes of footage, and a boatload of special features. It’s great, and worth seeking out, especially since it took forever for the film to get the kind of treatment that lesser horror movies already had.

So that should have settled that, right? Well, not exactly. You see there’s another extended cut of Nightbreed, one even more comprehensive, that made the rounds at select screenings recently. That one is known as Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut, and it contains even more footage.

Nightbreed was based on Clive Barker’s short story, “Cabal” and while he directed the film, it had a troubled production. That led to extensive amounts of footage not being used, and for years it was thought to be lost, and nobody ever thought we’d get to see the movie that Barker intended.

The Cabal Cut runs 145 minutes, which is at least a few minutes longer than The Director’s Cut from Scream Factory. Some of what’s included in The Cabal Cut is of low quality, and according to the folks at the CliveBarkerCast (who had the exclusive reveal) there’s still about 12 minutes of footage included in this that comes from VHS footage. But apparently a lot of the other extra footage has been cleaned up considerably since this was screening circa 2013.

Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut is apparently set for “a very limited Blu-ray release” from Seraphim. There’s no date yet, but hopefully this arrives in time for a ceremonial Halloween viewing.

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