New Friday the 13th Part VII footage found, but don’t expect to see it

Movie

Aug 31

If you have been seeing posts claiming that the long-lost uncut version of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood has finally been found, there is some truth behind the excitement. It just needs a little explanation because this is not as simple as someone finding a finished director's cut.

A private collector known online as ‘corterax’ acquired two VHS workprint tapes that came from composer Fred Mollin, who worked on the film's music alongside longtime Friday the 13th composer Harry Manfredini. One tape is a window dub containing reels two through five with temporary music from earlier films in the series. The second is the real attraction: an early rough cut of the entire movie.

Known as a ‘workprint’, it is an unfinished version of a movie used during editing and post-production. This rough cut does not have the completed score, final sound effects or ADR, and it includes material from before certain reshoots and editing decisions were made. In other words, Paramount did not have a polished secret version of The New Blood sitting in a vault waiting for someone to find it. These tapes preserved the movie while it was still being put together.

That’s key because The New Blood has one of the more frustrating censorship histories in the Friday the 13th series. Director John Carl Buechler and his effects team shot much more graphic versions of several kills before the violence was reduced to secure an R rating. Fans have known about these cuts for years, and rough VHS footage of some of the deleted gore has appeared on previous home video releases. The problem has always been that what survived publicly was incomplete and looked exactly like what it was, old footage copied from a VHS tape several generations removed from the source.

According to the collector, these tapes contain the uncensored effects along with alternate takes, extended scenes, Robin's original death, and an alternate ending and footage from before some scenes were reshot. The full rough cut also starts differently, moving directly into the young Tina sequence rather than opening with the prologue used in the finished movie.

One of the best examples is the famous sleeping bag kill. In the theatrical version, Jason grabs Judy while she’s trapped inside the bag and slams her against a tree once. The original scene was considerably nastier, with Jason repeatedly smashing her against the tree as blood begins appearing through the bag. Pieces of the longer kill have been seen before, but footage shown from this workprint gives us a much clearer look at what was originally filmed.

This is also why saying “the uncut movie has been found” is a little misleading. Some of this material was never truly lost. Deleted footage has circulated for years, and fans have even created their own extended versions by putting those pieces back into the theatrical cut. What makes this important is having larger portions of the actual movie preserved at different stages of production including material that has not been widely available in this form.

Now comes the part nobody wants to hear unfortunately.

The collector says an agreement signed when the tapes were purchased prevents public screenings of their content. The footage has been digitized for preservation, but there is no announced public release of the complete workprint. Paramount has also made no announcement about using these tapes for an official restoration or new version of the movie.

So, for now, nobody should start clearing a space on the shelf for that Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood - The Uncut Version.