Jack Clayton, 'The Innocents,' and 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'

There was an extensively different cut of Jack Clayton's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) that a lot of people would like to see. Above is a scene from the film that was eventually released.

There are a few things floating around the cinema world I’d like to see before I go. One biggie is the original cut of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) that Stanley Kubrick delivered to Warner Brothers just before he died. It's rumored that a full twenty minutes were cut out of the film, allegedly supervised by Sydney Pollack, before it hit the theaters. Many people believe that Kubrick was murdered for that missing footage. (I used to laugh at stuff like that, until Jeffrey Epstein committed “suicide” by hanging himself in his jail cell with a paper bedsheet.)

Another point of interest is the fabled missing footage that was cut out of Paul W. S. Anderson’s hybrid sci-fi/horror film, Event Horizon (1997) -- footage which is reportedly so gruesome it defies description. No skullduggery is responsible here; the footage was apparently straight-up lost due to epic carelessness on the part of the director/production crew.

And then there’s the original version of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) — based on the Ray Bradbury dark fantasy novel — that Jack Clayton delivered to Disney. Note, it wasn’t just a “director’s cut” — it was a whole 'nother film, with a different score, a different ending, and a ton of footage that was later cut, then re-shot, and re-edited.

Perfidious Disney Executives

Disney executives hated Clayton’s version, took it away from him, and butchered it. Reportedly, it was “too dark” for Disney’s family-oriented tastes. Among the things that were cut was an inventive animated sequence that depicted Bradbury’s famous dark carnival growing out of the ground like a tree. Also cut was a spooky score by French composer Georges Delerue, one of the best and most prolific film composers in cinema history. The film that was eventually released, starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce, is “decently nice” (that’s how Bradbury described it), but I’d bet my firstborn that the original film was a horror masterpiece.

In terms of sheer talent, Clayton ranked with the giants of the 21st Century. A protege of John Huston, he played in the same sandbox as Kubrick, Welles, and Hitchcock. A guy with only ten director’s credits to his name, he was impressively nominated three times for a best director Oscar, winning once for the short, The Bespoke Overcoat (1954).

Unfortunately, Clayton was, by many accounts, an extremely difficult person to work with. He was reportedly so eccentric and perfectionist that he made Kubrick look like Easy Ed from the corner bar. He directed only seven full-length feature films, although he worked in developing many others: he kept getting pulled off of projects, most likely for being “difficult.” To be fair, in the late 70s his career suffered a serious setback that wasn't caused by personality problems: he had a severe stroke, and was forced to re-learn how to speak and walk, which took five years of hard work and therapy.

As a director, Clayton showed a distinct taste for the macabre. He is, of course, the director of one of the greatest psychological horror films of all time, The Innocents (1961) — a film that has influenced big-name directors as varied as Martin Scorcese, David Lynch, and Guillermo Del Toro. Side note: Scorcese and Lynch later both hired Freddie Francis, the legendary DP for The Innocents, to shoot films for them. Francis shot Cape Fear (1991) for Scorcese and The Elephant Man (1981), Dune (1984), and The Straight Story (1999) for Lynch.

Even Clayton’s straight drama films have macabre elements, which is why I like to think of him as the greatest horror director who wasn’t actually a horror director. His version of The Great Gatsby (1974), for example, was marketed as a lush, romantic period piece, but the strongest and most memorable scenes are those that look like they belong in a horror film. Gatsby '74 opens with creepy shots of the vast, empty rooms of Jay Gatsby’s mansion, while faint, ghostly party sounds play in the background. These scenes look like they belong in The Shining. One of the unforgettable scenes shows Karen Black rapping on a window pane with her knuckles until it breaks, then licking the blood off her cut fingers (this scene appears nowhere in the book.)

One of his best films is the highly underrated Our Mother’s House (1967), which features a knock-out performance by Pamela Franklin, who played Flora in The Innocents. Our Mother’s House is a scocial satire about a group of children who bury their deceased mother in her garden and pretend to the world that she’s still alive. Despite being a social satire, it's pretty creepy. Stephen Spielberg is said to admire this film greatly.

If only Clayton had followed his natural inclinations (and been less cantankerous and perfectionist), we might have had a whole slew of high-class horror films from him to enjoy today. But at least we have The Innocents. And maybe someday, someone will find the original version of Something Wicked This Way Comes and release it. Don’t hold your breath though — if Disney’s got it, they won’t do a thing unless they can make buckets of money off of it.