‘Evil Dead Burn’ Was Forced to Trim a Brutal Scene to Avoid NC-17

When it comes to hardcore, brutal horror films, it has often felt like horror fans versus the MPA – formerly the MPAA. The ratings board has long had a reputation for butchering directors’ visions, forcing cuts, and sanitizing what audiences ultimately get to see in theaters. Whether that’s a good thing or not is an entirely separate debate.

After all, there’s an NC-17 rating for a reason. In theory, that rating exists so filmmakers can push boundaries without worrying about younger viewers. An R rating, meanwhile, technically allows anyone to attend as long as they’re accompanied by an adult. So there’s always been this ongoing tug-of-war between filmmakers who want to go as far as possible and a ratings board tasked with deciding where the line is.

That said, I do think the MPA has become noticeably more lenient over the last couple of decades. Gratuitous gore, extreme violence, and outright nastiness seem to have a lot more room to breathe now than they did years ago. Sexual violence remains an area where the board tends to be much stricter, but when it comes to blood-soaked horror, they haven’t been nearly as restrictive as they once were. Honestly, I haven’t found myself complaining about the MPA in years. I barely even think about them anymore. And movies like Terrifier have proven that filmmakers can find success outside the traditional studio system anyway.

Still, the ratings board recently became part of the conversation surrounding one of the biggest horror movies of the past year, Obsession. The original cut of Curry Barker’s breakout film reportedly featured an even more graphic version of its infamous head-smashing sequence. In that scene, Nikki repeatedly slams a character’s head into a steering wheel until she’s reduced to an unrecognizable mess of gore. What’s surprising is that the version audiences saw in theaters was already shockingly brutal. According to Barker, that sequence had to be trimmed down in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. If that’s true, it really makes you wonder just how extreme the original version was.