Editorials
‘Get Out’…Two of the Coolest Scenes Are Missing!
Something I struggle with as a movie fan is when a trailer carries footage from a film that’s not in the final product. One of the absolute worst offenders in recent memory is Warner Bros.’ atrocious The Gallows, which had excellent trailers oozing with cool shots, many, if not most, missing from the released feature. In fact, I notice this with a lot of Blumhouse productions, although it’s actually a symptom of how they make their movies (they rework a lot of their films and end up removing quite a bit of footage by release). While The Gallows left me feeling cheated, the opposite can be said for Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Get Out, from Blumhouse and Universal Pictures, in now in theaters everywhere. I left a late night screening feeling elated; it’s easily one of the best films of the year, and one that’s going to be hard to top. Watching TV in bed, I caught one of the latest commercials, which had me scratching my head – there was an insanely badass scene cut of the film. In fact, when I started to think back on it, the first trailer had one of the coolest trailer moments in recent memory – you know, the wicked homage to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2?
Warning: spoilers follow…
I spent the morning going through all of the trailers and television spots to see what else was missing, and found these two shots; the first shows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) deep in hypnosis. In the film, there are more than a handful of shots of a deer head mounted on a wall. This is thematically important to Chris’ story, which centers on the death of his mother when he was just a child. In the theatrical cut, Peele constantly is focusing on the deer head, but we never see the trailer shot where Chris is seemingly attacked by a skeleton version of this bust.
The second shot, below, shows a knight attacking a man. There are two separate edits in various television spots, one that makes it absolutely clear that this was cut out of the opening sequence. We see a man walking, only to be kidnapped by someone in all black. In the commercials, we see that the kidnapper is wearing a medieval knight helmet. This comes into play when Chris meets Rose’s (Allison Williams) father, who travels the world and collects weird artifacts. In fact, we see this helmet twice throughout the film, making me wonder if it was supposed to inform the audience that the father is involved in the kidnapping, or if it’s used in a latter sequence that was also removed. It’s cool imagery, but I wonder if the idea was not to tone down the supernatural elements and ground the film in more reality. By removing both of the aforementioned scenes, this would be achieved, and I can’t say I disagree with the decision. If anything, the opening sequence makes absolutely no sense once you know the big secret behind Get Out…
But I digress, at least we’ll probably get to see these deleted scenes on the home video release, if not on a much-needed “Director’s Cut”.
Deer Head
The Knight
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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