Krampus Extended “Naughty” Cut Coming This Holiday Season

Nearly six years since Michael Dougherty‘s holiday horror film Krampus was released, an all-new an unseen cut of the movie is about to be released. Scream Factory announced today that they’ll debut an all-new 4K release of the movie this year with Krampus: The Naughty Cut, available November 16th on in a 4K and blu-ray collector’s edition. In their official release on the film Scream Factory says this “previously unseen” version of the movie “restores key dialogue and scenes that had to be trimmed from the original theatrical release to appease the MPAA.” They further note that filmmaker Michael Dougherty supervised the release, calling it “the definitive version of the holiday cult classic.”

This release of the film will only include the “Naughty” cut of the movie and will not have the theatrical version, but what differences there are between the two cuts is unclear. Some deleted and extended scenes came on the initial home media release of Krampus that could find themselves back in the movie (one such sequence even connected the film to Dougherty’s previous horror effort Trick ‘r Treat). Speaking on the film’s commentary though, both the director and his co-writers Todd Casey & Zach Shields had a discussion about their internal debates over the film’s rating.

“I was on the fence for a long time, even into post production,” Dougherty said on the film’s initial blu-ray release about whether the film should have been PG-13 or R. “Kids in these kinds of movies is a huge red flag as far as ratings go because any time you show kids in danger the MPAA gets really sensitive. Especially kids around guns, which we also have. There’s a moment of a kid taking a teeny sip of spiked hot chocolate there was concern that might earn us an R-rating. It’s okay to show a kid getting swallowed by a clown monster but…”

He added, “There was a spirit that we were trying to embrace which is the spirit of ’80s Amblin movies, Gremlins and Poltergeist being two of the biggest ones, both of which were PG. The fun of those movies for us as kids growing up was that technically you’re allowed to see it and once you saw it, typically with your parents, it was ‘I can’t believe we were allowed to watch that, I can’t believe it was PG.’ I remember that’s how I felt watching Gremlins and Poltergeist as a kid.”

Krampus: The Naughty Cut will be released on November 16.