Last week’s post about the “Egress” spider generated some terrific responses, with a number of readers asking about plans to include the scene on Nightmare Cinema‘s upcoming Blu-ray release. Although I have no information on that possibility, I do have a few more images from David Slade that offer a glimpse of what we might see if the scene is ever made available.
The sequence opens with an extreme closeup of the spider’s staring eyes, then pulls back to reveal its fangs and shifting legs, and finally its web. Here’s the description from the shooting script:
Close up on a spider — long fangs — macro close.
It sits, adjusts itself in stops and starts.
Wider — the spider sits in a web strung across a ceiling corner.
At this point, our point of view rotates until we are looking down at a spider-eye view of a waiting room below. Helen, our protagonist played by Elizabeth Reiser (The Haunting of Hill House), stands at the waiting room’s reception desk. We first see her from above. Then the scene shifts to a close up of her looking toward the ceiling and finally resolves with a longshot of the web from her point of view.
So there you have it, the lost spider scene — or at least as much of it as we are likely to get for now. Cool as it is, I still prefer the current cut of the film. Sometimes, to paraphrase a bit of writing advice often miscredited to William Faulkner and sometimes Ernest Hemingway (it was actually the lesser know Cornish writer Arthur Quiller-Couch): “Sometimes you have to kill your darling spiders.”
Nightmare Cinema is currently available via video on demand from iTunes, Amazon, FandangoNow.
DVD and Blu-Ray editions are scheduled for release on September 3.
Screenshots copyright 2019 © by David Slade. Used with permission.
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