Before going mainstream with the Lord of the Rings films, Peter Jackson was a horror guy, kick-starting his career with the gory flicks Dead Alive and Bad Taste. Despite being beloved by horror fans, neither film has to date been restored and re-released, but Jackson himself had revealed way back in 2018, you may recall, that 4K restorations were in the works.
Additionally, he teased that Meet the Feebles and Heavenly Creatures were going to be restored in 4K by the WETA Digital VFX team as well, potentially for a big ole box set release.
“I’ve done some tests on Braindead (aka Dead Alive), where we took the 16mm negative and put it through our restoration pipeline — and shit, it looks fantastic!” Jackson told THR at the time. “I’m pretty keen to actually just get them back out there again. That’s sort of my plan for now: to do a nice little box set — the early years! The naughty years!”
“I’ve always had video diaries being shot,” Jackson also explained. “So I’ve got about an hour or two of us shooting Bad Taste, seven or eight hours of us shooting Meet the Feebles, 50 to 60 hours of us filming Braindead, and at least 70 hours of us doing Heavenly Creatures. And it’s not just people talking to camera. It’s actually a guy on the set filming us making the film. So there’s some pretty interesting stuff there and none of it has ever been out.”
So what’s the latest on all that? While out promoting his new project The Beatles: Get Back, Jackson just told Uproxx that the new restorations of his old horror films are coming soon!
“We are doing a remastering and whole digital 4K thing and it looks great,” Jackson updates. “But we’ve been trying to do all that in between Beatles stuff, and that’s been put on a shelf for a while. But, hopefully, within another year or so they’ll come out remastered.”
Stay tuned for more as we learn it.
‘Bad Taste’ (1987)