In an interview with Nigel Andrews, Steven Spielberg comments on the subject of cinematic alteration: “I’m sad seeing my movies on television or video because I don’t want my work altered and my work is altered the minute a widescreen movie, meaning a film I shot in Panavision, is shown on the small screen because you’re only seeing half my movie.” What is interesting about Spielberg’s, and by extension Andrew’s, comment, is that it only acknowledges modification as an exclusion or cut, while extra-footage (earlier cuts), which equally warp, are not perceived as a hypothetical re-rendering and stretching of the official border of a film text. Contrary to what Spielberg thinks, whether it’s taken out or put back in, new information modifies what we see and how we see it. “Happily, there is a small light at the tunnel’s end,” concludes Andrews. “…More and more feature films released on video today, including Jaws, are now appearing in wide-screen.” But more important than simply having extra, is the ability to understand what the extra means, how and where it fits, and what it does to the already existing and known.

So what role do these cinematic additions play? Like diary entries or notes, deleted scenes and outtakes unveil connotative narrative and meaning. Further, threaded into the fabric of the “final cut,” one begins to see things that weren’t originally there. In The Shining, Scatman Crothers tries to explain Danny’s telepathy to him in a way that he can understand. “When something happens,” he tells him, “it can leave a trace of itself behind.” While watching the documentary Making the Shining last year I was struck by how the crew played music while shooting the movie’s denouement in which Danny runs through the Overlook’s outdoor snow-filled maze. As a child, and an untrained actor, Danny, played by Danny Lloyd, having no emotional context for the scene, needed some kind of representation of the fear he had to fake. Similar to the Jaws theme, where signature music is used to characterize or anticipate the shark, creating a context for horror even when it isn’t being explicitly shown, music, which is added to a film in post-production, is used in The Shining for the actual making of the movie, and in this case generates a scene or performance instead of the other way around. According to Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director, in an effort to “shield” the child actor from any knowledge of violence, Lloyd had no idea what he was shooting and didn’t even know he was in a horror movie the entire time he was on-set. The idea of making a film about fear without a context of fear is interesting. In the case of Jaws, seeing the behind-the-scenes takes the horror out of the horror, or the “real” out of the scene, reducing it to just plain reel. In Jaws, this is never more apparent than when the shark is shown unedited and un-scored, exposing it as nothing more than a poorly operated piece of clunky machinery.

Sometimes the reverse is true, or the horror of on-screen interfaces with the horror of off-screen. I was just as nervous, for example, while watching the documentary footage of The Shining as I was watching the actual movie. The psychosexual abuse and tension that Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick inflict on Shelley Duvall, the female lead, is equally punishing. In some ways, Duvall the actress is treated just as badly as Wendy the fictional character, and one comes to realize that not only is the performance onscreen informed by Duvall’s experience “off”-camera—as both women are pushed to the edge—but, one wants to ask, what exactly is diegetic reality?