12 British horror films which took 6 or more years to get released

Sometimes films are announced, made, publicised, maybe even play a few festivals - then simply vanish. But all is not lost. Just because a movie disappeared into several years ago doesn't mean it won't suddenly emerge in some format...

6 years

The Haunting of Ellie Rose was the feature debut of top FX artist Tristan Versluis, filmed in September 2009 as Not Alone. There was apparently some sort of disagreement between Tris and producer Andy Thompson (Kill Keith, The Scar Crow) and the movie remained unseen until its retitled UK DVD release in October 2015.

Dominic Holmes’ coulrophobic slasher The Clown was produced in 2007 and, after six years down the back of the sofa, eventually turned up on YouTube in May 2013.

Sticking with creepy clowns, James D Layton’s WebKam stars Brit horror regular Eleanor James as a woman forced to humiliate and scar herself to save her friend from a clown-masked psycho. Shot in Layton’s kitchen in August 2008, a trailer appeared five years later and the whole film made it to YouTube in December 2014.

7 years

Sean Martin made The Notebooks of Cornelius Crow, an enjoyable amalgam of time travel and London myths, back in 2003 and it did play a few festivals in 2004/05. Its actual release was on the IMDB in January 2010, although that version has since disappeared, as has the one on Amazon.

Idol of Evil is a pretty dire sub-Indiana Jones archaeology adventure which was marketed as horror because of the demon-thing at the end. Directed by Kevin McDonagh of Birmingham-based Rotunda Films, it was shot in 2004 but not released until April 2011, after Rotunda’s second horror film, the bizarrely werewolf-free Lycanthropy.

In early 2009, AD Barker shot A Reckoning (aka Straw Man), a post-apocalyptic two-hander starring Leslie Simpson and Axelle Carolyn. The film was finished and reviewed but remained tantalisingly unviewable until April 2016 when producer Adam Krayczynski posted it onto YouTube.

Andrew Goth’s surreal horror-western Gallowwalkers became notorious, during its October 2006 shoot in Namibia, for star Wesley Snipes’ tax return problems – although that wasn’t the reason for the film’s subsequent disappearance. Additional footage was shot (by someone else) in Mexico in May 2009 but the film remained ‘lost’ until suddenly appearing from nowhere at Grimmfest in October 2012. The first DVD was the American release in August 2013.

8 years

Back in June 2008 Harold Gasnier, an actor whose credits included Darkhunters, Hellbreeder and The Witches Hammer, sent me his feature The Demon Within for review. For years it seemed like I was the only person who had ever seen this supernatural thriller. Then, out of nowhere and with zero publicity, it appeared on US DVD in March 2016 as 666: A Demon Within. I may still be the only person who has ever seen it though…

I first met James Shanks in 1998 when I was reporting for SFX on his work redubbing Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. He showed me footage from Devil’s Harvest, a supernatural feature he had directed the previous year with Brian Blessed and Julie T Wallace. It was May 2005 when the film was finally released in the UK, retitled Don’t Go into the Attic.

9 years

Daniel Grant’s Evil Dead-influenced Dark Night was first screened in July 2006 so must have been filmed some time before then. Nine years later, in March 2015, this became the first British film given a legitimate release via BitTorrent.

Dark Eyes is “a darkly comic supernatural-psychological thriller involving a drug crazed artist, his obsession for a Russian waitress and an office worker who has premonitions involving a murder near a fridge (much to the dismay of her fish loving husband).” Well now I really want to see this! Shot in 2001 by Andrew Spencer (The Casebook of Eddie Brewer) this was made available on Spencer’s website in September 2010 but has since vanished again.

11 years

Simon Cox’s debut feature Driven concerns an author who discovers that a serial killer is copying the events of his latest book. Shot in 1998, this became available to buy through Cox’s website in April 2009 (retitled Written in Blood) – and still is, as far as I know. No stranger to long-term projects, Cox has been working on his sci-fi epic Kaleidoscope Man since at least 2008.