Kevin Smith's Red State was a pretty interesting horror thriller about the terrifying nature of religious fundamentalism, but the movie very nearly had a completely different ending which would have changed our perception of the entire film.
Kevin Smith has previously discussed his alternate Red State ending, but Entertainment Weekly has provided us with a pretty cool animation so that we can actually see the vision that was in the director's head.
Red State follows a Westboro Baptist Church/Harold Camping type group which predicts the end of the world. They're lead by the terrifying Abin Cooper, played by Michael Parks. In the original ending, John Goodman's law enforcement character confronts Cooper when suddenly horns start blasting. Cooper and his group interpret this as being the end of the world, but it turns out to just be the neighbors messing around. The church members are proven to be just what we all saw them as: complete nuts whose belief system has no basis in reality and causes nothing but harm.
However, the original ending was completely different. In the script, as Abin Cooper is confronting John Goodman, out of nowhere his head explodes into a bloody mess. Suddenly all of Cooper's people start blowing up with blood and guts flying everywhere, and then the ATF characters start exploding too. John Goodman collapses to the ground in confusion and when he looks up, surrounded by bloody, headless corpses, he sees an angel in a full suit of armor piercing a member of the church with his sword, implying that everyone was killed by angels slaughtering them all. The angel flies away, and then we see the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding by.
This ending has been discussed by Smith before, but what might be surprising here is that this wasn't some crazy alternate ending that Smith scrapped: the only reason this didn't happen was because the director didn't have enough money to do it, so this is actually the way the story was intended to end. The budget for Red State was only $4 million, but had the director been given something more like $15 million, this is what we would have seen. Just viewing this through animation is insane, so imagine how unbelievable that would have been to see in live action in theaters.
Red State was Kevin Smith's first major experience with non-comedic filmmaking after directing films such as Clerks, Mallrats and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Since then he has released a new horror film, Tusk, which will be part of his "True North" trilogy, as we previously reported. That movie is about Justin Long turning into a walrus, so it looks like now Smith is finally getting to indulge in some of these insane horror elements on screen.
Image courtesy of INFevents.com