The Conan Completist

SOURCES: Métal Hurlant, Cinefantastique, thearnoldfans, alt.fantasy.conan, alt.video.dvd
AUDIO COMMENTARY: Yes.
NOVELIZATION: Yes.
COMIC BOOK: Yes.
FILMED?: Yes.
EXTRAS LAST UPDATE: ---

It is known, CONAN, THE BARBARIAN was X-rated three times by the MPAA before finally being rated R [1].
The violence of the original cut of course was seriously edulcorated during this painful process. First scene to have suffered from the cuts imposed by the American committee of censure: the attack of the village. Oddly, in the audio commentary commentary, Milius seems to want to minimize the importance of these cuts.

Schwarzenegger : "Look at the slaughter! You did cut a lot of things here, right?"
Milius : "Well. Not really."
Schwarzenegger : "I remember they said it was too violent, and all that stuff..."
Milius : "Yeah. Although, I didn't have to cut too much, you know."

.
In the comic book adaptation of the movie (the William Stout version), the violence of the raid is very graphic: one sees for example some fleeing woman being trampled by the hoofs of a horse. Two pages later, a Vanir rider impales a mother on his spear and crashes to pieces the skull of her baby against a post (picture 1)! Such scenes, also present in the novelization, were probably not filmed by Milius.

.
However, a portion was indeed filmed, which completely disappeared in the final cut: it concerns the Conan's mother character [2]. Intervening in a newsgroup dedicated to the film (alt.fantasy.conan), David Burton writes in April 1997:
.

I hope that someday [Milius will] put out a "director's cut" of the film. Then we would see (...) [Conan's] mother *fighting*. She takes out quite a few of Doom's men, protecting her son. No one could get close to her, which is why she was the last standing and why Doom himself kills her (it was an honor thing, his showing her respect by facing her, though he cheats and uses magic).

In the novelization (based on the Milius script, let us recall it), one can read:

Conan, at last, spied the lithe figure of his mother, standing barefoot in the snow. There was a majesty about her as she faced the enemy, her face flushed with fury, her hair cascading over her shoulders, and her hands clenched about the handle of a broadsword. Heaped before her lay the bloody remains of several Vanir and their merciless dogs. As the boy hurtled toward her, she glanced at her son's tousled mane of coarse black hair, so like his father's, and grasped her weapon with renewed determination. (...) Maeve [3] impaled one leering fellow who bent from his galloping horse to seize her. She smiled thinly as his torn body toppled from the saddle to lie sprawling in the mud. A sweep of the Cimmerian woman's sword hamstrung another animal. As the beast fell kicking, Conan sprang upon the rider, writhing in agony beneath his steed, and sliced open his throat.

This scene was filmed by Milius (except the final intervention of young Conan, which, at this moment in the film, is not yet a warrior...). Multiple photographs prove its existence (pictures 2 to 6).

While studying closely the final cut of the raidsequence, one can notice various small continuity errors, coming from the cuts required by the MPAA. When she is confronted with Rexor and Thorgrim, the sword which Conan's mother holds up finds itself for example suddenly mackled with blood. Explanation: this blood comes from the removed preceding shots where she faced a Vanir rider. Certain shots where she faced him were most probably re-used as reaction shots during the death scene of Conan's father.

Concerning the death of the father, precisely, it was to be at the beginning more elaborate: Rexor initially gave orders to his archers before releasing the dogs. The arrows sifted body of Conan's father is visible in a frame of the comic book adaptation from Buscema (picture 7). He was to be then decapitated. There is a behind the scenes photograph showing Milius with, in his hand, the cut head of the blacksmith (picture 8), which could make say to some that this scene had thus been filmed. It is possible... It is also possible that the head in question was created only for the only need of the shot where it is seen impaled on a peak, with the burning village in the background.

The decapitation of Conan's mother survived the final cut. What one knows less is that it had to be entirely reshot, following a defective special effect, as CromIsGod explains it on thearnoldfans.com:
.

The decapitation of Conan's mother was completely redone. The scene was initially two scenes. One of which was shot from the back in which this gigantic splatter of blood gets everywhere. The other shot was of a working mechanical head lying on a bank of snow going into the death twitches and spasms.

Questioned by the same CromIsGod, again on www.thearnoldfans.com, Ben Davidson (who play Rexor) remembers:

"The scene where Conan's mother got her head cut off was shot with this huge spurt of blood coming out of her skull, but that was cut out."

At the time of the release of the Special Edition DVD, Mark Spatny posted in May 2000 this message in the newsgroup alt.video.dvd:

When the movie [originally] came out, I saw a presentation by one of the filmmakers at the San Diego Comic Con[vention]. He told this story: When Conan's mom gets her head cut off, they built a robotic head that was laying in the snow, bleeding. Supposedly, the animatronic mouth kept talking as the tongue filmed black and the eyes popped out. He said the shot was cut because the film would have received an X rating if it stayed in (this was before NC-17).

Coming from the same thread, finally, this response to the message of Spatny, posted by a certain Altair4:

Milius mentions in the commentary that he tried showing an artificial head in that scene, but he decided all of the approaches he tried looked too fake, so he decided to go with the "falling hair" idea [4] I think it was a wise decision.

ConanCompletist 2004