2004's time-traveling horror story two direct to video sequels.
The rare blend of horror with time travel, The Butterfly Effect stars Ashton Kutcher as Evan Treborn, a young man with a past riddled with trauma and tragedy. One day, Evan discovers that when reading the journals he kept as a teen, he's able to send himself back through time to those scenes, and change his past. Unfortunately, things never seem to work out like Evan wants them to. He'll manage to improve things in his life, but accidentally wreck the future of his true love, or a friend. Evan than tries to fix the things he ruined, only to see his own future change for the worse, and so on.
The Butterfly Effect is a very dark film, which touches on subject matter as upsetting as child molestation and child pornography, murder, animal cruelty, and the horrors of life inside prison. However, The Butterfly Effect's director's cut ramps that darkness up to eleven.
The Butterfly Effect Director's Cut Has a Disturbing Subplot
The Butterfly Effect's director's cut only runs about five minutes longer, so there really aren't that many new scenes. However, what the director's cut does do is introduce a subplot that eventually pays off in a much darker alternate ending. In this subplot, it's revealed that both Evan's father and grandfather ended up in mental asylums, and it's suggested both possessed his ability to time travel. This helps add context to the scene in the theatrical cut where Evan's father tries to strangle him during a visit to the hospital. Additionally, Evan's mother tells him that she had been pregnant two times before his birth, and both children died in the womb. Thus, she'd always considered Evan her personal miracle.
The Butterfly Effect’s Director's Cut Ending Kills Off Evan
Contrary to the harrowing nature of most of the film, The Butterfly Effect's theatrical ending is somewhat happy, as while Evan and love interest Kayleigh don't end up together, both live happy lives separately. In the director's cut, a desperate Evan decides that the only way to prevent all the carnage his time trips have caused is to use a video of his birth to travel backward and take himself out in the womb. Evan is somehow able to strangle himself with his umbilical cord, and it quickly becomes clear why Evan's mom's other two children were stillborn: they also had time travel powers, and eventually decided to kill themselves as well. While the idea of a baby being able to strangle itself is pretty ridiculous, in practice, it leads to one of the grimmest endings in horror history.
