Things Movie Adaptations Had To Leave Out Because They Were Too Dark

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's deeply disturbing tale of the ultra violent exploits of teenage gang (the Droogs of A Clockwork Orange) is fairly faithful. Faithful enough to be as shocking as the source material, which largely consists of Alex and his uniformed mates getting high on drug-laced milk and committing violent crimes.

Despite how faithful the movie is to the source, one scene is notably toned down from the book (which is saying a lot of this film): that in which Alex has sex with two teenage girls. In the book, the girls are 10 years old, and Alex drugs and rapes them. Yikes. It's pretty clear why this detail couldn't have ever made it to the big screen. 

Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty retains a good part of the fairy tale weirdness of Charles Perrault's original, but considerably softens some of the most troubling aspects of the source, for obvious reasons.

Rather than a spinning wheel's needle, Perrault's story has the princess prick her finger on a piece of flax, sending her and the kingdom into a century-long sleep, instead of the hours-long one Disney chose to stop the prince horribly aging. In the book, said prince rocks up as he does in the film, but rather than a chaste kiss, he impregnates her with twins, who she gives birth to while comatose. It's only when one of the babies sucks the flax from her finger that Sleeping Beauty wakes up (and is probably a little confused.) 

Brian J. Robb notes in A Brief History of Disney that critics took issue with the film's sentimentality, while Walt Disney lamented that audiences were obsessed with "violence, sex and other subjects."

Readers of Stephen King's 1986 novel It know there's plenty of disturbing imagery that's difficult to translate to the screen. Perhaps the book's most infamous scene comes towards the very end. After defeating the terrifying Pennywise, the kids of the Losers Club find themselves hopelessly lost in the sewers underneath Derry. They come up with an unconventional way to recharge their collective energy and escape: have sex. The group's lone female member, Beverly, volunteers to take the virginity of each of the boys.

Understandably, both the '90s miniseries adaptation of It and the 2017 big screen version omit this scene entirely. King himself has spoken about the controversial sequence:

I wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood –1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children – we think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues.

Though there are a few scares in Disney's Snow White, such as the Evil Queen taking a tumble off a cliff, but really, Walt just wanted to make 'em laugh.

In Michael Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation In Its Golden Age, its revealed that, for Walt, "the main attraction of the story [...] was the Seven Dwarfs, and their possibilities for 'screwiness' and 'gags.' [...] The eighteen-page outline of the story written from the October [1934] meetings, featured a continuous flow of gags."

Though the finished version of the film wasn't filled with as much Dwarf-themed slapstick as originally envisioned, the darkest elements of the Grimm story - the Evil Queen being tortured to death, and requesting the Huntsman bring her Snow White's organs so she can, um, feast on them - were left out. Also, Disney thankfully aged-up the princess - she was well below the age of consent the Grimms' version.