For decades, one Hammer legend refused to die: that a more explicit cut of the film that reinvented horror had played overseas in 1958, too sexual and too gory for British censors, and then vanished.

In 2011, a Hammer obsessive living in Tokyo tracked down what remained of it in a film archive. The first five reels had burned in a fire years earlier. Only the last four survived, and they held the missing pieces.

DRACULA (1958), Terence Fisher's genre-defining film with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, known in America as HORROR OF DRACULA, had finally given up its secrets.

The recovered scenes are the ones the censors could not stomach: Mina visibly, dangerously enjoying her own seduction, and the Count clawing the rotting flesh from his own face as sunlight destroys him. When they were reinstated on Blu-ray in 2013, though, the salvaged footage looked faded and scarred, a rough patch stitched into a pristine film.

However - and this is the big news - pristine reels containing the long-lost "Japanese cut" footage were recently discovered inside a Warner Bros. storage facility.

This Halloween, Hammer's new owners are returning DRACULA to cinemas and 4K in a fresh restoration that finally renders those scenes in the same clean quality as the rest of the film. For the first time, the uncut version simply looks whole.