National Lampoon’s Animal House is one of the most beloved comedy films of all time, but if some of the original ideas that were floated around hadn’t been rejected for being too crazy, that might’ve been a totally different story. Early script treatments for the inaugural National Lampoon movie were given curious titles like Laser Orgy Girls and Teenage Commies From Outer Space. The details of those screenplays have never been fully revealed, but according to Animal House director John Landis, Doug Kenney’s first draft of Laser Orgy Girls was about “high school girls f—–g.” Landis never read it himself, but was told it was “unacceptable.”
Harold Ramis was brought in from there, and the focus shifted to Charles Manson during his high school days. In one of the drafts Ramis wrote at that time, the teenage Manson hosts drug-fueled orgies and indoctrinates young girls into his spaceship-worshipping cult. He then takes them back in time to witness John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “I did read that one, and it did have some brilliant stuff in it, but it was too outrageous,” Landis told The Playlist in 2013. “It could probably get made now.”
Landis also remembered the opening scene very well and described it like so: “It was in a prison, with these foreboding stone walls. The camera approaches this menacing fortress, and goes down this heavily guarded hallway and through this seriously fortified door with chicken wire glass into a padded cell. In the corner is a figure dressed in white pants and a straitjacket. He looks at the camera. It’s Charles Manson, with long hair and the swastika carved into his forehead. The camera moves deep into his eyes, and he says, ‘Is it hot in here, or am I crazy?’”
Producer Matty Simmons thought the script was “terrible” and “unfilmable.” “Everybody was on drugs and getting laid. I said, ‘You can’t do this. These kids are in high school.’ I said, ‘We gotta move this to college.’ That was the genesis of Animal House.” It was still a little rough around the edges after the switch, however, with John Belushi’s Bluto character essentially being “a thug rapist,” in Landis’s words. On top of that, there was apparently “a lot of projectile vomiting and implied rape, and the scene in the Black bar was truly offensive.”
How much worse it got, though, is something Landis has opted not to share. “I have some specific stuff that I don’t want to talk about,” the director admitted.
Things were significantly toned down by the time Animal House was released in 1978, with the story revolving around the misadventures of the rowdy Delta Tau Chi college fraternity.
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