Welcome to the El Camino High School library, where Bruce Cummings, Librarian Extraordinaire, has been keeping something unpleasant behind the desk. Crack open the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, pull up a chair, and prepare yourself for stories best left unread.
Welcome, one and all, to the strange.
Behind the Scenes
Welcome to the Strange was planned as an anthology horror film directed in pieces by Daryl Della, Ray Revello, and Brandon J. Snyder. Very little of it was ever completed.
What survives is a brief opening featuring Bruce Cummings: Librarian Extraordinaire, reading ominously from the Necronomicon Ex Mortis. The prop was actually the foam-rubber DVD case for The Evil Dead.
A second segment, Director’s Cut, never made it beyond fragments of a script. The idea followed the Dollars & Donuts crew making a horror movie while increasingly ridiculous violence broke out around them, including a planned scene where Jacy “Wolf” Criswell loses a hand, only for the severed hand to fly through the air and slash dozens of throats with his long fingernails.
That was about as far as the 2005 version got.
The original footage has since been lost. The only surviving copy is a low-resolution edit descended from an old upload to MySpace, essentially a copy of a copy from the early days of online video.
The movie quietly disappeared, but the title didn’t.
More than a decade later, the title and anthology concept were revived for the completed 2018 Welcome to the Strange. The original survives now as little more than one battered opening scene and a handful of abandoned ideas.