Many years before Lord of The Rings turned Peter Jackson into one of the greatest and most ambitious directors in Hollywood, he was a budding filmmaker in New Zealand making some low-budget splatter movies in what he refers to as his “Naughty Years” that are still loved among horror aficionados. When he was just starting out, the movies Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles and the Evil Dead-esque Dead Alive aka Braindead brought him to the attention of the world, and ultimately put him on a path that, in a huge leap of faith, would see New Line Cinema hand him the keys to the kingdom with the chance to direct Lord of The Rings. While the movies have made it as far as being released on DVD, they have not yet seen a Blu-ray release, but according to the director they are not far off.

Jackson has been teasing a 4K release of his early movies for some time now, and while it has been an on-going process, the work on his new documentary, The Beatles: Get Back for Disney+ meant that those titles were put on the back burner for a while. In a new interview with Uproxx, Jackson has now confirmed that work is still continuing on the restorations and it looks like we won’t have too much longer to wait until we get to see those cult classics getting the release they deserve.

"We've been held up a bit by doing this Beatles film, but we are trying to remaster all those early films," Peter Jackson said. "It would've been a little bit of a crappy quality for this, because all the DVDs that were out there were done back in the 1990s. So we are doing a remastering and whole digital 4K thing and it looks great. But we've been trying to do all that in between Beatles stuff, and that's been put on a shelf for a while. But, hopefully, within another year or so they'll come out remastered."

Jackson originally discussed the restoration of his gore-filled early work back in 2018 when he spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the release of his then new restoration of old war footage for They Shall Not Grow Old, a World War I project that could not be further away from the main bulk of Jackson’s movie catalogue. He revealed in the interview that it was working with the old footage that made him decide that it was time to return to his first movies and bring them into the 21st century.

“I’ve decided to go back and do this to my old films — the first four I made, which I own but never rereleased,” Jackson said. “I’ve done some tests on Braindead, where we took the 16mm negative and put it through our World War I restoration pipeline — and shit, it looks fantastic! I’m pretty keen to actually just get them back out there again. That’s sort of my plan for now: to do a nice little box set — the early years! The naughty years! The mixes on those films were pretty much all stereo in those days, so we’re going to get the old soundtracks out and do a 5.1 mix.”

After waiting so long, another year is not going to make much difference to the fans of these movies, who have been waiting to see the blood-splatters in vivid 4K color and clarity for many years now. In the meantime, Jackson’s three part series The Beatles: Get Back arrives on Disney+ over three days from November 25th.