The film was restored in June 2015 by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in partnership with the Library of Congress and Gosfilmofond of Russia. The new restoration combines all known film source elements and fills many of the narrative gaps that were present in the 1994 reconstruction based solely on the incomplete Library of Congress print.
A competing theatre with one running "Behind The Door" ran a newspaper editorial for two days commenting on the film's gruesome content. Some passages:
HORRORS ARE "TABOO" AT THE PLAZA
In presenting "Anne of Green Gables" at the Plaza next week, the management wants the public to know of its efforts to always present pictures that are morally clean and free from horrors that give children, and even grown men and women, terrifying nightmares, that engender or perpetuate hatred, that bring shudders instead of smiles, and disgust and distress instead of pleasure.
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Life is made up of contrasts. So are pictures. The Plaza people recently were offered, and previewed and rejected a picture that might be said to be the acme of horror, cruelty, distress, wrong and revenge, the final dismal scene of which was the supposed skinning alive by an ex-taxidermist of a human being-a fine and noble portrayal for our growing children, our happy grown-ups our refined, cultured, thinking people to contemplate, was it not?
(San Diego Union, 18/19 January 1920)