Halloween Horror: Re-Animator (1985)

Whether a horror film works for you is, like the question of whether a comedy is funny, largely a matter of taste. By this, I mean that what frightens an individual is particular to that individual—much like what makes an individual laugh is particular—and is not something that can be feigned. Some folks may not find Re-Animator very scary or its dark comedy very amusing, but to my tastes the film offers an excellent example of how horror-comedy need not sacrifice the horror to be genuinely funny as well as how comedy doesn’t necessarily undercut a genuinely unsettling premise. In its brief runtime, the 1985 film directed by Stuart Gordon and loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft's story, “Herbert West-Reanimator,” offers a mix of excellent gore makeup effects and a darkly funny and shocking story of science gone wrong. The film earns its cult status, providing plenty of interest for genre fans, while being so genuinely offbeat and deranged that you understand how it could never be a mainstream hit.

Re-Animator stars the eccentric character actor, Jeffrey Combs—best known as Weyoun in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and as one of the villains in The Frighteners— as the titular Herbert West. It’s a supremely off-putting and creepy role that would become his signature (he’d return to the role in two more Re-Animator sequels, unseen by me, and West’s chilly unctuousness would provide the template for characters like Weyoun). The film follows West, a medical student, who discovers a medical reagent that can reanimate dead matter, leading to a horrifying series of incidents. West proceeds to experiment with reanimating corpses from morgues and then whatever dead bodies can acquire. More disturbingly, the reanimated flesh is heightened in its aggression and has a desire to feast on the living. After drawing his roommate Dan (Bruce Abbott) into his experimental plots, the two friends must keep their discovery and the reagent from the villainous Dr. Hill (David Gale) while convincing a skeptical Dean of Medicine, Dr. Halsey (Robert Sampson), who is also the father of Dan’s girlfriend, Megan (Barbara Crampton), of their discovery.

Like the multi-part short story by Lovecraft, the film combines elements of the Frankenstein story with aspects of later zombie fiction and film. It should be noted that Lovecraft’s story is one of the first to suggest that the reanimated dead are more aggressive and violent than they were when alive; however, the film takes full advantage of zombie tropes from later films, lingering on and emphasizing the truly macabre and outrageous concept of reanimating dead matter.

The late director Stuart Gordon was best known for taking inspiration from and sometimes adapting the stories of Lovecraft, in films such as From Beyond, Dagon, and Castle Freak; yet Re-Animator remains his best known work. One of the reasons why is his ability to inject the story with an over-the-top comedic tone while amping up the amount of blood and gore well beyond what Lovecraft suggests in his writing. And, at least in Re-Animator, it works very well, treading a thin line between horrifying and desensitizing, without verging into intentional camp. Yet, Gordon and his co-creators aren’t simply grafting the humour onto Lovecraft’s story. For instance, while “funny” may not be what most people think of when they think of Lovecraft, his stories are often darkly ironic and satirical, emphasizing some of the more florid conventions of the Gothic in their elaborate prose. Lovecraft himself considered “Reanimator” to be a generic satire of Frankenstein, exaggerating the concept and leaning into the horror the story suggests in his own manner.

At the same time, while Lovecraft’s stories are usually about the horror of a dawning realization rather than the grisly details, “Herbert West-Reanimator” is well-suited to Gordon’s love of prosthetic effects and gallons of blood. Re-Animator the film has some of the most inventive and impressive makeup effects of any horror film of the 1980s, in a decade that produced some of the greatest horror prosthetic work of all time in films like An American Werewolf in London, The Thing, and The Fly. Its makeup effects are still impressive today. The lack of CGI or digital compositing leaves me even more astonished and impressed at the special effects work today than when I first saw the film in the late-90s.

The care and, dare I say, love put into the realization of such a grotesque spectacle spills into other elements of the film as well. While Re-Animator is fairly contained and limited in its scope, sticking to the morgues and hallways of Miskatonic University for the most part, its visual realization is clear and draws attention to the details that make it memorable, whether spaces where undead corpses spring out or the neon-green glow of West’s reagent. The whole film has a kind of bright clarity to it, at times bordering on shiny; this helps it to stand out in a field where low-budget horror often hides its scares and uses shadows to conceal the limits of its production. Re-Animator never feels cheap; rather, what is shown is given the utmost care. Even when it’s self-consciously drawing on other horror films traditions (as in it’s opening theme, which riffs directly on Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Psycho), it is knowing and affectionate.

There’s a level of clear love that the filmmakers and performers imbue Re-Animator with, even if their exuberance and love of the macabre leads the film into territory that others might find morally revolting. For instance, like many 1980s films Re-Animator isn’t afraid to show nudity, in this case both male and female; lurching naked corpses with everything hanging out lunging at the characters, similar to the parasite infested zombies in Cronenberg’s Shivers, emphasize the truly absurd and primal elements that have been unleashed in the reanimated. At one point, Dr. Hill’s reanimated head and body, separated in an earlier scene, plot together to capture and sexually assault Megan; Dr. Hill’s latent attraction to her is exaggerated by his rebirth as an undead monster. It’s simultaneously horrifying but also clearly absurd, as the disembodied head of Dr. Hill lusts and lunges for Megan’s body. One isn’t sure whether to laugh or turn away in disgust.

This element of Re-Animator actually underscores the basic themes of the film, Lovecraft’s story, and the Frankenstein archetype, which is that the meddling of humans with the processes of life and death is profoundly morally disordering. While Dr. Hill is the film’s ostensible villain, Herbert West himself is the Dr. Frankenstein who is ultimately morally culpable for the events that transpire.

To return to the question of taste, Re-Animator is certainly open to the charge of being in “bad taste,” but at the same time, as do so many films in the horror genre, it has moral questions lurking around its corners. The tensions that the film opens up—tonally and thematically between horror and comedy, and in emphasizing the moral dimension while reveling in immorality, visually between gallons of blood and mutilated flesh and a clear and confident cinematic presentation—are where its pleasures reside. For all these reasons, even if fans of the arch-Gothic trappings of Lovecraft’s original stories might miss their presence in this particular adaptation, the film still does justice to the purposes of Lovecraft as one of the best adaptations of his stories.

8 out of 10

Re-Animator (1985, USA)

Directed by Stuart Gordon; screenplay by Dennis Paoli, William J. Norris & Stuart Gordon, based on “Herbert West, Reanimator” by H.P. Lovecraft; starring Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbot, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson.

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