IMDb 7.1 / 10
Official trailer
Re-Animator is the film that made Jeffrey Combs a horror name and gave Lovecraft his funniest adaptation. The rating here’s IMDb’s, since I haven’t watched it.
Stuart Gordon directed, from Lovecraft’s serialized story Herbert West: Reanimator, written in 1922 as a parody of Frankenstein. Combs plays West, a medical student with a serum that brings the dead back in a state nobody would want. Bruce Abbott plays the roommate he drags into it, Barbara Crampton the dean’s daughter and David Gale the rival professor.
It was made for under a million dollars, released unrated because the cuts required for an R would have gutted it, and has sat near the top of horror lists ever since.
Jeffrey Combs had me laughing from the first clip I found. A man in a basement full of corpses complaining about intellectual theft is my favorite brand of joke, the straight-faced kind. The severed-head business sounds like more than I’d want on a full stomach, but everything written about it says the tone saves it.
The Story
West arrives at Miskatonic University with a reputation from Switzerland, where his mentor died in circumstances he describes as a success. He rents a room from a fellow student, sets up a laboratory in the basement, and starts testing his reagent on a cat.
The results are consistent: the dead come back, violent and without much of whoever they used to be. West treats each disaster as a data problem, and that’s the joke the film runs on.
By the end there’s a morgue full of reanimated corpses, a severed head giving orders, and a body count nobody in the story seems to find surprising.
Jeffrey Combs
Combs plays Herbert West as a scientist with no interest in anyone else’s opinion, and that performance is why the film works as comedy. He’s rude, focused and entirely certain, and the horror around him is a side effect of his agenda.
The line readings became famous. West explaining that his mentor’s death was a success, or dismissing a rival’s work as intellectual theft while standing in a basement full of corpses, are played completely straight.
Combs is the reason I’d give this film my time. I think playing West as rude instead of mad is the smartest call in the picture, because a raving scientist is a cliché, and a scientist who simply can’t be bothered with anyone else is funny every time he opens his mouth. It made him a fixture in the genre. Combs went on to work with Gordon repeatedly, in From Beyond and Castle Freak among others, and has spent forty years as one of horror’s most reliable character actors.
Barbara Crampton and the Cast
Barbara Crampton plays Megan Halsey, the dean’s daughter, and the role became the foundation of a long career in horror. Bruce Abbott plays Dan Cain, the roommate dragged into West’s work, and acts as the audience’s representative, since he’s the only person in the film who reacts to any of it the way a person would.
I’ve got a soft spot for the Dan Cain role. Every horror comedy needs the one person who reacts like a human being, and without Abbott’s appalled roommate the joke of West’s calm would have nothing to bounce off.
David Gale plays Dr Carl Hill, the rival professor whose research West considers stolen, and his part of the film is where the material goes furthest.
The ensemble is small and the locations are few, a house, a basement, a hospital, a morgue. That’s how the production kept the budget under a million and still filled the screen.
For Writers
A house, a basement and a morgue, and the film never feels cramped, because every location earns repeated use. A small set of well-chosen places beats a tour of many. When you write, limit your settings and let the reader learn them well enough to feel the changes. Count the locations in your draft. If you have more than a handful and few recur, you’re describing instead of building.
The Gore
This is a very bloody film, and it’s the reason it went out unrated. The effects are practical, wet and inventive, and the severed-head sequence in the last act is the most notorious thing in it, an extended piece of body horror that critics of the period described in terms usually reserved for legal proceedings.
What keeps it from being unpleasant, according to nearly everyone who writes about it, is the comic tone. The film is never solemn about its atrocities, and the excess reads as a joke pushed well past sense. I buy that argument up to a point. A joke pushed that far can stop being funny, and the severed-head sequence is where I suspect I’d stop laughing and start looking away.
Rotten Tomatoes has it in the nineties with critics, unusual for an unrated gore film, and the reviews consistently separate the craft from the content.
For Writers
Gordon shoots extreme material with a comic tone, and the combination keeps it bearable instead of repellent. Tone decides how a reader receives content, more than the content itself does. When you write something brutal, decide how the narration feels about it, because that choice determines whether the reader recoils or leans in. Take your most violent scene and rewrite the narration twice, once appalled and once amused. The events won’t change. The book will, and so will what the reader does with it.
The Lovecraft Question
Lovecraft wrote Herbert West: Reanimator as a serial for a magazine, paid by the instalment, and thought little of it. It’s his most conventional work and the least like the cosmic horror he’s known for.
That makes it good adaptation material. There’s no unnameable geometry to render, just a scientist, a serum and a series of consequences, and the film is free to invent.
Gordon added the comedy, the dean’s daughter, and most of the plot. Purists complain. Most viewers, judging by the score and the reputation, consider it the best Lovecraft film anybody has made.
The Score
Richard Band’s music is a deliberate lift from Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho theme, close enough that it caused comment at the time, and it announces the film’s attitude in the first thirty seconds.
That’s a joke on the audience. The music promises a classic horror picture, and what arrives is a medical student arguing about credit while a corpse lurches around the room. The Psycho lift delights me. It’s a cheeky thing to do on a budget this small, and it tells you in thirty seconds that the people making the film know exactly what they’re sending up.
Small productions rarely get a score this distinctive. It’s one of several places where a film made for under a million dollars behaves like something much better funded.
For Writers
Band borrows a famous horror theme almost openly, and the audience’s recognition becomes part of the joke. Deliberate borrowing works when the reader is meant to notice. When you allude to a well-known work, make sure the reference is doing something, setting an expectation you’ll break or a tone you’ll undercut. Check every homage in your draft. If a reader who misses it loses nothing, and a reader who catches it gains nothing, cut it. Allusion for its own sake is just showing your bookshelf.
Its Reputation
It’s in most rankings of the best horror films of the 1980s, alongside The Thing and The Evil Dead, and it built a following on home video that has never gone away. Two sequels followed, Bride of Re-Animator in 1990 and Beyond Re-Animator in 2003, both with Combs and neither well regarded. Gordon spent decades trying to make a fourth.
An IMDb score of 7.1 understates its standing, since gore films collect low votes from viewers who wandered in by accident. The critical numbers are much higher.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Re-Animator takes a minor, half-joking story by a famous author and treats it as a chance to invent instead of a text to protect. Sometimes the best source material is the weak material, because nobody will mind what you change. When you adapt, look past the work everyone loves to the work nobody defends, since the neglected story leaves you room to invent.
Is Re-Animator worth watching?
If you like horror comedy, the consensus is emphatic. IMDb users have it at 7.1, critics rate it far higher, and Jeffrey Combs’s Herbert West is one of the genre’s great performances. It’s extremely gory and it isn’t solemn about any of it.
There’s no rating from me on this page, since I haven’t seen it.
The 7.1 looks low to me for a film with a performance this good at its center, and the critics’ numbers back that up. My one reservation is the gore, which I suspect outruns the jokes in places. Combs, the cheek of that score and Gordon’s freedom with a minor Lovecraft story are enough to put it on my list anyway.
