We’re on the 27th post for 31 Days of Halloween, and this time the topic is Stuart Gordon’s 1985 classic Re-Animator. It is one of my favorite Lovecraft adaptations because it swerves so far away from some Lovecraftian tropes that it becomes a commentary on the aesthetics of Lovecraft.
It’s also a filthy, perverted film, and I believe we need to be more honest about our love of these things. So, let your freak flag fly, and let me know what pervert cinema you swear by, alright?
This is going to be a safe space, okay?
I am going to talk about my deep love of garbage, sleazy movies, and, in turn, I will not judge you when you inevitably comment and share your guilty cinema sins, because why wouldn’t you? This is a safe space, after all.
Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) is an elevated example of what I call pervert cinema. If you are anything like me, and I know I am, you may also know this by other terms, such as drive-in fare, midnight movies, mutant movies, or, in more polite company, “cult cinema.” These are the dirty, awful, cheap little films that we watch late at night when we are alone, maybe with a remote handy in case someone walks in on us consuming our filth. The types of movies with, as Joe Bob Briggs describes, “blood, breasts, and beasts.” Often they’re not great works of art, but there are those which transcend and come to carry more meaning and respect than other films of their ilk.
These are the types of movies found on cheap Roku movie streaming apps that have dedicated sections for sexy, murderous nun films, or softcore pornographic slashers where there is a knife, gallons of fake blood, and plenty of excuses for topless women. Re-Animator is of the ilk, but elevated – yet still has that oily, perverted sheen that makes it a film you probably don’t want to watch among the regular folks. Unless you are me, watching it at 2 P.M. with my apartment windows wide open. It’s a dominance thing.
Re-Animator is a dirty little movie that happens to be very, very good. It features great writing, fantastic effects, excellent performances, and still manages to be something that makes you feel a little weird for enjoying.
The Anti-Body Horror of H.P. Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft, the original author of the 1922 “Herbert West – Re-Animator” stories that inspired this 1985 adaptation, was not a man interested in the body. If the man could go through his life without eating, I feel like he would have opted for that. His writing, occasionally dipping into repulsive imagery, isn’t overly concerned with the body, but with larger, often more fearfully racist ideas. Lovecraft’s fiction thrives on terror rather than building on physical revulsion. So the choice to adapt one of his more iconic stories as a horny body horror production is fairly fascinating. Almost as though the adaptational choice is a form of commentary pointed at Lovecraft.
Lovecraft hated his work on “Herbert West – Re-Animator,” treating it as paycheck schlock to get him through the diminishing fortunes of his family. His horror was cold and calculated, concerned with lofty ideas and his numerous anxieties. Enter producer Brian Yuzna, director Stuart Gordon, and screenwriter Dennis Paoli, who take a work from the cold, clinical, asexual Lovecraft and throw it into the meat grinder of 1980s low-budget pop horror that absolutely thrived on the warm, gooey, and sexual: Lovecraft gone wild.
What was once a clinically depicted riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein becomes grindhouse excellence. I have a complex relationship with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and I have a deep admiration for just how hard Re-Animator swings from him, while still recognizing and building on his work.
Herbert West: The Asexual Pervert
Part of the success of Re-Animator as a work of film is that nobody performing in it treats it as a lesser film, and especially not the lead actor, Jeffrey Combs, as Herbert West. Perversion takes on many forms, and while we may often get hung up on the blood, breasts, and beasts, there are deeper perversions.
Herbert West is the biggest pervert of the film. Yes, more so than the sinister Dr. Hill (David Gale), who tries to orally rape Meg (Barbara Crampton) with his own severed head. I know that is a bold claim; Hill’s case looks shocking, horrific, and a sinister inversion of the erotic on celluloid. It is one of the film’s most iconic scenes, and genuinely one of the funniest in terms of black humor. It gets people talking. It’s peak pervert cinema: an actor delivering a diabolical monologue as a severed head while a headless corpse fumbles, trying to perform one of the most grotesque sex acts imaginable.
But West’s perversion is headier and speaks to capital ‘T’ themes that evoke the actual work of Lovecraft. Tune in for the nasty, gross scene; stay for the consideration of what true evil actually is (it’s not just the horny severed head, folks).
Herbert West is a complete monster, driven by very human emotions of pride and envy that cause him to do the most perverted thing presented in the film: tampering in God’s domain of life and death at any cost. Herbert West doesn’t recognize people, only opportunities. With Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) he sees a resource in the form of a basement and later a coerced assistant. With a cat, he sees a test subject. The dead themselves are not immune to West’s research-driven thinking. When Meg’s father dies in an accident, West does not hesitate to use the man as another test subject.
It can be hard to really weigh West’s perversion against, say, Dr. Hill, given the immediate shock of him trying to assault Meg, nude and strapped to a dissection table. The immediate vulnerability and grotesqueness of the mingling of horror and sex really proves effective. But in the long run, due to the strength of the film, West’s evil really does stand out as the pinnacle of perversion and speaks to the overall quality of the production.
Art of the Artless
Re-Animator is sleaze with intent and care. They took a lesser, but still iconic Lovecraftian story and adapted it to the perverted cinema style that exploded in the 1980s with the care and attention of theater kids who understood tension, pacing, and juxtaposition. It is staged sleaze excellence that embraces the fact that sometimes what audiences really want is the stuff they might not want to share with polite company.
I know I have spent this whole time elevating sleaze, but that is just to show that the depraved can be divine. Re-Animator can be a gateway drug that gets you hooked on some real trash and is worth a try.
But now I am curious. Comment on this post with your examples of pervert cinema that you love. Any Russ Meyer fans reading this? Sound off. There are more of us out there than you know.
With the general success of the re-release of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) back into cinemas, I think there may be hope for us perverts and our dirty movies finding broader acceptance yet.
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Ya know I’m not even sure if I’ve watched a sleazy movie. Which if ya know me is either not surprising or entirely surprising; because im a horny vixen, but i also don’t watch much. I’ve seen my fair share of slashers, but those are too well known and loved, I think.