Re-Animator (1985)
- Andrew Smith
- May 27
- 7 min read
"Herbert West Has A Very Good Head On His Shoulders... And Another One In A Dish On His Desk"
Plot
Talented medical student Herbert West has discovered a serum that re-animates dead bodies, though his previous human experiment in Switzerland ended in catastrophe. West goes to an American college where he moves in with student Daniel Cain. Immediately suspicious of West, it isn’t until Cain stumbles upon an experiment with a dead cat that he begins to believe in the serum. But when word of this discovery gets out to renowned brain research Dr Carl Hill and he tries to get his hands on the serum, West and Cain find themselves in an ever-worsening situation involving murder and reanimated bodies.
Review
Cult classics don’t come much more cult than Stuart Gordon’s legendary 1985 horror-comedy Re-Animator. Perfecting the art of black comedy to a tee, Re-Animator is based upon the Herbert West–Reanimator short stories by famous horror master H. P. Lovecraft which is a Frankenstein-style tale about a scientist who believes he can bring the dead to life by injecting them with a re-agent serum that he has designed. As we know from the world of literature, meddling in things that humans can’t comprehend doesn’t end well and this is no exception. Re-Animator would never be made today. It was a labour of love from a team of people which was a lot like the effort that Sam Raimi and co. put into The Evil Dead. With low budgets forcing the makers to get creative and practical in their approaches, the films took the genre by storm. Whilst it often gets overlooked in favour of Raimi’s ground-breaking debut film, Re-Animator has rightly been heralded as the genre-busting favourite it has become and I was genuinely surprised to see famous critic Roger Ebert, who was notoriously tough on this kind of material, loved it. He gave it a highly constructive, positive review, which was practically unheard of for such genre material.
Things all start off innocently and sensibly and low key and the narrative plays things straight. Cain is naturally suspicious of his new flatmate, but he doesn't cross the threshold into believing West's theories until a very specific, incredibly messy point in the film which really kicks off the carnage you’re about to see: the scene involving the dead cat in the basement. This is where Re-Animator proudly stands up to be counted. Cain goes down into the basement and stumbles into a literal wrestling match between West and a violently reanimated screeching feline. It's not just a plot device to convince Cain but it’s a mission statement for the entire film’s tone. It’s at this moment where Re-Animator’s use of slapstick comedy truly materialises. Think about the mechanics of what we're watching. Reanimating a dead pet is inherently grotesque and it taps into very real human grief and revulsion. But Gordon approaches the staging like a Buster Keaton routine. By relying on physical comedy and chaotic sight gags, the director is essentially hot-wiring the audience's brain. Slapstick disarms our natural fear response. When you introduce a chaotic, clumsy, physical struggle into a scenario that should be terrifying, it forces a cognitive dissonance. The audience is looking at something dark, but the execution is so absurd that the tension has nowhere to go but out through laughter. However, the characters don’t just stay in the basement fighting dead cats and soon all hell breaks loose across the campus.
Combining gut-wrenching home-grown splatter and fiendish “you shouldn’t laugh but you will” comedy is never an easy feat in the horror genre, but Re-Animator gets the mix spot on. The blood is notoriously plentiful. We are talking gallons upon gallons of it, but crucially, it is never presented with absolute, gritty realism. It's just a little too bright, a little too thick, leaning into a cartoony aesthetic rather than a sinister one. When the violence erupts, it is so over the top, so structurally excessive, that the audience's brain processes it as a spectacle rather than a trauma. We aren't watching a documentary about a surgical mishap. We’re watching a grand theatrical performance involving electric surgical saws, chaotic zombies and geysers of fake blood. But because the film understands its own silliness, it doesn't try to ground the violence and misery; it just rides the wave of its own outlandish premise. Now it's worth noting that upon its release in 1985, Re-Animator was considered one of the goriest films ever made. It was famously butchered by the censors for its initial VHS release, just so rental stores would carry it. Yet when you watch it today, alongside modern, oppressive gore fests like the Saw franchise, Re-Animator almost feels a little quaint - a wild word to use for a movie where a guy gets decapitated with a shovel! It’s purely because the film lacks that heavy sadistic cruelty. The violence is a punchline, an escalation of the absurdity, rather than an exercise in punishing the viewer.
All this cartoony blood and slapstick carnage means absolutely nothing if the actors don't deliver it perfectly. A script can be perfectly balanced on the page, but if an actor winks at the camera, the illusion shatters. I can’t give enough praise here to the entire cast, specifically Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West. The linchpin of the entire franchise, his delivery is brilliant and slightly insane. From his first frame, Combs possesses this magnetic, erratic energy. He can never quite predict how he's going to react to a problem which keeps the audience entirely off balance. Combs' absolute commitment to the reality of the story and the science behind it really grounds the film, especially as he plays West entirely deadpan. The cardinal rule of this specific type of comedy is that the characters cannot be in on the joke. The situations they find themselves in are aggressively loopy and daft, but by playing the role with total earnestness, Combs grounds the absurdity. West isn't trying to be funny. He is a deeply serious man constantly frustrated by the physical limitations of the dead tissue he's working with. The comedy is entirely generated by his serious reaction to a ridiculous situation. When you watch a character like this, do you root for him, or do you hate him? Combs’ West is a difficult man to hate but you really should based upon how he treats anyone who comes into his circle. They're tools at his disposal, nothing more.
Speaking of serious reactions to ridiculous situations, a massive amount of credit needs to be given to the late David Gale, who plays the antagonist, Dr. Carl Hill. Gale spends a significant portion of this film acting as a decapitated head sitting in a surgical tray full of blood. Meanwhile, his headless body is stumbling around the room, blindly trying to carry out tasks for him. It's the ultimate execution of the site gags I mentioned earlier. Try to imagine the sheer physical and logistical comedy of filming that. You have a serious actor delivering sinister, authoritative dialogue while his head is resting in a pan, barking orders at a stuntman who is bumping into medical equipment. It takes a terrifying concept, a reanimated corpse, and turns it into a bizarre workplace comedy. But the film also pushes boundaries in ways that are deliberately meant to shock the audience. Barbara Crampton, who plays Megan, Cain's love interest, needs credit for her role in establishing the film's reputation for unapologetic shock value and cemented in 80s excess. She's visually appealing and she has nude scenes, but she is infamously the centrepiece of a perversely funny sequence that gives a completely new definition to the phrase “getting head.” It’s one of the most outrageous things put to film in that decade, a deliberate provocation by the makers of the film to stretch the B-movie elements past their logical breaking point – would the audience go along for the ride for this scene so late in the film? Hell yes is the answer!
One final note which really needs highlighting as to the impact it is has is the film's score. During the opening credits, the tone is immediately dictated by composer Richard Band's theme music; a highly overt, none-too-subtle reworking of Bernard Herrmann's legendary score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. It’s the icing on top of a very blood-soaked cake.
Final Verdict
Re-Animator works not just as a crazy movie, but as a triumph of a very specific era of filmmaking alchemy. It’s a true labour of love from Stuart Gordon and his crew, with the best direct parallels being with the relentless, inventive energy that Sam Raimi and his team poured into The Evil Dead a few years prior. Both had shoestring budgets. Both couldn't afford to fix things in post-production. If they wanted a headless body to walk across a room, they had figured out how to build a rig and film it practically right there on the set. This tangible, practical effort is what defines the era. It forced a level of on-the-fly creativity that gives the film its texture. Everything you see on screen, no matter how absurd, physically existed in a room in front of a camera. It's real. While Re-Animator sometimes lives in the shadow of The Evil Dead in mainstream discussions, it deserves to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it as a masterclass in genre busting. Any self-respecting horror fan should see Re-Animator. From the decade that brought us so many classic B-movie splatter flicks, it’s a twisted little film which comes with a massive reputation and delivers every second of its running time. A must see.
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Re-Animator Director(s): Stuart Gordon Writer(s): H.P. Lovecraft (story "Herbert West, Re-Animator"), Dennis Paoli (screenplay), William Norris (screenplay), Stuart Gordon (screenplay) Actor(s): Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, Peter Kent, Ian Patrick Williams Duration: 86 mins |  |
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