Transformations in Re-Animator: Body Horror at its Finest
By Tabby Knight (Instagram - tabby.knight6)
Artwork by Dy Dawson, @xgardensinspace
I love Re-Animator. Iâm in love with it. Seriously, disgustingly, violently in love with it. If I could marry a film, itâd be Re-Animator (and Iâd be sure to court it firstâflowers, chocolates, disembodied hearts floating in jars, the works). If I could marry a character in a film, itâd be Herbert West, which probably indicatesânot that I needed an indicationâthat thereâs something really very wrong with me as a human being.
But the heart wants what it wants, and ever since I watched Stuart Gordonâs 1985 splatter-fest as a bloodthirsty undergrad, streaming the film in low quality on my cracked, ageing iPhone, my heart has wanted Re-Animator. I love everything about the film, from its lead characters to its buckets of blood to its ridiculous, oh-so-quotable moments of barefaced comedy (âYouâll never get credit for my discovery. Whoâs going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow.â) and I know just about everything about it, too. Iâve seen its sequels (Brideâs a messy triumph, we donât speak about Beyond) watched interviews, deleted scenes, actor and director commentaries, the works. Iâve also tracked down just about every other horror film featuring the dynamic duo of Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, seeking something of the same calibre to scratch that gory itch. A few films have come close, but none so far have surpassed it. As a lifelong viewer of 80âs corn-syrup gore, I can assure you that Re-Animator is unmatched. It stands alone.
Thereâs a lot of talk about Re-Animator as a cult classic, and rightly so. Thereâs also talk about it as a comedy (true) a splatter film (also true) and a landmark of Lovecraftian canon (absolutely). But what I donât see talked about as much, is that itâs a pretty impressive piece of transformation horrorâverging on body horror, reallyâin the same vein as Jekyll and Hyde, The Fly, or American Werewolf in London.
At its core, Re-Animator is a film about uncontrollable, transforming bodies, both the obvious and the subtle. From its opening sequence (Doctor Gruberâs freaky, bulging eyes that explode right out of his head) to its final, blood-soaked showdown, the body is a constant site of change.
There is, first and foremost, the transformations brought about by Herbert Westâs re-agent: the re-animation of the tranquil dead to aggressive, violent zombies. By that same token, the re-agent also transitions Dean Halsey from a rational human being into a creature who mindlessly kidnaps, restrains and strips his own daughter, and aids Doctor Hillâs transition from a creepy, unethical professor to an all-out, murderous sexual predator (albeit a decapitated one).
But there are also the subtle changes. Danâs patients are always in motion, crossing over from life to death (itâs funny to think that in a film set primarily in a hospital, none of the patients on display actually make it out alive) and the bodies in the morgue are always shown in transitional states of rot and decay. Almost every shot of a body (or its parts) displays these changing states in full detail, a constant reminder of human fragilityâour own lack of control over our own bodies, and the inevitable breakdown of the flesh.
But my favourite transformationâand perhaps the most criminally overlookedâdoesnât actually occur in the body at all. Or at least, not at first glance. Itâs the transformation we see in All-American good guy Dan Cain: our squeaky-clean med student protagonist, and eventual accomplice to Herbertâs maniacal experiments. At the start of the film, Dan appears to have it all. Good career prospects, a super cute girlfriend (Megan Halsey, Iâm in love with you) and what appears to be a fairly concrete spot on the Deanâs List: Dean Halsey even goes so far as to describe him as one of Miskatonicâs most promising studentsâno mean feat, considering heâs regularly bedding the ultra-conservative Deanâs only daughter. The only identifiable flaw in his apple pie life would appear to be his inner struggle with mortality. Not his own, you understand, but that of his patients. He refuses to accept that dead is emphatically, irrevocably dead. And of course, itâs this struggle that sets up the rest of the film.
Throughout Re-Animatorâs speedy 90-minute runtime, we see Dan transition almost seamlessly from an upstanding member of society to a man who willingly injects a volatile substance into the corpse of his dead girlfriend, despite knowing full well what the consequences will be. In essence, he transforms from a regular guy into an all-out monster. Granted, heâs a monster with a conscience (we see that very clearly in Bride of Re-Animator) but arguably, so are your American Werewolves and Brundleflies.
In fact, you could argue Danâs a little bit worse than most transformative monsters: Danâs conscience, such as it is, always seems to disappear when faced with the prospect of his own self-interest. Despite all his prior reservations, his reluctance to revive Dean Halsey (until it suits him) his fury at Herbertâs murder and resurrection of Doctor Hill, all of it seems to dissipate in the face of Megâs death. Then, suddenly, thereâs no hesitation, no ethics. He barely hesitates in retrieving the reagent, measuring up the dose, or injecting Meg in the brain stem. His transformationâman to monsterâis complete. And he didnât even have to shed his skin to do it.
This is, in part, what I think is missing from the 1989 sequel, Bride of Re-Animator (aside from Stuart Gordon in the directorâs chair). Brideâs a good movie, and I like it a lot, even if it does lag a little somewhere around the middle. But what really lets it down is the absence of that underlying transformative arc â we as an audience arenât particularly unnerved by Danâs second descent into medical madness, because itâs not exactly shocking or new. Weâve already seen the very worst he could do first time around, and anything Bride tries to offer us naturally falls short. A better direction for the sequel might have been a role reversalâmaybe Herbert gains something of a conscience while Dan continues to lose his? But then of course, thereâs the risk that Herbert might also lose some of the callous edge that makes him such an iconic anti-hero (and makes me love him so, so much). Itâd be a fine line to walk, and interestingly some fanworks do a great job of it, but itâs never quite transferred to the realm of sequel film.
For me, itâll always come back to that final shotâthe plunge of the Re-agent filled syringe before Barbara Cramptonâs iconic scream and the dramatic cut to black. Thereâs only one ending that comes close to scratching the same depraved itch in my strange little brain, and thatâs the closing line in Stephen Kingâs Pet Semetary:
ââŚDarling.â
