Re-Animator

Re-Animator is the funniest horror film ever made and the joke is always, precisely, that Herbert West is correct.

Jeffrey Combs's performance is the film and it is one of the great comic turns in the genre: a small, intense, humourless man in a waistcoat who is never once being funny on purpose. He does not cackle, he does not monologue and he is not mad in any theatrical sense. He is a scientist with a working result and an administration that will not approve it, and every appalling thing he does is a reasonable next step given the previous one. His irritation is the engine. When he tells Dan that he was busy and that the cat was dead already, the delivery is pure annoyed professional.

Gordon came out of Chicago theatre and directs this like a farce — doors, timing, people hiding bodies from each other, a dinner that must not be interrupted — and plays the gore as slapstick without ever softening it. The violence is extreme, the practical effects are magnificent, and the audience is laughing. That combination has been attempted a hundred times since and almost never works, and the reason it works here is that nobody in the film is in on it.

The Hill material is where it goes furthest

David Gale's Dr Carl Hill is the film's actual villain — a senior academic who steals West's research, lobotomises a colleague and has a long-standing interest in a student — and after West removes his head with a shovel, the film reanimates the head and the body separately and has one direct the other. Gale plays a severed head with enormous dignity.

The scene everyone knows, in which Hill's head assaults the restrained Barbara Crampton, is the film's single worst decision and the one that gets it pulled from recommendations. It is played for a laugh, Crampton has spoken about shooting it, and it is genuinely indefensible on its own terms. The film is otherwise remarkably good company.

The practical effects

Unrated on release because the MPAA could not be satisfied, and still extraordinary: a reanimated cat, a lobotomy, a head in a tray, intestines with intent, and the morgue sequence, which involved dozens of performers in full prosthetics and about twenty-five gallons of fake blood. Richard Band's score is a deliberate, unapologetic parody of Bernard Herrmann's Psycho theme.

For the same creator ruined by his own result, The Fly and Frankenstein; for the same practical-gore maximalism with jokes, Evil Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

The short answer: Hill, reanimated and in two pieces, takes over the hospital morgue and uses West's reagent on every corpse in it, building himself an army of lobotomised dead and taking Megan Halsey. Dan and West come after her. Megan's reanimated father Alan Halsey — lobotomised by Hill earlier and still, somewhere in there, her father — turns on Hill and tears his body apart, which is the film's one genuinely moving beat. West injects Hill's head with an enormous overdose of the reagent; the head's body ruptures and Hill's intestines grab West and drag him down, and he is still shouting instructions as he goes. Megan is killed in the chaos. Dan, alone in the morgue with her body and a case of syringes, does exactly what the film has spent ninety minutes establishing that a man in this position does. He injects her. The last thing in the film is Megan's scream over a cut to black.

What is the reagent in Re-Animator?

A glowing green serum of West's own design that restores function to dead tissue. It works — that is the film's premise and it never wavers — but it restores animation rather than the person: the reanimated are violent, confused, enormously strong and not themselves, and the film's running argument is West's insistence that this is a dosage and freshness problem rather than a fundamental one. He is, by the standards of the evidence in the film, not obviously wrong.

How does Dr Hill survive decapitation?

He does not survive it; he is reanimated after it. West kills him with a shovel, then injects the head and the body separately, and both animate. The head retains Hill's intelligence, his memory and his speech; the body retains strength and obeys the head, carrying it in a tray. Hill also keeps the one ability West does not have — he had been researching the reagent himself, and in his reanimated state he can control other reanimated corpses, which is what lets him take the morgue.

What happens to Megan Halsey?

She is restrained by Hill, assaulted by his severed head, and freed when her reanimated father attacks Hill. She is then killed during the morgue sequence. The film ends with Dan Cain injecting her with the reagent in the empty morgue, and her scream is the final shot — which is both the correct ending and an unambiguously terrible outcome, because the audience has watched what the reagent produces for ninety minutes.

Is Herbert West the villain of Re-Animator?

No, and the film is clear about it. Dr Hill is the villain: he plagiarises, he performs an unauthorised lobotomy to silence a man, and his interest in Megan predates the supernatural entirely. West is a monster in effect and a careerist in motive — he wants the credit, the data and to be left alone to work. The film's position is that the only truly predatory person in it is the tenured one.

How faithful is it to Lovecraft?

It takes the premise, the names Herbert West and Dan Cain, Miskatonic University and the serial structure, and discards the tone completely. Lovecraft's "Herbert West–Reanimator" was written as a paid serial he regarded as hack work, is grim and humourless, and runs to the First World War. Gordon moved it to 1985, invented Hill, Megan and the morgue, and made it a comedy — which is why it is the best Lovecraft adaptation and the least Lovecraftian.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 092 is the most gleeful score in the index — 104 of 105 works score lower. The film is a comedy throughout, the gore is staged as slapstick, and it is having an enormous amount of fun.

Viscera 090 is near the ceiling — only 6 works score higher. A decapitation, a lobotomy, a reanimated head in a tray, a body torn open, intestines used as a weapon, and a morgue full of prosthetics.

Pace 078 is very fast — 102 works are slower. It runs eighty-six minutes and is structured like a farce.

Era bias 024 reads analog — 38 works score lower. 1985 latex, animatronics, in-camera effects, optical compositing and a score cut on tape.

The threat at 030 is on the supernatural side — 35 works score lower, which is arguable: the reagent is science-fictional rather than occult, and the two men using it are entirely human.

Reality anchor 040 is grounded — 26 works score lower. A university, a hospital, a basement and a morgue, all obeying ordinary geography.

On jump scares: almost none. The film would rather make you laugh and then show you something.