Re-Animator
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“Herbert West, Reanimator,” by H. P. Lovecraft
SCREEN:
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Re-Animator, directed by Stuart Gordon
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It is a rare privilege for a storyteller’s efforts to have such a distinctive style that their very name becomes an adjective for describing a specific but recognizable flavor in other works. If someone says a novel is “Tolkeinesque,” even people who’ve never read The Lord of the Rings know they can expect a fantasy world with elves and dwarves and goblins and various quests for various items of power. If a reviewer bandies about the term “Lynchian,” you know the movie they’re referring to is most likely filled with all manner of weird stuff and difficult to follow, dream-like plots. And, of course, there’s Kafka, a man whose writing strikes such a strong chord that it is almost impossible to think of him as a person who came before the adjective, instead imagining that he wrote the sort of things he did because, cursed with a name like that, he had no other choice.
Then there’s Lovecraft, who, while not quite on the same level as Kafka, still managed to carve out a unique niche in the horror genre, with stories that were not quite like anything that had been before, and whose disturbing effects have never been precisely replicated, despite a legion of slavish imitators. It’s difficult to describe precisely what makes him so distinct. There’s the narrative voice, which no matter who the narrator is always sounds like a prissy Englishman just three stops short of Crazy Town. There are the exotic names and mythologies for monsters who remain, by and large, tantalizingly out of focus but far too close to the surface. What always gets to me is the sheer scope and size that Lovecraft is able to convey; vertigo is generally considered a visually-inspired sensation, but there are sentences in some of his better stories that terrify you with their alien vastness, and the inconsequential nature of your own infinitesimally pointless existence. There are no heroes in his oeuvre. Just men who, either through their own choice or pure chance, are given brief glimpses of the maddening void that lurks behind the shadows; some go mad, others are devoured, (Or “disappear.” I can think of few things more unpleasant than to “disappear” in a Lovecraft story.) but none escape unchanged.
“Herbert West- Re-Animator” doesn’t deal much in the cosmos, and while its narrator is quite possibly mental, and writes in the baroque phrasings of a man getting paid by the participle, it’s not a particularly good example of Lovecraft’s work. Written in serial format, it tells the story of Herbert West (duh) and the narrator, West’s oddly faithful assistant, as the two men attempt to bring the dead back to life. The story is divided into six parts, each part being relatively self-contained, with all but the last pulling your interest ahead by hints of dreadful doings in installments yet to come.
Those dreadful doings never quite appear, which is one of the story’s more obvious flaws; read individually, each section packs a nice little punch, but when pushed together, the cumulative effect can’t help but be anti-climactic. There is neat stuff here, but it’s paced in such a way that there’s no sense of rising dread like in the best of Lovecraft’s work. He clearly tries to build up to something, and the last segment ends in a way that combines all the horrors of the previous ones, but it’s at best a partial success. The pacing is off; and while it’s clear that has more to do with the original format of the tale than any true fault in the writing, this doesn’t keep the piece from being anything more than a minor entry in the author’s canon.
Section One (“From the Dark”) finds us with West’s unnamed assistant, as he describes the first horrific results of West’s mad vision. After a number of successful experiments with small animals, West decides it is time to make a human test; but he is convinced that they need the freshest corpse possible in order to reanimate a body with a nearly intact brain (thus making the newly undeadened capable of rational thought and communication). They are soon “blessed” with just such a corpse, a twenty-something drowning victim in otherwise good health, and they quickly take hold of it. When the body fails to respond to an initial treatment of West’s serum, the two medical students (for West and his assistant were both attending Miskatonic University at the time) go off into another room to try and find a new formula that will have more positive results. However, it turns out the initial dosing worked after all, and they are startled from their work by cries from the room with the “corpse” in it. As the two men flee, a lantern is knocked over and the abandoned house burns to the ground. They tell themselves that their experiment burned as well, but there are troubling hints to the contrary; and from then on, West is plagued by a constant fear of being followed…
The next five installments follow the same basic structure, charting the most vivid disasters their experiments create over the course of the protagonists’ lives. West continues his hunt for fresher corpses, while his assistant continues to wring his hands but still go along with West’s schemes, even after he is convinced that West killed someone in attempt to further his studies. I found this part of the story rather difficult to believe, personally. Not that West would commit murder to achieve his goals; the character is little more than obsession personified, and I’d believe him capable of anything. The fact that his assistant is so loyal is puzzling, though. Since the story is narrated from the “present”- as in, the assistant is telling us all these things after they occurred, and after West himself has disappeared- it’s possible to believe that his dread in describing them is more a current condition than one of the time; perhaps while things were happening, he truly was so fascinated by what his cohort was trying to achieve that he could get beyond the essential horror and destruction that followed them at every step. Still, when West stoops to murder- and he does so halfway through the tale- the implausibility level shoots up. The assistant says he was “afraid” of West, as though that were some sort of excuse as to why he remained, but that doesn’t make much sense. Due to the ambiguous nature of the story’s conclusion, it’s possible that Lovecraft was trying to suggest the fallibility of his narrator at an early stage, but there’s nothing else to indicate this, so I’d say it was a failed attempt.
It is worth mentioning that horror and destruction, though. In many ways, this tale owes a great deal to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; not only in its basic concept, of a man (or men, in this case) rooting through graves to solve the mystery of death, but also in it’s automatic moral judgment of anyone who would dare try such a thing. Viewed dispassionately, there seems to be nothing wrong with what West is trying to accomplish. Unlike Shelley’s creation, he’s not even trying to create new life, but rather to return life to the no longer living. But even this is bad mojo, as though to even approach the boundary between the two states of being is to immediately bring doom upon one’s head. Every one of West’s experiments, in the end, goes wrong somehow, and they go the most wrong when they actually succeed- the beings he returns to life are not just empty of souls, they are violent and murderous, as though they somehow comprehend their state and know they are damned, and are driven to evil because of it. The point, I think (if there is a point- Lovecraft was largely writing this for the money, and while that doesn’t mean it’s thematically blank, we can’t expect the same sort of complexity we find in his other work), is that life without the soul is wrong in a way we can barely comprehend. Wrong like a rip down the middle of Nature.
Before moving on to the movie, it’s worth mentioning that this story has one of the most blatant runs of Lovecraft’s racism that I’ve found. (Or that I can remember, which right now is sort of the same thing.) The third section, “Six Shots by Moonlight,” deals with West’s attempt to resurrect an African American man who died in a boxing match. Not to get to into it, but the description of the guy is pretty vicious; even before West goes to work on the body, his assistant is repulsed by the man’s “ape-like” appearance. Ugly stuff and, in its way, more unpleasant than any of the made up horrors which surround it.
Overall, this wasn’t a terrible read; the serial nature was a drawback, especially considering the number of times you have to read summaries of things you just read, but there are a few spooky moments. The ending is very odd. The narrator describes West being dragged away by a group of his former experiments through his basement wall, but then tells us that the police won’t believe him, since the wall appears untouched. Up until this point, there’s been no uncertainty as to the validity of the narrator’s word- are we supposed to doubt him now? Or just be unnerved that the creatures were able to cover their tracks so well? Neither way really works; one can’t help but wonder if Lovecraft just threw it in to confuse us. In any case, the piece as a whole is not the sort that will linger on in the imagination once you passed it over.
Not so with the film it inspired, H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator, a movie that holds the opposing titles of being both One of the Best Lovecraft Adaptations Ever as well as The Movie Based on Lovecraft’s Work That Would Horrify Him the Most If He Ever Saw It. (Or TMBOLWTWHHTMIHESI.) (Gesundheit!) In fact, if you know anything about the writer at all (and have never read the supposed source material), it’s hard to watch the movie and imagine the title is anything but a marketing gimmick. There’s tons of gore, which Lovecraft never liked, sex, which he may or may not have liked but certainly never used in his work, and, dare I say it, a sense of black humor so sharp it’ll take your eye out. I’ve read a lot of Lovecraft’s work. I can’t think of a funny bit in any of it, unless you count some of the regional dialect, and I’m fairly certain that’s not intentional humorous.
I think the first time I heard of Re-Animator was in the introduction to a Stephen King book, although I’ll be damned if I can remember which one. They were talking about that scene (and if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about), and while I’m not sure I understood what I was reading at the time, the name of the movie stuck in my head. It’s the sort of movie, like Evil Dead 2 or the original Dawn of the Dead, that you really have to see at some point if you want to call yourself a horror fan, or a cult movie fan. I can vaguely remember the time I saw it, back at my parents old house; I’d rented an old beat-up VHS, and it was raining outside. I liked it a lot, I think. I dunno. It’d be nice if movies like this left impact craters in your mind, so when you get all nostalgic about your first time with them, you could actually provide data that wasn’t so full of holes. (I’m not even sure if the version I saw was the edited version or not.)
I do know that the Elite DVD- the original, not the two disc set (which has most of the same stuff that the original had on it anyway)- was one of the first things I bought on eBay. Man was I psyched to get my hands on that. Great DVD too, with some terrific commentary tracks and deleted scenes.
But yeah, about that review… Re-Animator is the story of Herbert West’s (Jeffrey Combs) obsessive struggle to bring life to dead tissue. His study begins in Europe with a Dr. Gruber, who we see dying horribly before the opening credits; I’ve seen the movie five or six times at this point, but I’m still not entirely sure if Gruber dies of natural causes or if he injected himself with the re-animation fluid while he was still alive. Either way, it goes badly for him, with West by his side trying to record as much information as possible before the shocked eyes of the local police.
We then switch to our other main character, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), a med student desperately trying to revive a patient in an emergency ward. He continues CPR even after the doctor on duty declares the victim dead, and when he finally backs off, he’s told that he needs to learn to let go. So, we have one man obsessed with curing death, and another man obsessed with holding onto hope of life for as long as possible. I wonder if there’s any way for these two men to meet?
Huzzah! When Dan brings the corpse down to the morgue, he interrupts Dr. Hill (the late David Gale) autopsying a patient with his laser invention, which will come into play later; more importantly Dan is there when Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson) brings in the latest transfer to the university, Herbert West. And the rest, really, is history.
Okay, not so much. Basically, West rents a room in Dan’s apartment, much to the dismay of Dan’s girlfriend (the incredibly brave Barbara Crampton), and unpleasant things start happening. The girlfriend, Meagan, eventually discovers Dan’s cat dead in West’s small fridge, and we’re never entirely sure if West killed the cat or not. Well, all right, we probably are sure; he talks fast enough, but his answers are all a trifle too convenient to be real. Dan, however, is pacified by them, and ignores his girlfriend’s fears.
Things get weirder. Dan discovers West’s experimenting in the basement (on the dead-undead-dead cat), is convinced of their importance, and tries to get Dean Halsey’s support, which provokes Halsey into expelling West and canceling Dan’s student loans, which will force him to leave school as well. Of all the scenes in the movie, this one has always rung false to me. Dan is making an honest attempt to tell an authority figure about a potentially groundbreaking discovery, and Halsey listens to him for all of five minutes before flipping out. Granted, his biggest reaction is when Dan mentions Megan- who happens to be the Dean’s daughter- but it still seems extremely out of place. There have been no negative affects to the school (yet…), no one’s been hurt, no property damage, and yet the man’s treating Cain as though he has been giving out Novril in the Children’s Ward. It seems like a throw-back to the original story, when even the idea of tampering in god’s domain was instantly repulsive, but even in the story, West and his assistant aren’t kicked out of school. It’s a weirdly Puritanical moment that manages to even outdo the strict morality of its source material, and considering what happens during the rest of the movie, it’s fairly baffling. Obviously you’re supposed to sympathize with Dan, and understand how he’s driven even more to work with West; but surely it would’ve been possible to achieve that without being quite this hamfisted about it. At the very least, a few more signs that Halsey was overprotective of his daughter might’ve helped.
Things really go to hell at this point, when Dan sneaks West into the morgue so they can try out the serum on a human subject. Why they’d want to do this, considering the re-agent turned the friendly cat into a furry ball from hell, I’m not sure, but it is the next step forward; and the subject is successfully revived, although he immediately goes on a rampage. Dean Halsey arrives at precisely the worst moment, first getting being crushed by a steel door, and then strangled to death by the still raving corpse. This sequence is one of my favorite in the film, from the way the re-animated body moves around, to West’s calm, intensely practical method of killing it, to Dan’s collapse into shock and West’s covering him with a sheet, consoling him with the knowledge that they got the whole thing on audio-tape- it’s great stuff. Halsey gets injected with the serum, and West passes off the whole thing as the Dean’s fault, saying he went on a rampage and attacked them both; no one knows what, exactly, is wrong with Halsey, although Meg has her suspicions, and the man is sent to a padded room under the care of the villainous Dr. Hill.
Lots more bad stuff happens after this, including a beheading, inverted necrophilia (with a visual pun!), attacking accident victims, a squished head, really aggressive intestines, and a downer ending that works best if you ignore that it’s largely lifted from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Nearly everyone ends up dead, or if not dead, so psychologically mucked up that they probably wished they were. Good times had by all.
So what is it that makes this movie so great? Well, like I said, it’s very funny. West gets a number of choice one-liners (“What would a note say? ‘Cat dead- details later’?”), but many of the attack sequences, like the zombie cat, manage to be funny and freaky at the same time. There’s that visual pun I mentioned, plus a lot of goofy little touches that work very well. I’m sure the most hardened audiences (ignore awful pun here) wouldn’t find it particularly scary, but I can say that the funnier parts mesh excellently with the horror stuff, so that even if the movie is never all that terrifying, it never loses it’s edge.
Lots of gore in their too. Admittedly, if you’ve seen Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, you won’t find anything new here, but if you’re working your way up the gore ladder (as I did), this is fairly strong. Lots of blood, lots of gooey stuff flowing around. Makes you wonder if the crew didn’t wear raincoats to the set on certain days. And poor Barbara Crampton… While this movie doesn’t require the degree of courage that Crampton would provide in From Beyond (long, long round of applause for the lady, thankyouverymuch), there’s at least once scene that makes me wonder just how much therapy she needed before she was able to sleep again.
The script is very good, and while it’s not a faithful adaptation (we’ll talk more about that in a sec), I think that’s for the best; it takes the basic premise of Lovecraft’s story and runs with it in its own perverse, invigorating fashion. The actors are what keep me coming back, though. Bruce Abbot makes an excellent straight man, so to speak, an audience identification figure who keeps the film grounded emotionally, enough so that the final shot, all questions of originality aside, both makes perfect sense and is oddly moving. Crampton is great, although the role doesn’t give her much to do beyond get worried about things and get naked (needless to say, she’s good at both). Robert Sampson is impressive in a way you don’t really notice unless you think about it; as Halsey, he is convincing, and almost manages to sell the impossible-to-sell expulsion scene, but he also manages to transition into an undead shadow of his former self that the two are almost entirely distinct characters. David Gale is suitably slimy, and his pan-acting is very nice- he makes the idea of a bodiless head actually talking not quite as implausible as it sounds.
But really, the star of the show here is Jeffrey Combs, an actor who defines his character as completely as Bruce Campbell defined Ash. Combs makes West likeable, even when he’s doing clearly unlikable things; he perfectly captures the mix of Ahab-level determination and dry-humor and it’s impossible not to root for him, even after you realize that he destroys the lives of everyone he comes in contact with. This trend becomes more apparent in the sequels, but even in the first movie it becomes clear that no matter what you do, and no matter how good or bad your intentions are- and no matter whether or not West gives a damn about you- the moment you see him, you’re best chance is to just start running, and even then you’ll most likely get it in the back. And even with all that, he’s disturbingly endearing; maybe it has something to do with what Hitchcock said, that an audience loves a man who’s great at his job.
But enough of that, what about the actual adaptation? Unless you’ve skipped most of this review, you’ve probably realized that, while Re-Animator is one of the best movies to come out of a Lovecraft story, a large part of that story doesn’t make it to the screen. The movie is set in the present, so none of that junk about lanterns; I’d assume the health codes are also a tad stricter in the eighties. Herbert West is still around, and I think we can assume that the assistant narrator is Dan Cain. One improvement the movie makes is in their relationship, as, since we’ve seen Dan’s need to save lives, it makes sense that he’d team up with West when he sees West has a chance of making death obsolete. There’s also a strong element of passivity in Dan’s nature, as he seems perfectly content with letting other people rule his life. First it’s his girlfriend, but when West walks in, he starts trying to make both of them happy, until West’s indomitable will pretty much takes over the conversation, and, eventually, his life.
Dean Halsey is a presence in the story, and is presented much the same as in the movie, although he’s more of a saint-type in the source material. He never expels West or the narrator from Miskatonic, although he does condemn their experiments, and when he dies during a typhoid outbreak, West immediately seizes upon the opportunity to use the re-agent on him. Halsey ends up much as in the film, although far more murderous; the events are confusing, as Lovecraft seems to be attempting a third person description through first person narration (essentially, the narrator recounts other people’s versions of an event that he was present for, and we never hear his own account), but Halsey essentially escapes West and goes on a murderous rampage. When he’s caught, he’s locked up in an insane asylum- again, this is clearly referenced in the film.
Dr. Hill is also in the short story, although in a very different form. After various adventures in the states, West and his assistant enlist in the army, to have more ready supply of corpses. West has started experiments on re-animating parts of the body instead of the whole, to prove that some form of consciousness exists in all the limbs and pieces. (Both of these ideas were used in the not quite as good but not completely terrible sequel, Bride of Re-Animator.) One night, while the two men are working, a plane crashes near the infirmary and delivers up two bodies; one is unusable, but the other is the nearly decapitated corpse of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, a man who had actually studied with West for a time and learned the secrets of re-animation. West cuts off the Major’s head, putting it in a restorative solution, and then injects the headless body with reanimation fluid. The body comes to life; and then the head starts making noises; and then the hospital is bombed. At the end of the story, Clapham-Lee returns, this time with a large group of all the undead creatures that West created. This is very similar to Dr. Hill’s turn, as his final attack on West is through hypnotic control (via the laser lobotomy) of a small army of corpses.
So obviously, somebody read the Lovecraft piece before they turned it into a movie. The only major character to not feature in the original source in some form is Meg, and her presence in the movie, all jokes about nudity aside, is pretty damn important. Her relationship with Dan, while sketched in quickly, seems real enough that when she is put in danger late in the movie, you can understand the lengths he goes to to save her. Even more crucial is that it gives the final moments of film an emotional weight that they would not otherwise have; as thought the director decided to remind us, fun and games are swell, but this is a horror movie, and bad things happen in horror movies. It’s probably possible to make a more faithful adaptation of “Herbert West: Re-Animator,” but I’m not sure even Lovecraft himself would see the necessity for it.
Besides, a faithful adaptation wouldn’t have any naked coeds, and who the hell wants that?
SOURCE: QQ
SCREEN: QQQ.5
The re-animating fluid reminds me of glow sticks. Man, all the things I could’ve done last Halloween…