'Drowning in fake blood': How cult horror Re-Animator pushed the limits of gore
Forty years ago, the mad scientist comedy-horror was released to meagre box-office. But its shock value and outrageous humour soon made it a cult favourite among horror fans.
Searching for a single word to describe cult horror Re-Animator, one of the film's special effects artists, John Naulin, offers 'moist'. Released in the US 40 years ago this month, Re-Animator is loosely based on Herbert West – Reanimator, a 1922 short story by the seminal horror writer HP Lovecraft, which was indebted to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and centred on a medical student who found a way to revive corpses. The film transports Lovecraft's mad scientist to the 1980s, where the results are absurd, violent and obscenely bloody.
Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence that some may find offensive.
'We made over 40 gallons of blood from my own formula,' Naulin tells the BBC, 'which was more than I have ever used on any film.' Director Stuart Gordon, who died in 2020, plastered the syrupy mixture across everything with a 'more is more' flair: more blood, more carnage, more everything. 'They would dress the set with blood,' says Jeffrey Combs, who played the titular re-animator, Herbert West, 'and then Stuart would walk in and say, 'Hand me that gallon of blood, would you?' It was like drowning in this stuff sometimes.'
Adding to this inundation was some separately-created 'foamy drool', says Naulin, a bloody but also frothing mixture that spews from the mouths of West's zombie-like creations and coats Re-Animator's later scenes. The original recipe had to be changed when the sheer volume of gore Gordon desired became apparent, since it included an antacid with potentially adverse side effects when taken in large quantities. 'After we'd heard the call 'more foamy drool!' more times than you can shake a stick at, we worried it might thin the actors' blood,' says Naulin.
Such revolting excess is one reason why Re-Animator is so hard to unstick from the mind long after it ends. Yet, beneath that blood is a masterclass in adaptation, a tight balance of laughs and frights, and an innovative filmic experience, which keeps audiences coming back for more four decades later.
How it became a defining 'splatter horror' Re-Animator emerged from a horror landscape which in 1985 was 'in a stage of transition', academic and film-maker Mike Duffy tells the BBC. The slasher boom that followed 1978's Halloween was foundering, though the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984 signalled that, Duffy adds, 'the genre might be on the verge of embracing wilder stylistic ideas and approaches'. This uninhibited flavour was felt in films that followed, including Re-Animator, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II (1987), and Return of the Living Dead (1985), which embraced surrealism, comedy and experimentation, as opposed to deadpan masked killers.
It was a moment made for Gordon, who was directing his first film. He'd developed a reputation for making experimental, often controversial, theatre – including an infamous politicised take on Peter Pan featuring a nude dance sequence, for which he was arrested on obscenity charges – and brought many of those sensibilities to Re-Animator.
'Stuart loved to take an audience out of their comfort zone,' Combs says. 'They could be immersed in a story and then Stuart would do something, and suddenly the audience is part of the story because they're reacting in two different ways: not only to what's happening with the characters and the story, but to what's happening to them.'
An audience that enters expecting the same-old 80s horror of ghosts or immortal slashers is quickly compelled to re-calibrate their expectations. Viewers might shift uncomfortably as West experiments on the dead cat belonging to Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), his housemate and later accomplice, but may well be laughing when he wrestles its zombified corpse. By the time the severed head of West's rival-scientist-cum-nemesis Dr Carl Hill (David Gale) leers over Cain's fiancée Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), while his own headless body ties her to a slab as a vaudevillian scoundrel might tie a woman to the railroad tracks, they may also be looking at each other in disbelief as much as they are at the screen.
The film was part of a sub-genre of excessively gory horror films that became known as 'splatter horror', a term coined by director George A Romero to describe his 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead. From the 1960s until the late-1980s, such 'splatter' films thrived, and were defined by their focus on physical gore and lack of interest in any real moral framework, or ideas of good and evil.
But while other films of this type might have similarly forced audiences to audit their relationship with the disgusting, they did so with a corrosive cruelty. Re-Animator, by comparison, is so in-your-face, so perverse, and so caked in blood that viewers cannot help but revel in the absurdity. 'It's really hard to have that participatory thing that a theatre production allows in a movie,' Combs says. 'And he really did that!' When revered film critic Roger Ebert reviewed it, he noted that it was 'a movie that had the audience emitting taxi whistles and wild goat cries'.
That theatrical bravado, somehow transplanted onto the screen, means that as Re-Animator rockets to a bloody climax, it becomes 'not just a gore film which delivers splattery mayhem [but] also a wildly effective dark comedy', says Duffy.
According to Combs, however, Gordon genuinely believed he was making a serious film, and the decision to play for laughs was largely down to the individual actors. 'Our instincts told us we have to find release points for the audience,' he says. 'I didn't really talk to Stuart about it – neither did Bruce [Abbott] – but it's something we decided to do. Otherwise, it's just going to be a bombardment of gross stuff.'
Whoever the impetus came from, it's a comedic-dramatic tonal balance that Re-Animator manages admirably, with the humour helping blunt the excess that, in a less self-aware film, might have come across as sadistic. 'It's not nasty or mean-spirited,' says Lindsay Hallam, course leader of film and screen studies at University of the Arts London. 'Nor does it delight in torturing female victims.'
Indeed, one element of what makes Re-Animator a success is its central female character, Crampton's Megan Halsey. Atypically for the time, she's a complex horror heroine who, rather than blithely waltzing into trouble, is both wise to the dangers of re-animating, and savvy about the world in a way her boyfriend is not. Crampton leads with a charismatic deadpan: 'She really understands how to play the material, to keep it grounded, while, like the other leads, embracing Re-Animator's silliness,' Hallam says. 'She sells the believability and danger, while avoiding falling into the cliché of being a victim or the 'dumb blonde'.' Even as she becomes an object of lasciviousness for the re-animated villain, 'she transcends being just a sex symbol that caters to men,' Hallam adds.
The reaction to it – and it's cult afterlife When Re-Animator premiered at the Cannes Film Market in May 1985, the initial reaction from both audiences and critics – most notably Ebert and The New Yorker's Pauline Kael – was ecstatic. Kael labelled the film 'pop Buñuel… as the ghoulish jokes escalate you feel revivified – light-headed and happy'.
However, 'it didn't do anything theatrically,' says producer Brian Yuzna about its subsequent general release, making just over $2m (£1.5m) at the US box office.
More like this:
• The dog-centred horror led by a canine 'superstar'
• The terrifying music changed film forever
• How The Evil Dead set off a culture war
That it failed to become a blockbuster hit like A Nightmare on Elm Street was in part because Yuzna declined to submit the film to the ratings board and risk cuts. Many cinema chains at the time would not screen unrated films, and newspapers often refused them advertising space. 'It was very well-received,' Yuzna continues, 'but from the beginning it didn't get any real distribution [from Empire International Pictures].' Ultimately, however, keeping Re-Animator unrated kept its outlandishness intact and, more importantly, the mystique that went with it.
As VHS rental exploded in the late-1980s, becoming a $6bn (£4.5bn) industry in the US at its peak, Re-Animator was given new life as video stores sought, Duffy says, to fill 'a gap in their inventory for wildly transgressive horror'. Suddenly, its outrageous scenes of bloody horror became a selling point, with younger audiences, in particular, thrilled by the promise of how far it took its shock value.
As a youngster, Hallam recalls furtively peering into the curtained R-rated section of her local video store in Australia at Re-Animator's VHS cover, which pictured Combs, his face lit by a luminous green syringe, with a severed head gazing up at him from his laboratory table. 'Most provocatively of all,' she says, 'the VHS cover had 'BANNED IN QUEENSLAND' emblazoned across it, making it seem even more tantalisingly forbidden.'
Come the DVD age, Re-Animator was aptly resurrected yet again, with its most gruesome moments becoming catnip for a whole new generation. Looking back, the bloody fingerprints of Re-Animator's excess can be traced, both directly and indirectly, in what followed it. 'Sam Raimi's Evil Dead isn't devoid of dark wit, but its more directly comedic 1987 sequel Evil Dead II might have seemed more incongruous if Re-Animator hadn't preceded it,' says Duffy.
Meanwhile, a noted fan of Re-Animator was Peter Jackson. He went on to co-write and direct The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but while he was still a tyro in his native New Zealand, he used Re-Animator as a template for splatter horror films Bad Taste (1987) and Dead Alive (aka Braindead) (1992). A lewd scene from Re-Animator is referenced in American Beauty, while Combs says he even saw shades of the film in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. 'Arkham Asylum is run by a young, sort of bespeckled, arrogant young man [Cillian Murphy's Dr Jonathan Crane, aka the Scarecrow],' he says. 'I thought, 'That could be me.' It's a frame of reference for people.'
Four decades on, its influence continues to emerge in both surprising and unsurprising places as film-makers try to capture the horror, the humour and the shock of the moments that stay with an audience after seeing Re-Animator for the first time. 'It's that moment where the audience stops looking at the screen and turns to each other, or puts their head in their hands and says, 'Can you believe this?'' Combs says. 'That's kind of one of the secrets to why Re-Animator is Re-Animator.'
Forty years ago, the mad scientist comedy-horror was released to meagre box-office. But its shock value and outrageous humour soon made it a cult favourite among horror fans.
Searching for a single word to describe cult horror Re-Animator, one of the film's special effects artists, John Naulin, offers 'moist'. Released in the US 40 years ago this month, Re-Animator is loosely based on Herbert West – Reanimator, a 1922 short story by the seminal horror writer HP Lovecraft, which was indebted to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and centred on a medical student who found a way to revive corpses. The film transports Lovecraft's mad scientist to the 1980s, where the results are absurd, violent and obscenely bloody.
Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence that some may find offensive.
'We made over 40 gallons of blood from my own formula,' Naulin tells the BBC, 'which was more than I have ever used on any film.' Director Stuart Gordon, who died in 2020, plastered the syrupy mixture across everything with a 'more is more' flair: more blood, more carnage, more everything. 'They would dress the set with blood,' says Jeffrey Combs, who played the titular re-animator, Herbert West, 'and then Stuart would walk in and say, 'Hand me that gallon of blood, would you?' It was like drowning in this stuff sometimes.'
Adding to this inundation was some separately-created 'foamy drool', says Naulin, a bloody but also frothing mixture that spews from the mouths of West's zombie-like creations and coats Re-Animator's later scenes. The original recipe had to be changed when the sheer volume of gore Gordon desired became apparent, since it included an antacid with potentially adverse side effects when taken in large quantities. 'After we'd heard the call 'more foamy drool!' more times than you can shake a stick at, we worried it might thin the actors' blood,' says Naulin.
Such revolting excess is one reason why Re-Animator is so hard to unstick from the mind long after it ends. Yet, beneath that blood is a masterclass in adaptation, a tight balance of laughs and frights, and an innovative filmic experience, which keeps audiences coming back for more four decades later.
How it became a defining 'splatter horror' Re-Animator emerged from a horror landscape which in 1985 was 'in a stage of transition', academic and film-maker Mike Duffy tells the BBC. The slasher boom that followed 1978's Halloween was foundering, though the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984 signalled that, Duffy adds, 'the genre might be on the verge of embracing wilder stylistic ideas and approaches'. This uninhibited flavour was felt in films that followed, including Re-Animator, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II (1987), and Return of the Living Dead (1985), which embraced surrealism, comedy and experimentation, as opposed to deadpan masked killers.
It was a moment made for Gordon, who was directing his first film. He'd developed a reputation for making experimental, often controversial, theatre – including an infamous politicised take on Peter Pan featuring a nude dance sequence, for which he was arrested on obscenity charges – and brought many of those sensibilities to Re-Animator.
'Stuart loved to take an audience out of their comfort zone,' Combs says. 'They could be immersed in a story and then Stuart would do something, and suddenly the audience is part of the story because they're reacting in two different ways: not only to what's happening with the characters and the story, but to what's happening to them.'
An audience that enters expecting the same-old 80s horror of ghosts or immortal slashers is quickly compelled to re-calibrate their expectations. Viewers might shift uncomfortably as West experiments on the dead cat belonging to Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), his housemate and later accomplice, but may well be laughing when he wrestles its zombified corpse. By the time the severed head of West's rival-scientist-cum-nemesis Dr Carl Hill (David Gale) leers over Cain's fiancée Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), while his own headless body ties her to a slab as a vaudevillian scoundrel might tie a woman to the railroad tracks, they may also be looking at each other in disbelief as much as they are at the screen.
The film was part of a sub-genre of excessively gory horror films that became known as 'splatter horror', a term coined by director George A Romero to describe his 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead. From the 1960s until the late-1980s, such 'splatter' films thrived, and were defined by their focus on physical gore and lack of interest in any real moral framework, or ideas of good and evil.
But while other films of this type might have similarly forced audiences to audit their relationship with the disgusting, they did so with a corrosive cruelty. Re-Animator, by comparison, is so in-your-face, so perverse, and so caked in blood that viewers cannot help but revel in the absurdity. 'It's really hard to have that participatory thing that a theatre production allows in a movie,' Combs says. 'And he really did that!' When revered film critic Roger Ebert reviewed it, he noted that it was 'a movie that had the audience emitting taxi whistles and wild goat cries'.
That theatrical bravado, somehow transplanted onto the screen, means that as Re-Animator rockets to a bloody climax, it becomes 'not just a gore film which delivers splattery mayhem [but] also a wildly effective dark comedy', says Duffy.
According to Combs, however, Gordon genuinely believed he was making a serious film, and the decision to play for laughs was largely down to the individual actors. 'Our instincts told us we have to find release points for the audience,' he says. 'I didn't really talk to Stuart about it – neither did Bruce [Abbott] – but it's something we decided to do. Otherwise, it's just going to be a bombardment of gross stuff.'
Whoever the impetus came from, it's a comedic-dramatic tonal balance that Re-Animator manages admirably, with the humour helping blunt the excess that, in a less self-aware film, might have come across as sadistic. 'It's not nasty or mean-spirited,' says Lindsay Hallam, course leader of film and screen studies at University of the Arts London. 'Nor does it delight in torturing female victims.'
Indeed, one element of what makes Re-Animator a success is its central female character, Crampton's Megan Halsey. Atypically for the time, she's a complex horror heroine who, rather than blithely waltzing into trouble, is both wise to the dangers of re-animating, and savvy about the world in a way her boyfriend is not. Crampton leads with a charismatic deadpan: 'She really understands how to play the material, to keep it grounded, while, like the other leads, embracing Re-Animator's silliness,' Hallam says. 'She sells the believability and danger, while avoiding falling into the cliché of being a victim or the 'dumb blonde'.' Even as she becomes an object of lasciviousness for the re-animated villain, 'she transcends being just a sex symbol that caters to men,' Hallam adds.
The reaction to it – and it's cult afterlife When Re-Animator premiered at the Cannes Film Market in May 1985, the initial reaction from both audiences and critics – most notably Ebert and The New Yorker's Pauline Kael – was ecstatic. Kael labelled the film 'pop Buñuel… as the ghoulish jokes escalate you feel revivified – light-headed and happy'.
However, 'it didn't do anything theatrically,' says producer Brian Yuzna about its subsequent general release, making just over $2m (£1.5m) at the US box office.
More like this:
• The dog-centred horror led by a canine 'superstar'
• The terrifying music changed film forever
• How The Evil Dead set off a culture war
That it failed to become a blockbuster hit like A Nightmare on Elm Street was in part because Yuzna declined to submit the film to the ratings board and risk cuts. Many cinema chains at the time would not screen unrated films, and newspapers often refused them advertising space. 'It was very well-received,' Yuzna continues, 'but from the beginning it didn't get any real distribution [from Empire International Pictures].' Ultimately, however, keeping Re-Animator unrated kept its outlandishness intact and, more importantly, the mystique that went with it.
As VHS rental exploded in the late-1980s, becoming a $6bn (£4.5bn) industry in the US at its peak, Re-Animator was given new life as video stores sought, Duffy says, to fill 'a gap in their inventory for wildly transgressive horror'. Suddenly, its outrageous scenes of bloody horror became a selling point, with younger audiences, in particular, thrilled by the promise of how far it took its shock value.
As a youngster, Hallam recalls furtively peering into the curtained R-rated section of her local video store in Australia at Re-Animator's VHS cover, which pictured Combs, his face lit by a luminous green syringe, with a severed head gazing up at him from his laboratory table. 'Most provocatively of all,' she says, 'the VHS cover had 'BANNED IN QUEENSLAND' emblazoned across it, making it seem even more tantalisingly forbidden.'
Come the DVD age, Re-Animator was aptly resurrected yet again, with its most gruesome moments becoming catnip for a whole new generation. Looking back, the bloody fingerprints of Re-Animator's excess can be traced, both directly and indirectly, in what followed it. 'Sam Raimi's Evil Dead isn't devoid of dark wit, but its more directly comedic 1987 sequel Evil Dead II might have seemed more incongruous if Re-Animator hadn't preceded it,' says Duffy.
Meanwhile, a noted fan of Re-Animator was Peter Jackson. He went on to co-write and direct The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but while he was still a tyro in his native New Zealand, he used Re-Animator as a template for splatter horror films Bad Taste (1987) and Dead Alive (aka Braindead) (1992). A lewd scene from Re-Animator is referenced in American Beauty, while Combs says he even saw shades of the film in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. 'Arkham Asylum is run by a young, sort of bespeckled, arrogant young man [Cillian Murphy's Dr Jonathan Crane, aka the Scarecrow],' he says. 'I thought, 'That could be me.' It's a frame of reference for people.'
Four decades on, its influence continues to emerge in both surprising and unsurprising places as film-makers try to capture the horror, the humour and the shock of the moments that stay with an audience after seeing Re-Animator for the first time. 'It's that moment where the audience stops looking at the screen and turns to each other, or puts their head in their hands and says, 'Can you believe this?'' Combs says. 'That's kind of one of the secrets to why Re-Animator is Re-Animator.'
Forty years ago, the mad scientist comedy-horror was released to meagre box-office. But its shock value and outrageous humour soon made it a cult favourite among horror fans.
Searching for a single word to describe cult horror Re-Animator, one of the film's special effects artists, John Naulin, offers 'moist'. Released in the US 40 years ago this month, Re-Animator is loosely based on Herbert West – Reanimator, a 1922 short story by the seminal horror writer HP Lovecraft, which was indebted to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and centred on a medical student who found a way to revive corpses. The film transports Lovecraft's mad scientist to the 1980s, where the results are absurd, violent and obscenely bloody.
Warning: This article contains descriptions of violence that some may find offensive.
'We made over 40 gallons of blood from my own formula,' Naulin tells the BBC, 'which was more than I have ever used on any film.' Director Stuart Gordon, who died in 2020, plastered the syrupy mixture across everything with a 'more is more' flair: more blood, more carnage, more everything. 'They would dress the set with blood,' says Jeffrey Combs, who played the titular re-animator, Herbert West, 'and then Stuart would walk in and say, 'Hand me that gallon of blood, would you?' It was like drowning in this stuff sometimes.'
Adding to this inundation was some separately-created 'foamy drool', says Naulin, a bloody but also frothing mixture that spews from the mouths of West's zombie-like creations and coats Re-Animator's later scenes. The original recipe had to be changed when the sheer volume of gore Gordon desired became apparent, since it included an antacid with potentially adverse side effects when taken in large quantities. 'After we'd heard the call 'more foamy drool!' more times than you can shake a stick at, we worried it might thin the actors' blood,' says Naulin.
Such revolting excess is one reason why Re-Animator is so hard to unstick from the mind long after it ends. Yet, beneath that blood is a masterclass in adaptation, a tight balance of laughs and frights, and an innovative filmic experience, which keeps audiences coming back for more four decades later.
How it became a defining 'splatter horror' Re-Animator emerged from a horror landscape which in 1985 was 'in a stage of transition', academic and film-maker Mike Duffy tells the BBC. The slasher boom that followed 1978's Halloween was foundering, though the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984 signalled that, Duffy adds, 'the genre might be on the verge of embracing wilder stylistic ideas and approaches'. This uninhibited flavour was felt in films that followed, including Re-Animator, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II (1987), and Return of the Living Dead (1985), which embraced surrealism, comedy and experimentation, as opposed to deadpan masked killers.
It was a moment made for Gordon, who was directing his first film. He'd developed a reputation for making experimental, often controversial, theatre – including an infamous politicised take on Peter Pan featuring a nude dance sequence, for which he was arrested on obscenity charges – and brought many of those sensibilities to Re-Animator.
'Stuart loved to take an audience out of their comfort zone,' Combs says. 'They could be immersed in a story and then Stuart would do something, and suddenly the audience is part of the story because they're reacting in two different ways: not only to what's happening with the characters and the story, but to what's happening to them.'
An audience that enters expecting the same-old 80s horror of ghosts or immortal slashers is quickly compelled to re-calibrate their expectations. Viewers might shift uncomfortably as West experiments on the dead cat belonging to Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), his housemate and later accomplice, but may well be laughing when he wrestles its zombified corpse. By the time the severed head of West's rival-scientist-cum-nemesis Dr Carl Hill (David Gale) leers over Cain's fiancée Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), while his own headless body ties her to a slab as a vaudevillian scoundrel might tie a woman to the railroad tracks, they may also be looking at each other in disbelief as much as they are at the screen.
The film was part of a sub-genre of excessively gory horror films that became known as 'splatter horror', a term coined by director George A Romero to describe his 1978 zombie film Dawn of the Dead. From the 1960s until the late-1980s, such 'splatter' films thrived, and were defined by their focus on physical gore and lack of interest in any real moral framework, or ideas of good and evil.
But while other films of this type might have similarly forced audiences to audit their relationship with the disgusting, they did so with a corrosive cruelty. Re-Animator, by comparison, is so in-your-face, so perverse, and so caked in blood that viewers cannot help but revel in the absurdity. 'It's really hard to have that participatory thing that a theatre production allows in a movie,' Combs says. 'And he really did that!' When revered film critic Roger Ebert reviewed it, he noted that it was 'a movie that had the audience emitting taxi whistles and wild goat cries'.
That theatrical bravado, somehow transplanted onto the screen, means that as Re-Animator rockets to a bloody climax, it becomes 'not just a gore film which delivers splattery mayhem [but] also a wildly effective dark comedy', says Duffy.
According to Combs, however, Gordon genuinely believed he was making a serious film, and the decision to play for laughs was largely down to the individual actors. 'Our instincts told us we have to find release points for the audience,' he says. 'I didn't really talk to Stuart about it – neither did Bruce [Abbott] – but it's something we decided to do. Otherwise, it's just going to be a bombardment of gross stuff.'
Whoever the impetus came from, it's a comedic-dramatic tonal balance that Re-Animator manages admirably, with the humour helping blunt the excess that, in a less self-aware film, might have come across as sadistic. 'It's not nasty or mean-spirited,' says Lindsay Hallam, course leader of film and screen studies at University of the Arts London. 'Nor does it delight in torturing female victims.'
Indeed, one element of what makes Re-Animator a success is its central female character, Crampton's Megan Halsey. Atypically for the time, she's a complex horror heroine who, rather than blithely waltzing into trouble, is both wise to the dangers of re-animating, and savvy about the world in a way her boyfriend is not. Crampton leads with a charismatic deadpan: 'She really understands how to play the material, to keep it grounded, while, like the other leads, embracing Re-Animator's silliness,' Hallam says. 'She sells the believability and danger, while avoiding falling into the cliché of being a victim or the 'dumb blonde'.' Even as she becomes an object of lasciviousness for the re-animated villain, 'she transcends being just a sex symbol that caters to men,' Hallam adds.
The reaction to it – and it's cult afterlife When Re-Animator premiered at the Cannes Film Market in May 1985, the initial reaction from both audiences and critics – most notably Ebert and The New Yorker's Pauline Kael – was ecstatic. Kael labelled the film 'pop Buñuel… as the ghoulish jokes escalate you feel revivified – light-headed and happy'.
However, 'it didn't do anything theatrically,' says producer Brian Yuzna about its subsequent general release, making just over $2m (£1.5m) at the US box office.
More like this:
• The dog-centred horror led by a canine 'superstar'
• The terrifying music changed film forever
• How The Evil Dead set off a culture war
That it failed to become a blockbuster hit like A Nightmare on Elm Street was in part because Yuzna declined to submit the film to the ratings board and risk cuts. Many cinema chains at the time would not screen unrated films, and newspapers often refused them advertising space. 'It was very well-received,' Yuzna continues, 'but from the beginning it didn't get any real distribution [from Empire International Pictures].' Ultimately, however, keeping Re-Animator unrated kept its outlandishness intact and, more importantly, the mystique that went with it.
As VHS rental exploded in the late-1980s, becoming a $6bn (£4.5bn) industry in the US at its peak, Re-Animator was given new life as video stores sought, Duffy says, to fill 'a gap in their inventory for wildly transgressive horror'. Suddenly, its outrageous scenes of bloody horror became a selling point, with younger audiences, in particular, thrilled by the promise of how far it took its shock value.
As a youngster, Hallam recalls furtively peering into the curtained R-rated section of her local video store in Australia at Re-Animator's VHS cover, which pictured Combs, his face lit by a luminous green syringe, with a severed head gazing up at him from his laboratory table. 'Most provocatively of all,' she says, 'the VHS cover had 'BANNED IN QUEENSLAND' emblazoned across it, making it seem even more tantalisingly forbidden.'
Come the DVD age, Re-Animator was aptly resurrected yet again, with its most gruesome moments becoming catnip for a whole new generation. Looking back, the bloody fingerprints of Re-Animator's excess can be traced, both directly and indirectly, in what followed it. 'Sam Raimi's Evil Dead isn't devoid of dark wit, but its more directly comedic 1987 sequel Evil Dead II might have seemed more incongruous if Re-Animator hadn't preceded it,' says Duffy.
Meanwhile, a noted fan of Re-Animator was Peter Jackson. He went on to co-write and direct The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but while he was still a tyro in his native New Zealand, he used Re-Animator as a template for splatter horror films Bad Taste (1987) and Dead Alive (aka Braindead) (1992). A lewd scene from Re-Animator is referenced in American Beauty, while Combs says he even saw shades of the film in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. 'Arkham Asylum is run by a young, sort of bespeckled, arrogant young man [Cillian Murphy's Dr Jonathan Crane, aka the Scarecrow],' he says. 'I thought, 'That could be me.' It's a frame of reference for people.'
Four decades on, its influence continues to emerge in both surprising and unsurprising places as film-makers try to capture the horror, the humour and the shock of the moments that stay with an audience after seeing Re-Animator for the first time. 'It's that moment where the audience stops looking at the screen and turns to each other, or puts their head in their hands and says, 'Can you believe this?'' Combs says. 'That's kind of one of the secrets to why Re-Animator is Re-Animator.'
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'Drowning in fake blood': How cult horror Re-Animator pushed the limits of gore
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