It was more by default than design that producer Brian Yuzna and director Stuart Gordon discovered each other, made a 80’s horror favourite and secured a reputation for often outlandish films that started with one of the most celebrated, outrageous and original horror films with 1985’s ‘Re-animator’.
So how did Re-animator ever get made?
Gordon had been an experimental theatre director for years and had a script based on H.P.Lovecraft’s novel that he was hoping to turn into a TV serial. But finance was not forthcoming and the writer lost interest and the project fell by the wayside until Gordon met upcoming producer Brian Yuzna who was looking to make a low budget horror film. Yuzna wanted gory and sexy and the script had that potential to be overhauled and condensed into feature film length to accommodate that criteria.
Their new script now saw a brilliant, if somewhat deranged, medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) arrives at Miskatonic Medical School and is not impressed by his professor’s (David Gale) outdated views on death. West has his own outlandish theories and when he discovers a serum that can re-animate dead flesh, all hell breaks loose. Roping in fellow student Dan Cain (Bruce Abott) and his girlfriend Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton), their shocking experiments work all too well with horrific results, and it isn’t long until the campus is overrun by the undead, placing the faculty and fellow students in devastatingly disturbing danger.
What went on behind the scenes ?
With only $1m to make the film it had to be made quickly. The effects team only had six weeks to build the prosthetics and had to employ students as their crew whilst Gordon and Yuzna auditioned actors in pairs. Those actors included Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West the reanimating Doctor, an occupation that he had portrayed previously in a very different film in Steve Martin’s ‘The Man with Two Brains’. Joining him would be his on screen nemesis David Gale a British actor with a career up to then largely in TV shows as diverse as Kojak and The Dukes of Hazzard and whose wife was purportedly appalled at what she saw at the premiere of Re-animator
Added to this was the love interest provided by Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton in a role that did not exist in the book but would define her career from thereon as a Scream Queen. It would also see her fully naked in a scene that began the climactic final act and would cause issues with the censors. But she wasn’t the only one naked with a cast of cadavers that come alive and cause mayhem as the cameraman desperately did his best to frame out men’s dangly bits – though for the one actor who had doubled as a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator it was all in a day’s work.
With its morbid humour the film was quite different from the normal horror film which wowed a Cannes audience but when it came to the US the censors wanted a lot of edits which Yuzna would not do and instead the film was released untested with little publicity but word of mouth spread quickly and the film gained cult status and the film earning back more than twice its budget on release that saw sequels.
Those bonus features in full……
Now revived thanks to Second Sight Films, the highly anticipated release of Stuart Gordon’s seminal film is now on Dual 4K UHD / Blu-ray Limited Edition and Standard Editions this winter in all its gory glory, alongside a bloody bucket load of special features.Presented in a rigid slipcase with new artwork by Krishna Shenoi and a fascinating essay filled 120-page book. It includes a dual format three-disc edition including one UHD and two Blu-rays, with main feature and bonus features on both discs.
Special Features
- UHD Presented in HDR with Dolby Vision approved by producer Brian Yuzna
- Dual format three-disc edition including one UHD and two Blu-rays with main feature and bonus features on both discs
- Includes ‘The Integral Version’ in HD
- New Audio Commentary by Eddie Falvey
- Audio Commentary with director Stuart Gordon
- Audio Commentary with producer Brian Yuzna and Actors Bruce Abbott, Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton and Robert Sampson
- The Cosmic Horror of HP Lovecraft: a video essay by Mike Muncer
- Re-Animator at 40: conversation with actors Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, and Producer Brian Yuzna
- Piece By Piece: Cutting Re-Animator: an interview with editor Lee Percy
- Suzie Sorority and The Good College Boy: an interview with actor Carolyn Purdy-Gordon
- The Horror of it All: The Legacy and Impact of Re-Animator
- Barbara Crampton in Conversation
- A Guide to Lovecraftian Cinema
- Re-Animator Resurrectus
- Interview with director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna
- Interview with writer Dennis Paoli
- Interview with composer Richard Band
- Interview with former Fangoria editor Tony Timpone
- Extended Scenes
- Deleted Scene
- Theatrical Trailer
- TV Spots Still
- Gallery
- Limited Edition Contents
- Rigid slipcase with new artwork by Krishna Shenoi
- 120-page book with new essays by Sean Abley, Becky Darke, Lindsay Hallam, Josh Hurtado, Michelle Kisner, Justin LaLiberty, Phil Nobile Jr and Heather Wixson
- Six collectors’ art cards
Released by Second Sight and true to form this is inevitably a fantastic release lavished with the usual array of excellent bonus features supplemented by some archive features out of necessity with director Stuart Gordon having passed away in 2020 and David Gale in 1991 though not before he had appeared in the 1990 sequel.
Re-animator remains one of those low budget horror gems from the 1980’s and for both Combs ( who is especially good in the role ) and Crampton ( who seems to have barely aged thirty years later) it became one of their best loved films and rightly so because it manages that most difficult of balancing acts of combining comedy with horror and bought the books of H P Lovecraft to the attention of filmgoers,
related feature : scream queen BarbaraCrampton talks acting, producing & nudity in vampire film, ‘Jakob’s Wife’
related feature : Barbara Crampton in ‘Sacrifice’ – DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
Here’s the Re-animator trailer……
Re-animator – BLU-RAY / 4K UHD LIMITED EDITION is released on 15th December 2025
