Re-Animator (1985)
Directed by Stuart Gordon
Conducting clandestine experiments within the morgue at Miskatonic University, scientist Herbert West reveals to a fellow graduate student his groundbreaking work concerning the re-animation of fresh corpses.
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6 films that influenced Re-Animator
What critics say influenced Re-Animator
Completing the mood, composer Richard Band blatantly rips off Bernard Hermann's Psycho score, and gets away with it (it works beautifully).
While still somewhat limited by the source material, the new soundtrack sounds excellent, opening up Richard Band’s fantastic New Wave rendition of Bernard Herrmann’s classic Psycho score and making all those gushy, gross-out sound effects even, well, gushier and grosser coming from your surround channels.
Richard Bands memorable score, which cheerfully rips off Bernard Herrmanns "Psycho" theme, sounds just fantastic here.
Purposeful and loving as it may be, it’s merely a half-step up from “Psycho,” right down to the anxious eighth-note triplets.
These were all movies that irreverently stripped away the seriousness that had filled the horror genre throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, and replaced it with a willful sense of the comic, which ranged from outright slapstick in Raimi’s films to the dark, EC Comics-inspired humor of George Romero and Stephen King’s Creepshow (1982).
This links the reanimation film to that distinct subgenre of transplant horror, which includes such films as The Hands of Orlac, Body Parts, and The Eye, films in which the past lives of donated body parts return to haunt their present owners.
Winner of a special critics' prize at Cannes, it could become a classic of the genre like "Night of the Living Dead" or "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and enjoy a long life as a cult film.
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It arrived in 1985, at the height of the ’80s’ spate of horror comedies, which also include Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982) and Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985).
Re-Animator was Stuart Gordon's first (and best) movie and bustles at the seams with that youthful energy you see in Sam Raimi's original The Evil Dead and the Coen brothers' Blood Simple.
"Re-Animator" is therefore not really all that scary, although it's absolutely out of the question for the faint of heart and/or impressionable youngsters; it is rather comically gross in the way that "Animal House" was as a fraternity comedy.