CW: sexual assault
Production still from Re-Animator (1985). Source: official film site. It’s a really wild place.
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of horror flicks. Life is scary enough; I’ve never felt the need to hand over my cash and free time to get voluntarily spooked. Look, I fully embrace horror’s role in the movie family tree. I even studied it for second in college. A classmate in Film Criticism 101 once mused that watching horror films fills our need to re-experience the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
So, why did I watch Re-Animator (1985), Stuart Gordon’s campy reenactment of an H.P Lovecraft tale? Well, I didn’t. The me from 2017 did (poor thing had no idea what was coming). This is an adapted piece of writing from that same film criticism class -- a paper so scathing that upon reading it, my professor informed us he would no longer show this film in future classes.
Re-Animator follows two medical students who take their Socratic oath to the extreme by bringing the freshly dead back to life. You know, for science. A Frankenstein story with all the monstrosity and none of the philosophy or charm, the plot centers on Herbert West (Jeffry Combs), a beady-eyed stranger who comes to town with a fluorescent “reagent” in tow. He shacks up with fellow medical student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) and successfully recruits Dan to his unworldly cause after killing and resurrecting Dan’s house-cat. But the dead are not too keen on crossing back to the world of the living, reentering their former bodies with a murderous vengeance; an experiment in the medical school hospital’s morgue confirms this. In a series of monstrous events, a reanimated corpse violently kills Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson), dean of the school and father of Cain’s girlfriend Megan (Barbara Crampton).
Our medical duo brings Halsey back to life, much to the intrigue of Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), the boys’ medical school professor who is cringingly obsessed with Megan. Under the guise of discovering his colleague’s illness, Dr. Hill lobotomizes Halsey and attempts to take credit for West’s reanimation accomplishments under his own name. West, who makes the best decisions, decapitates Hill in self-defense and reanimates him. Headless Hill returns to the morgue to raise an army of the dead to take his revenge, and after a dramatic showdown of man versus monster, the film ends with a deeply traumatized Cain injecting the reagent into his newly dead girlfriend’s skull.
Not a hot take, but the excessive fake blood, unwarranted number of reaction shots, and glowing green goo successfully push the film into parody. The dialogue is written poorly and acted earnestly over heavy background music. Shots with prominent shadows and non-naturalistic lighting, such as the cat-chase in the boys’ basement and the backlit monster battle in the finale, indicate some intentionality and creativity on Gordon’s part.
Let’s go back to Megan for a sec.
Production still from Re-Animator (1985)’s official film site.
Unlike the others, she keeps apart from the parody parade. Her first line in the film comes only after kissing Cain hello and a sex scene. She is the only significant female character in the film and functions solely as an object onto which the other men project power or sexual desire. Never mind zombies; the first half of the film centers around the conflict between Cain and Halsey over ownership of Megan as either a wife or a daughter, without much of her input. West sneers at her for her emotional sway on Cain when Cain acts contrary to West’s wishes, and Dr. Hill’s obsession with Megan comes to a head when he literally treats her like a sex object (more on that below). She shrieks like a boring horror ingénue should, but her reactions seem over the top because she’s placed next to an ensemble of doctors a little too comfortable with spilling blood. Megan’s sorrow over losing her father punches through the campy aesthetic with horrifying realism. She fulfills a problematic stereotype of a beauty teetering on the brink of violation or death, waiting for heroic men swoop in and save the day. C’mon, 80s.
It is precisely the following scene, however, that pushes Re-Animator into irredeemable territory. In the 11th hour, Halsey captures Megan, strips her naked, and straps her to a gurney. She is molested by the headless Dr. Hill while crying and screaming for him to stop.
This is a rape scene. What Megan endures is one of the most horrible forms of physical abuse. The only thing worse is murder, and spoiler, that happens to Megan too. Say what you want about the unusually equal display of male and female nudity throughout the film, or effectiveness of mixing realistic horror with supernatural, but this scene? Not okay with me, and it shouldn’t be okay with you.
Scores of critics—most of them men, apart from Pauline Kael—advocate that this scene serves to further vilify Dr. Hill in tangible ways, and that the scenario of a floating head performing unwanted oral sex is so absurd one cannot help but laugh. I did not laugh once while watching this film; in fact, I left sick to my stomach. While many may revere Re-Animator as an important installment of the horror/comedy/parody genre, I cannot reconcile the inclusion of that base, real-life horror to a parodic end, and it clouds my respect for the rest of the film’s intentionality.
I promise I’ll be back to my lighthearted self next time!