Re-Animator (1985)

Re-Animator is Stuart Gordon's celebrated adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story. Reviews tend to cite it as being the best of the movies derived from Lovecraft's writings. That may be true, but Gordon's Dagon is also in a good jousting position for that crown. There are many Re-Animator reviews on the net so I'm not going to write one — I'm more interested in comparing the movie with the original story.

Herbert West — Reanimator (1922)

Lovecraft's story was originally serialized in six parts in a publication called Home Brew in 1922 [1]. The serialized nature of the story leads to a lot of recapping of the previous chapter at the start of each new one. There's enough that it starts to feel like filler when the story is read in one shot, but when reading it in monthly or bimonthly installments the material serves as a nice refresher. Interestingly, after having written this I found a Wikipedia article about Re-Animator that gives some more details about the reasons behind this story structure.

The influence of World War I on the horror genre has been cited a number of times [2]. A war with new and improved weaponry that leaves large numbers of survivors in pieces and gas that wipes out a person's lungs would seem to be a natural influence on this story, never mind that one chapter is set in that war for the obvious ghoulish reason of easy access to bodies. However, World War I took place between 1914 and 1918 yet this story was written starting in 1921. Why the delay? Did it take time for the reality of this war to be absorbed by the society of the day and then make its way into the entertainment media of books and film?

Story and Movie Compared

Differences and simularities. Obviously what follows is spoiler-laden!

• The story is related in the first person by West's unnamed collaborator. In the movie the collaborator is named Dan Cain.
• The story takes place over 16 or 17 years while West experiments with reanimation whereas the movie covers an indeterminate period that could be as short as a few days.
• The movie's comedy is much more overt than that of the story, where the comedy is so black that one can easily miss it. It's only upon realizing the ridiculousness of elements such as a talking head in a carrying case that one clues in to the fact that this is an H.P. Lovecraft comedy!
• West becomes loopy earlier in the movie than in the book. This may be for logistic and creative purposes since there's only 90 minutes or so to tell this story, and it doesn't feel like much time passes in the movie.
• The reanimated corpse wearing a fake head in the movie is from the story; the accompanying head in a carrying case talked in the story too. Could the story's fake head be a World War I influence? Were facial reconstructions using wax something that was not uncommon after the war? Scenes involving wax faces melting become a whole lot more personally involving and tragic given this interpretation.
• The circumstances of Dean Halsey's death are quite different: Death via typhoid plague (or perhaps exhaustion) in the story versus being pulped by the reanimated Arnie-stunt-double in the movie. It was a reanimated Halsey that was imprisoned in both the movie and the story.
• Movie adaptations often add things that were not a part of the original story. One might expect that the animation of isolated body parts is a grotesque modern conceit but, no, the story does make explicit mention of reanimating only parts of bodies, as well as the reanimation of "parts joined to organic matter other than human" as West begins to get a bit loopy.

What the movie has that the story doesn't.

• Meg. It follows that the most well-known scene in the movie is not from the story.
• Super-duper laser brain surgery.
• The story doesn't have a Dr. Hill but it does have a pilot called Ronald Hill. He doesn't survive the crash of his airplane nor is he reanimated.
• Dr. Hill's mind control of the living seems to be a plot device of the movie. However, in the story the severed head of Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee was able to control his detached body, and possibly a host of other reanimated bodies but the story isn't clear if this latter control is via mental means or simply voiced instructions (although the former is a more appropriate interpretation).
• The movie's scene with Dr. Hill needing more reanimating fluid and perhaps blood is inconsistent with the story, where the reanimated specimens don't seem to need anything.
• Parts of the title theme are suggestive of the theme music from Psycho (1960) as well as the theme from Murder by Death (1976). Perhaps both are appropriate homages to Psycho.

Footnotes

1. http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/publish.asp
2. http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=55

Credits

DVD frame captures from Re-Animator are copyright 1985 Re-Animator Productions, Inc. and are from the Millennium Edition DVD released by Elite Entertainment in 2002.