Charlie Penney
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The Lure of the Deviant: Queerness and Subversion in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator
From black and white vampire movies of the 1930s to the slasher boom of the 70s and 80s to even the polished, well-respected movies today, horror has always thrived as a subversive, chaotic genre. This aspect shines brightest in the B-movies of the 1980s, made with big ambitions and shoestring budgets. Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) is one of these films, a modern adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s series, “Herbert West - Reanimator.” The film tells the story of an ambitious experiment gone wrong, then attempted again, and again, and again, going wrong each time. Herbert West moves to New England to study medicine at Miskatonic University after leaving the University of Zurich, where he studied previously, after something terrible happened to the man he worked with. West is not just a dedicated medical student, however; he mainly focuses on a strange personal project: a serum he calls “Re-Agent” which brings the dead back to life. Needing a space for this work, he moves in with fellow medical student Dan Cain, who needs help with rent because his fiancé, Meg Halsey, will not move in with him yet. Though Herbert does not set out to find an assistant, he unexpectedly finds one in Dan, who he convinces of the importance of his work, and they begin to do experiments together. The film devolves into chaos, with reanimated corpses consistently becoming violent and every side character quickly becoming wrapped up in the collateral of Herbert’s work. This chaos centers entirely on Herbert: a small, dark, gaunt figure with no concern for social niceties or much human emotion. Herbert disrupts all sense of normalcy any character may have had in their education, job, relationships, and existence. He destroys families, relationships, and lives with a plunge of a syringe and shows no care or concern about any of it. Every time he subverts order and creates chaos, his queerness shows itself. I also assert that Herbert, and specifically his queerness, must be evaluated through a horror-specific lens, as the genre must be viewed from a perspective that differs from how we view other genres.
By Charlie Penney5 years ago in Horror
