Forty years after Stuart Gordon’s horror classic, Re-Animator, a new take on HP Lovecraft’s 1922 story has been announced.
Director Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror Re-Animator may be a cult classic, but it’s somewhat different from the story which inspired it. Forty years on, though, HP Lovecraft’s 1922 short story, Herbert West – Reanimator, is getting a new adaptation.
According to Deadline, the new take on Lovecraft’s sci-fi horror piece will be financed by Woodlake Entertainment, while its writers are Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe, who previously collaborated on the 2009 chiller, The Haunting In Connecticut.
Adam Simon also has some other credits worth highlighting. He directed a couple of films for producer Roger Corman in the 1990s – the horror Brain Dead, starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, and the hurriedly-made Jurassic Park cash-in, Carnosaur. He wrote and directed the terrific documentary about modern horror, The American Nightmare, in 2000. He also co-wrote Bones (again with Tim Metcalfe), a 2001 horror starring Snoop Dogg and Pam Grier.
Little is known about Simon and Metcalfe’s Reanimator adaptation at present. Will it update the source material to the present, like Stuart Gordon did? Will it be a more serious take on Lovecraft’s text, or bloodily outrageous like the 1985 version?
The story itself is classic gothic horror in the vein of Frankenstein. Miskatonic University medical student Herbert West invents a serum that brings the dead back to life – the only downside being that the reanimated subjects unfailingly become violent, bloodthirsty ghouls.
Gordon’s 1985 adaptation kept the broad strokes of the story but condensed its events, added a few extra characters, and added a streak of black humour. Jeffrey Combs was unforgettable as a maniacally self-absorbed Herbert West, while David Gale (from under a truly unfortunate wig) gets some of the film’s best lines as West’s nemesis, Dr Carl Hill (“Mr West, I suggest you get yourself a pen!”). Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton gamely join the ride as a pair of young lovers drawn into West’s increasingly deranged experiments.
There’s no word on when the new Reanimator will go into production, but it’s said to be the first “in a series of elevated genre pics the company plans to develop and finance.”
In the meantime, The American Nightmare is currently available on YouTube if you want an engrossingly-told survey of 20th century US horror.
