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How Stuart Gordon adapted H. P. Lovecraft to film

By @nemeyuko (this is evis writing blog)

Warning it talks about xenophobia, sexual assault, misogyny, war, and epidemics.

Warning I directly quote the racist lines from Lovecraft as I wanted to show evidence (this was my English final). I do not the same beliefs as this dead author, and he was a horrible person. The time stamps of the film are off as I used the extended cut of the film without the sexual assault scene as the scene upsets me.

It’s rather hard to adapt the work of Howard Philips Lovecraft as the horror of his work was internalized instead of externalized. Though, in my opinion, my favorite film to adapt his work was Re-Animator (1985) directed by the late Stuart Gordon. Why is this so important? It’s important as it showed that any author’s work can be adapted to film even if it can be difficult.

“Herbert West — Reanimator” was serialized in 1922 for the amateur humor magazine Home Brew and was written by H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was commissioned to write it and was paid $5, or around $76.49 to $85.77 today, per installment. There were six installments. Lovecraft loathed writing for commission. He claimed, “Now this is manifestly inartistic. To write to order... reduces the happy author from art to the commonplace level of mechanical and unimaginative hack work.”2 The story is also known for the blatant racism in it. Especially in the third installment of it as the way Lovecraft described black people, Italians, and Polish people in it were, and still are, abhorrent. Lovecraft’s work is known for the fact it had a lot of racist themes.

“Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can only speak of with extreme terror.” (Lovecraft 5).

The story is told by an unnamed narrator who wrote about his experiences with his friend and colleague Dr. Herbert West who disappeared. The narrator met in his third year in medical school at the fictional Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. It takes place over a span of seventeen years. The main idea is that Herbert West believed that the concept of life was entirely mechanical and could possibly be restarted by having a chemical solution be injected into the body immediately after death. The reason each test subject failed to get comprehensive thought or reason after reanimation was because the bodies weren’t fresh enough. That was the humor from the story even though it was an extremely morbid joke.

Each installment can be summarized as this. Herbert West and the narrator reanimate a human corpse, the reanimated corpse causes havoc, and West and the narrator cover it up. However, the last installment ended with West’s reanimated subjects taking revenge and killing him which broke the usual format. The first two installments took place in university, the third and fourth took place when both characters were physicians in the town of Bolton, the fifth took place when the main characters joined a Canadian regiment and were surgeons during The First World War, and the final installment took place in Boston, Massachusetts.

Re-Animator (1985) was an unrated low budget horror film directed by the late Stuart Gordon and produced by Brian Yuzna. The film’s cast included Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, Bruce Abbot as Daniel Cain, Barbara Crampton as Megan Halsey, Robert Sampson as Dean Alan Halsey, and David Gale as Dr. Carl Hill. The film is considered by some horror movie fans as a cult classic and had two sequels. The sequels would make the essay too long, so they won’t be mentioned here.

Stuart Gordon found out about the story from someone mentioning that someone should adapt it into film. The book was hard to find as it wasn’t republished much as Lovecraft’s friends, the ones that started to publish his work after death, saw it as a bad story compared to Lovecraft’s well-known works. Gordon found it in a library’s special collection and was allowed to copy the pages of the story. The story started to be republished again after the film’s release.3

The film was about a medical student, Herbert West, who transferred from University of Zurich Institute of Medicine in Switzerland to Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts after being involved in the gruesome death of his Professor Dr. Hans Gruber. In Arkham, West becomes the roommate of fellow medical student Daniel Cain. He’s dating the medical school’s Dean’s daughter, Megan Halsey. The story takes a turn when Cain helps West with his experiments in reanimation. The Dean, Alan Halsey, was killed when West reanimated a human body in the morgue of the university’s hospital. Halsey was reanimated by West, and Halsey was taken by Dr. Hill believing he went insane. Dr. Carl Hill, who had been West’s adversary throughout the film, figured out Halsey was reanimated and tried to blackmail West. Hill would take credit for West’s research or West would be arrested for murder. West killed Hill by cutting his head off with a shovel, and he reanimated Hill’s head and body.

Hill took revenge at the end of the film by stealing West’s reanimating formula, using mind control on the lobotomized zombies he reanimated, and kidnapping Megan Halsey for his predatory desires. The film ends with the Miskatonic hospital panicking from the attacking zombies, West being strangled by Hill’s intestines, and Megan dying with Cain trying to reanimate her with West’s reanimating formula. The film doesn’t show if Megan’s reanimation succeeds as the film goes to black and her scream is heard.

The main similarities of the film are that the main characters go to university at the fictional Miskatonic Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts, the character of Herbert West has a theory in reanimating the dead and needed fresh bodies for it, and there’s a character who was reanimated with his head cut off and led an army of zombies.

The main differences of the film are the change in having it taken place in the 1980s instead of the early 20th century, the film took place over a short amount time compared to the publications span of seventeen years, the film cutting the publications racism, the film adding a female character who’s dating West’s assistant, and the film adding sexual assault for pure shock value.

The change to have the film in the 1980s instead of the 1920s was probably due to the film having a rather low budget and filmed in a span of a little more than two weeks. Stuart Gordon wanted to film a miniseries that was mostly a one to one adaptation of the original publications for PBS, but it fell through. They had to change the fact the film took place over a shorter amount of time compared to the original publications was due to the change of having it be a film instead of a miniseries.

Brian Yuzna, the film’s producer and later directed the sequels, suggested to Gordon to just add scenes from all six parts instead of the first three parts for the film. That’s why the film had a lot of scenes and ideas from different parts of the story.4

The second part of the serialized story took place during the Typhoid epidemic in 1906 to 1907 which really did happen. It started because an Irish cook in New York, Mary Mallon, had an asymptomatic form of the fever. She was often referred to as “Typhoid Mary” due to her starting the epidemic in the Northeast of the United Sates.6

In the second serial, Herbert West and the unnamed narrator had their degrees but weren’t licensed physicians. The two were allowed to work with the less severe cases of Typhoid due to a massive staff shortage. Dr. Allan Halsey died from the stress of helping Typhoid patients, and he was hailed as a hero by the people of Arkham. West and the narrator, after going to a bar with other medical students to celebrate the life of Dr. Halsey, reanimated the deceased Dean in West’s boarding house room. Halsey attacked the two and escaped out the window. West told the landlord and police a false narrative of what happened, so no one found out. The reanimated Dean killed fourteen people and ate three dead bodies taken by Typhoid for the next few nights. He was nonfatally shot, and he was taken to Sefton Asylum.

The second installment ended with this somewhat morbid and hilarious note, “To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages, “Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!”” (Lovecraft 24).

Returning to the main point of the original publications having a strong setting in its time and place, the fifth installment had the main characters join the allies in the First World War in 1915. The United States didn’t join the war until 1917, so H. P. Lovecraft did something clever. Dr. West and the unnamed narrator joined the war with Canadians with help of Major Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Clapham-Lee will be an important character going forward in this paper. His character will shed light in my next point.

The villain of the film, Dr. Carl Hill, was named after the pilot, Ronald Hill, that flew Clapham-Lee back to St. Eloi in Belgium, which West and the unnamed were at, and they both died when the plane was hit by German shellfire. West, whose secret reason for joining the war was for getting fresh bodies in every stage of dismemberment, seized the opportunity when he saw his friend’s body was mostly intact besides him being almost entirely decapitated. West cut Clapham-Lee’s head off and covered the wound on the neck with skin from other dead soldiers. He put the head in a vat of reptile tissue, which he researched helped preserve parts of bodies, and reanimated both the head and body. The body reenacted his last moments in life in the plane while the head harshly screamed for Hill to jump. “The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message—it had merely screamed, “Jump, Ronald, for God’s sake, jump!” The awful thing was its source. For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows.” (Lovecraft 52, 53). Clapham-Lee was the reanimated zombie, with a wax head, that led an army of zombies to kill and dismember Herbert West in the final installment.

Both Dr. Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee and Dr. Carl Hill serve the same purpose as West’s headless adversary who led an army of zombies to stop him, but their characterizations are drastically different.

Clapham-Lee sought revenge for being reanimated. He was West’s friend and was taught reanimation under him, but he didn’t reanimate the army that took West down. He found test subjects and experiments that got away. That included breaking Allan Halsey out of Sefton Asylum. He led the horde to tear apart West and was the one to carry West’s head away through the catacombs that were hidden by the plaster walls of the laboratory. West was the one to cut Clapham-Lee’s head off entirely from his body, and Clapham-Lee was the one to rip and carry off West’s head. “A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.” (Lovecraft 62).

Dr. Carl Hill, in contrast, wanted power and credit. Herbert West called Hill a plagiarist at the beginning of the film as he supposedly knew Dr. Hans Gruber and took credit for his work. Hill tried to blackmail West with either Hill takes credit for his work in reanimation or West is arrested for murder. Hill escaped after being reanimated and put on a model head from his office in the Miskatonic Hospital. He hypnotized Halsey to get Megan, and he went to the hospital’s morgue to reanimate the human bodies there.

Hill used his reanimated army to stop West and Cain when they got there to stop Hill and save Megan. He ordered some of the horde to restrain Cain and Megan while another part restrained West to an operation table to lobotomize him. As quoted, “Enough! I will show you power, Mr. West! My discovery, a laser surgical drill. It makes possible a new technique in lobotomy, which results in total mastery of the human will. Reanimated subjects have proven to be the best. They will give me power! Undreamed of power.” (Re-Animator, 1:38:40 — 1:32:27). Hill is defeated at the end of the film as Halsey, after breaking out of his hypnosis, ripped apart Hill’s head, and West injected Hill’s body with more reanimating formula for the organs to explode out of him. The most interesting part was that Halsey got the fate as West in the publications in that he was ripped apart by zombies after he stopped Hill.

Now, the main criticisms with both the original story and the film adaptation. The publication’s intense amount of racism, and the film’s misogyny and use of sexual assault as pure shock value.

The third publication of the story starts with Herbert West and the unnamed narrator asked by some polish immigrants to come help an injured boxer in an underground boxing match. The main characters moved to the nearby town of Bolton and their house was by Potter’s Field. A burial ground where the more impoverished were buried without embalming. Boxing was also outlawed in Bolton due to the more puritan views there. Both West and the narrator treated patients who worked at the mills in Bolton.

The boxer that was injured, and died before doctors could come, was a black man named Buck Robinson. His boxing name was “The Harlem Smoke,” and he had a brain injury in the fight which caused his death. His opponent was a man named Kid O’Brien and he didn’t mean to kill him. How Lovecraft described both characters, which the characters were deserving of, were rather revolting.

“The match had been between Kid O’Brien—a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose—and Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke”. The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.” (Lovecraft 30).

If that wasn’t bad enough, both buried the body after thinking the reanimation failed, and the next day West was nearly attacked by a patient’s husband. His patient was an Italian woman whose child went missing, and she died from her worry and stress. Her husband was extremely upset and tried to attack West. His friends stopped him. What Lovecraft had to say about Italians are shown in the text.

“An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child—a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner—and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o’clock in the evening she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses, and oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the family’s friends were busy with the dead woman and the screaming man.” (Lovecraft 31, 32).

Lovecraft’s xenophobia and racism are well known, but it was still very hard to read. Stuart Gordon didn’t want to adapt this part of the story as he saw it as too racist, and he didn’t like it at all. Though, how Gordon handled female characters and the use of sexual violence is something to criticize.

The female character in question is Megan Halsey, and she’s Alan Halsey’s daughter. She was the character to have the most common sense compared to her boyfriend, Daniel Cain, and the mad scientist, Herbert West. She tried to stop Cain from helping West, but it failed. She forced Cain to confess what happened to her dad, and they both sneak into Hill’s office in the hospital. Cain found a creepy folder that Hill had on Megan and saw that Hill lobotomized Halsey. Megan was later kidnapped by Halsey while under his influence of hypnosis. She was knocked out during the kidnapping. She awoke, was stripped naked, and Hill forced himself on her. Did this add anything to the plot? No, it didn’t. To make it even worse is that West, who called her the derogatory b word toward women earlier in the film, said this after her assault, “I must say, Dr. Hill. I'm very disappointed in you. You steal the secret of life and death, and here you are trysting with the bubble-headed coed, you're not even a second-rate scientist.” (Re-Animator, 1:30:00 — 1:30:41). The quote was to get under Hill’s skin, but it also treated this traumatic event to Megan like it was a joke. Megan was later killed by a zombie after Hill’s defeat and Cain tried to reanimate her.

Misogyny was rather common in horror films in the 1980s, including having women be killed and assaulted in horrific ways, it was still not great to have in the film. Barbara Crampton, the actress that played Megan Halsey, said she was made sure not to feel uncomfortable during the scene by the late David Gale, the actor that played Dr. Carl Hill, in the actor’s commentary of the film. It still ruined the film for multiple people, and I understand why. The film even caused David Gale’s wife to leave him due to this scene.

The film may not be a perfect adaptation, but it did adapt it well enough that it fit well with the original. It’s still important to look back on films that adapted books that were rather hard to adapt, and that can be adapted as a film.

Works Cited

Gordon, Stuart, Director. Re-Animator. Performances by Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, and Robert Sampson. Empire International Pictures, 1985.

Hudson, Patrick. “Herbert West - Reanimator.” Pointless Philosophical Asides, 6 Mar. 2011, philosophicalasides.blogspot.com/2011/03/necronomicon-best-weird-tales-of-h-p.html?m=1. Accessed 21 Oct. 2023.

“HPPodcraft 24 - Herbert West: Reanimator - Part 1.” YouTube, Witch House Media, 25 Mar. 2020, https://youtu.be/z-Vb4RM1ji4?si=ENKoJ7lYn8XKsfNh. Accessed 21 Oct. 2023.

“HPPodcraft 25 - Herbert West: Reanimator – Part 2.” YouTube, Witch House Media, 25 Mar. 2020. https://youtu.be/hR6lHHZ0bi4?si=1quZi4oeOYuZYP6E. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.

Lovecraft, H. P. “Herbert West – Reanimator.” Oregan Publishing, 2018.

Robinson, Dana. “The Worst Outbreaks in U.S. History.” Edited by Rena Goldman, Healthline, Healthline Media, 10 May 2023, www.healthline.com/health/worst-disease-outbreaks-history#typhoid-mary. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.

I had to write a paper on Herbert West Reanimator publications vs 1985 Stuart Gordon Film, and I had to restrain myself from calling out the racism of the publications and the sexism/misogyny of the film.

#hyde reblogs #hyde writings #hp lovecraft #herbert west #herbert west reanimator #re animator #reanimator #reanimator 1985 #jeffrey combs #bruce abbott #barbara crampton #stuart gordon #brian yuzna

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