Film director who made his name with the 1980s cult horror classic Re-Animator
Horror movies don’t come much gorier, funnier or more outre than Re-Animator (1985), the HP Lovecraft adaptation that brought acclaim and infamy to Stuart Gordon, who has died aged 72 from multiple organ failure. The film, which marked his cinematic debut after many years at the forefront of experimental, cutting-edge theatre, concerned the medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), who concocts a DayGlo serum to reanimate dead tissue, only for the revived corpses to wreak havoc.
The acting was commendably straight-faced with hints of camp, the violence graphic, gooey and over-the-top: “The main thing I remember about
shooting Re-Animator is that my shoes stuck to the floor the whole time,” Gordon recalled. In an unequivocal rave review for the New Yorker, Pauline Kael said, “You laugh out loud, and as the ghoulish jokes escalate you feel revivified –light-headed and happy… the bloodier it gets, the funnier it is”.