The Film Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is a cult horror film that expertly blends grotesque body horror with dark comedy, reviving the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft’s early 20th-century pulp fiction through a gory, neon-tinged 1980s lens. While only loosely adapted from Lovecraft’s serialized short story Herbert West—Reanimator , the film forges its own path, transforming a bleak tale of hubristic science into a technicolor fever dream of excess, eccentricity, and headless terror. At its core, Re-Animator follows the story of Herbert West (played with manic brilliance by Jeffrey Combs), a brilliant but unhinged medical student who has discovered a serum capable of reanimating the dead. Driven by an obsessive pursuit of scientific mastery, West transfers to Miskatonic University, where he quickly becomes entangled with fellow student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) and his girlfriend Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton). As West’s experiments escalate, so too does the chaos—culminating in a visceral sho...