True Story Tuesday: RE-ANIMATOR And The Problem With Not Staying Dead

 ~by Marie Robinson

In 1921, H.P. Lovecraft wrote a serialized short story called “Herbert West—Reanimator” for a magazine called Home Brew. It concerns two medical students, our narrator and his peer Herbert West who has a fascination with life after death. His goal is to reanimate a human body and receive a conscious reaction, and hopefully some recount of the places in between life and death.

Although Lovecraft hated this particular piece of his, and did it only because he was paid decently, it went on to inspire one of the most beloved cult classic films of all time, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator. Gordon takes liberties with the text and gives a gory, crass, romping good time.

Lovecraft was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and wrote “Herbert West—Reanimator” as a parody. I, however, was inspired to look into some real-life stories of reanimation and some other fun indirect connections to this story that are based in fact.

They say fact is stranger than fiction, and with this notion, we welcome you to True Story Tuesday.

Dr. Sergei Brukhonenko—Reanimator 
In Stalin-era Russia there was a Soviet scientist named Sergei Brukhonenko who was famously an open-heart surgeon and more infamously a reanimator. He received much controversy over a 1940 film called Experiments in the Revival of Organisms; this introduces Brukhonenko’s device - the autojektor - a heart and lung machine used to maintain life. The film showcases experiments Brukhonenko performed on various parts of a dog, such as a heart, which can be seen beating on its own, suspended by tubes and cables. The most disturbing part, and weirdly enough pretty much a scene right out of Re-Animator, is when they show a dog’s decapitated head kept alive by the autojektor. It is up to you to decide if the scene is fake or not, but I think we can all agree that it is downright creepy.



When the Dead Come Back
What is more horrifying than a loved one dying? How about them coming back to life! This happens surprisingly often in countries where bodies aren’t embalmed and advanced medical technology isn’t accessible. Sometimes people are just mistaken as dead; other times are a bit stranger. South Africa is one of those places where lack of modern medicine equipment often makes it hard to test that someone is clinically dead; one man in Zimbabwe was lying in a coffin at his funeral when one of the attendees filing past noticed his leg twitching. Thankfully the man came to before they could seal him up forever—--an ambulance was called and he was saved. Another South African man suffered an asthma attack and his distraught family members immediately thought he had died, so they called and made funeral arrangements. The poor man eventually woke up—in a morgue freezer surrounded by corpses. When he started screaming the present morticians thought it was a ghost and ran out of the building. A group returned later and released the man.

 One burial custom of a Chinese village is that the deceased rest in a coffin within their home a few days before they are eventually buried. This is what was done for a 95-year-old woman who was found unconscious and believed dead. When her neighbor went to check on her coffin, she found the lid pried open and the woman gone. She was found in her kitchen, cooking, since she woke up from a very long sleep and wanted something to eat.
  An unlucky Venezuelan man woke up in the middle of his own autopsy due to the pain of the medical examiners cutting open his face. They thought it was odd when their scalpel drew fresh blood, and even odder when their corpse awoke; they immediately stitched him up and he returned home to his wife.
  This last story is the most heartbreaking as well as the most unsettling: a Brazilian boy was lying in his coffin as his family prepared for his funeral to begin. Suddenly, the child sits up in the coffin and kindly asks his father for a glass of water because he is thirsty. Everyone began screaming, but a moment later the little boy lay back down, and died.

Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis portray the devilish duo...

Exhumation for a Profit
In Lovecraft’s story, the narrator and Dr. Herbert West’s goal is to obtain a body as fresh as possible. Dead bodies are hard to come by—no questions asked, that is—so the two take up robbing graves of their bodies.
This was actually a repulsive trend in the early 1800s, as legal supply for human cadavers was low, and surgeons and medical students demand high. Some took to body snatching, but two Irish men named Burke and Hare’s methods were a little grimmer.
 It started when a neighbor of theirs died of natural causes; they brought the body to a Dr. Knox at Edinburg University, who paid them handsomely for their prize. Tired of just waiting for people to die, the duo took to murdering people and giving the bodies to Knox, who took them and placed payment in the men’s hands. Burke and Hare killed over 10 people within ten months. Their usual method was getting the victim supremely drunk and then suffocating them, but some died more cruelly, such as a mute twelve-year-old who had his back broken over Hare’s knee. The two were eventually caught when a body was found stashed under Burke’s bed.
I’m sure they would have made a fortune off of Dr. Herbert West…

Reanimation in Modern Science
The Lazarus Phenomena is when a person automatically regains resuscitation after CPR has been administered, and failed. The most common cases of this phenomenon are in people who have suffered a cardiac arrest, which isn’t too surprising, considering it is the leading cause of death in America. CPR is usually applied for an average of 15 minutes (although it varies on who is performing) before “calling it”—the longer it takes to revive after the heart has stopped beating, the less likely there will be brain damage due to lack of oxygen flowing to the brain. In cases of the Lazarus Phenomena (named as such after Biblical figure Lazarus who laid dead for four days before being resurrected by Jesus), victims of heart failure come back to life after being verbally declared dead of their bodies own accord. However, a new experimental method in resuscitation could increase the success rate of CPR.

In Australia they have upgraded from using good old-fashioned elbow grease to perform CPR and started using a device called an Auto-Pulse, which is a portable machine that consists of a band that wraps around the persons chest and gives regular chest compressions that keep the heart beating. Pairing this up with an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), which is an artificial heart and lung machine that keep these vital organs working while doctors can diagnose the cause of heart failure and treat it. In this particular hospital in Australia three patients have been revived after being dead after up to an hour. Similar efforts in Japan have revived people who had been dead for hours.
The reason our Dr. Herbert West wanted extremely fresh specimens is because of the possible brain damage that is possible when oxygen is cut off from the brain. Even though resuscitation is becoming more advanced, brain damage is still a risk of being revived after being clinically dead. Let’s just hope you don’t end up like one of the Re-Animator’s subjects.

Take care, everybody, and keep your eyes peeled for more True Story Tuesdays!

Resurrecting some Lovecraft

I love to chat about forgotten films that I've taken a liking to. I like it even more when they are that rare film that puts together two of the genre's best:  H.P. Lovecraft and Dan O'Bannon. 

A rather faithful adaption of the Lovecraft tale, 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward' (note: many people try to add “strange” in there, but they are mistakenly thinking of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), The Resurrected tells the tale of a man obsessed with a mysterious ancestor who was delving into the forbidden dark arts, including re-animating the dead.

Widely known as being the screenwriter of such films as the incomparable Alien, Return of the Living Dead, and Total Recall, this particular film was one of Dan O'Bannon’s few times in the director’s chair. It certainly seems like a B-movie when it starts, but to me it’s part of its charm.  So what’s it about, you ask?

Christian Shephard (Whoops! LOST reference, sorry) John Terry stars as John March, a private detective who is hired by the wealthy yet despondent Claire Ward (Jane Sibbett) to look into her husband’s exceedingly bizarre behavior. Seems Charles Ward (genre fave Chris Sarandon), married less than a year to Claire, has moved out of their happy home and into a house a bit further out of town – unsurprisingly the ancestral home of one Joseph Curwen – a man with a dreadful hobby. He has found a way to regenerate the dead using the ash of corpses and some dark magic.

The search for answers makes up most of the movie, but the getting there is half the fun. After Charles opens an old chest filled with an ancestor’s (Curwen) personal belongings, he becomes driven to discover just what it was Curwen was working on. At first Charles camps out in his own home’s carriage house, but eventually he has to move his “lab” (dude’s front is that he is a cosmetics scientist, and is always perfecting the next best thing. How ironic.) to the house out in the country because the neighbors were starting to complain about the smell and the noises emanating from the house. (Never a good sign.) So he moves his operation away from town and away from his wife.

During March’s investigation, he finds that long boxes (um, coffins for the clueless here) and loads of blood and animal parts are being delivered from the slaughterhouse at the edge of town on a VERY regular basis.
When confronted, Ward denies any wrong-doing, but it is so blatantly obvious he’s flipped his lid.
He tells some bogus story about a confidant of his, a Dr. Ash, who has been helping him with his work. Later, Claire receives a cryptic phone message from Charles telling her to stay away from Dr. Ash. It’s here where things take a turn for the worse. As if it wasn’t already weird enough.

Eventually able to corner Ward at the house and remove him in a straitjacket, it becomes obvious that Charles is no longer actually “Charles’. Anyone paying close attention can figure this out, but when Ward tells them (from his stretcher as he’s being loaded into the funny farm wagon) that they’ve made a “damndable mistake” (and no, I’m not sure that was ever a word), it’s fairly clear he’s off his rocker.

With Ward safely tucked away in his padded cell, John, Claire, and John’s right hand man Lonnie (Robert “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” Romanus) return to the house in the country to delve into Charles’s work. They end up finding a labyrinth of tunnels under the house, with one branch leading to the river (easy access to dump unused ‘parts’, you see). Seems Curwen had been using the underground lair to try out his handiwork.They discover the journal of Joseph Curwen, and the movie sidesteps a bit to a flashback from the past to tell the tale of Curwen and the Ward family, which does help to explain the story a bit more clearly.

Even worse though, they stumble upon a pit of “mistakes” – a hole full of writhing things that seem to be part human, part total fuck-up. After they notice a wall full of shelves containing the remains of some of the most renowned alchemists in history, March dabbles a bit himself, pouring the ashes of one of them onto the table and mixing it with some blood that is already there, you know- just to see what happens! It generates into one of those fuck-ups but they kill it before it can harm anyone.

Getting out of said lair however, becomes an unenviable task after their flashlight batteries die (if I only had a dollar for every time that happens in a horror film!) and they drop their only lantern (yep, seriously). Using a pack of matches (!), they attempt to make their way to the exit, only to be chased by a few of the monstrosities created by Curwen. Do they make it out? And what happens to Curwen/Ward – locked up in the psych hospital? Will the experiments continue? What will become of Claire’s perfectly coiffed yet utterly ugly hairdo? And hey, are those explosives in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

As mentioned, this film is one of the better Lovecraft adaptations, in my humble opinion. A few details have been changed to bring it up to date a bit (after all, the novella was written in 1927), but the major plot points are kept intact, and for me, the movie portrays quite well the sense of dread and unease surrounding Charles Ward and his unique brand of life-science. The family doctor in the original story is replaced by the private investigator in the film version, and I think this is quite suitable and makes a bit more sense for these times. No doctor I know would pursue the truth so diligently unless of course, there is a giant monetary compensation – in particular after seeing that house in the country. March’s character in fact exclaims in the movie that he’d require at least five figures to go there after dark. True that.

The movie progresses at a circumspect pace, careful to address all the weirdness going on, but never dragging to the point of boredom. There are some unnerving scenes, such as when Detective March finds himself at the door of the country house for the first time and is greeted by a menacing dog and then shunned and told to leave initially by Ward’s henchman (a creepy Asian dude with a wonky eye) then by Ward himself – who proceeds to explain away the strange smells by saying it is decaying laboratory animals… as if that’s okay. The second time March comes back he brings Mrs. Ward, and is allowed access into the house. But Ward has changed.
He has major inexplicable physical changes, as well as the fact that when he speaks he sounds like he belongs in the 18th century. So very disconcerting.
If we didn’t know better already, we’d be wondering just what the hell was going on, but the film isn’t exactly cryptic, at least not to me. Then again, maybe it would be to someone who hadn’t read the novella (and if you haven’t, you should. Now.)

So how does the film fare as far as the logistics of it all? Well, I can’t say it’s a stellar production, in fact it even reeks of straight-to-video lameness. But you can’t help but like it, it’s so darn freaky and unorthodox. All the deviant occult overtones make for some good gore and an interesting plot line to be certain.

Acting. Hmm… It’s overacted in many places, but again, it didn’t kill the film for me.
That said, I don’t really care for Jane Sibbett in any capacity. She is very much a “Lifetime Movie of the Week”-kind of actress, and the part severely lacks because of it. Overly dramatic in all the wrong places, she is just barely passable here, if even that.
The rest of the cast fairs okay, in particular Sarandon (who incidentally was an Oscar nominee at one point). He embraces the dual roles fervently, and has a tight hold on just how far to go with it. Holy balls is he scary as the back-from-the-beyond Joseph Curwen. The way he talks in that antiquated accent is shuddersome enough, but the way he looks - Ahhhh! If I saw that answering the door I’d run. With rotted teeth, sunken eyes, darkly disturbing fingernails not unlike Frankenstein, and funky outfits from waaay back? Gah!

Plot. Do I really have to sing the praises of H.P. Lovecraft?
Nope, didn’t think so.

Effects. Minimal special effects make more sense here, and what is there works sufficiently enough.  The ghastly look of Sarandon as he ‘becomes’ his nefarious alter-ego are practical and just enough. Less is more, and certainly is in this case. The hideous mistakes in the pit are the most ambitious part of the movie, save for perhaps a few scenes at the end which I won’t spoil for anyone. After all, I’m not sure most people reading have even heard of the film, much less seen it.

And to that I say – see it! Matter of fact, it was streaming on Netflix before I dropped that part of the red envelope company. So it still may be available for free!  Instantly! And you might as well check it out there, because damn if it isn’t nearly impossible to find for purchase anywhere. It does make an appearance on eBay: two copies available on DVD, starting at $89.75! You can get it on VHS, however, but as a big fan of this Dan O’Bannon obscurity, I was lucky enough to get it on DVD as soon as I saw it for sale several years ago.

(On a side note:  This film was also known as Shatterbrain.  Why, I have absolutely no idea.  It’s original title makes worlds more sense.  But if looking for the film, you may run across it under this name.)