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!

OCTOBER 5: FIVE FRIGHTENGLY "TRUE" STORIES

 ~by Marie Robinson

You've seen this line plastered over almost any exorcism movie, "Based on true events". I've decided to highlight a few tales that inspired some terrifying (or terrible, it's all subjective) films!

AN AMERICAN HAUNTING (2005) ~Courtney Solomon

You may or may not have seen this one; I remember seeing the standee for it at the theatre and being excited. Silly me, I always get excited for exorcist films, but am almost always disappointed...  Anyway, this film, as you can see by the poster is based on a "true" story; in reality, it is based on a legend and some supernatural events that may or may not have happened.

In both the film and real life, a family from Tennessee called the Bells were haunted by a witch. Beginning in 1817 on a farm inhabited by John and Lucy Bell and their nine children, the family noticed some strange activity about the place. Children were getting their hair pulled, stones were being hurled across the property by an unseen hand, and even little Elizabeth was slapped. A neighbor began an investigation in the house, and upon his arrival the activity immediately worsened. It was discovered that the activity was focused around daughter Elizabeth. On one occasion she even vomited brass pins.

Things progressed to stones being hurled at the windows and the other children, and some visitors to the house would receive a welcoming slap from the poltergeist. Perhaps the strangest thing to happen was a voice that appeared from nowhere and curse and talk a lot of shit. It claimed to be numerous people, but admitted to being a neighbor woman named Kate Bates who happened to have a grudge against the Bells.

Kate then took an interest in the father, John, and began to make him ill--swelling up his tongue so that he couldn't eat. He died in 1820 from poison that was allegedly fed to him by the ghost. After his death the poltergeist activity stopped, but the Bell Witch is still said to haunt the area.

The movie actually does stick with the legend pretty well, which was originally recorded in a diary by one of the Bell's sons. One of the theories around the strange phenomenon is that Elizabeth was experiencing puberty at the time of the haunting, and it was believe she attracted the negative, supernatural attention because of it (it actually is a common theory in parapsychology). People also thought that her father perhaps had been sexually abusing her and this caused a lot of sexual tension and frustration within the household.

Whether you believe the legend, liked the movie, or thought it was all bullshit, you have to admit it is a good, creepy story.

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (1979) ~ Stuart Rosenberg

There are many versions of this tale, there is the book version, published in 1977 by Jay Anson, the 1979 film version directed by Stuart Rosenberg, the 2005 film version directed by Andrew Douglas and starring the godawful Ryan Reynolds, and then there's, of course, the "real" version.

What is most definitely true is that a family was murdered in 1974 on 112 Ocean Avenue in New York. The killer was Ronald DeFeo and the victims were his mother, his father, and his four siblings, all killed with gun shots. DeFeo claimed that he heard the voices of his family members tormenting him and was driven mad.

The house sat on the market at bargain price for a year before anyone bought it and the lucky new owners became Kathleen and George Lutz and their three children. However, they only lasted a month in the house before fleeing from an alleged haunting, which traits included the walls oozing, doors slamming, and odors appearing out of nowhere.

Jay Anson wrote a "non-fiction" book about the haunting but nowadays it is widely believed that the whole thing was a hoax. The people who lived in the house after the Lutz's had no complaints or mysterious happenings and the Lutz's probably just made it all up to get super-fucking famous. Well, they got what they wanted!

ED GEIN - A TRIFECTA OF TRUTH?

Now don't get mad at me, but I am going to count this guy as three movies in one.

The infamous Ed Gein, also known as The Mad Butcher or the Plainfield Ghoul, has been a pretty big inspiration in the horror world. A man from Wisconsin, Ed Gein is known for his violent and bizarre acts. He was convicted for the murder of Bernice Warden in 1957, who was found in his shed headless, field-dressed, and upside down and later confessed to killing a woman in 1954 named Mary Hogan.

When the police investigated his house after the arrest they hit the jackpot of horrible shit. There were precisely nine masks made out of human skin, a lampshade made from a human face, chairs upholstered with human skin, bowls made out of skulls, a belt made from nipples (I doubt anyone can pull that off), and ten women's heads with the tops sawed off. Remind you of someone? This information lead to the inspiration of Leatherface and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974).

Gein also had some big ole mommy issues. He was an avid body snatcher and made an estimated 40 visits to local graveyard to dig up recently buried bodies--more specifically, the bodies of middle-aged women who he thought to resemble his mother. Hence he also became the inspiration for Norman Bates (Christine, I hope this doesn't ruin you and Norman's relationship) from Hitchcock's 1960 classic "Psycho'.

When he brought the bodies home he removed the skin and tanned it. After his beloved mother died, it dawned on Gein that he wanted to become a women, thus he started making suits out of the dead women's skin so that he could wear them and pass as a woman. He wore the suits around his house and this, of course, led to the inspiration of the Jame Gumb--or, Buffalo Bill--character in Thomas Harris' 1988 novel "The Silence of the Lambs", later to be made into a beloved film (1991).

So there you have it, the "true" stories! Not as true as they make it seem, it's up to you to decide, which is more interesting (or horrifying), fact or fiction?

*Editor's note:  Marie, there is nothing that could tear me from my Norman!  ~c