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RE-ANIMATOR by Eddie Falvey Liverpool University Press, 2021 120 pp.; paper, $34.83
WITH HIS RECENT PASSING IN 2020, IT IS A particularly apt moment to consider the career and filmography of the genre auteur Stuart Gordon. Of his films, none looms as large as Re-Animator, his outrageous 1985 adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's short story "Herbert West-Reanimator." Eddie Falvey's Re-Animator, an entry in Liverpool University Press's horror-focused Devil's Advocates series, takes this film as its primary object of study, casting a work that is often regarded as a cult oddity-albeit one with a particularly strong critical reputation-and placing it in a larger lineage of impactful, important, and accomplished horror films that are regarded as canonical. Such consideration for this film and for Gordon as a major figure of genre cinema is long overdue, and thus Falvey's volume is a welcome addition to the series, providing a lively and informative introduction to the film Re-Animator as a serious object of study. The volume's brief length, however, coupled with its comparatively expansive ambition leaves some fascinating threads un- or underexplored, and thus it may best be regarded as an opening salvo, a foot in the door for further research of this understudied film and filmmaker.
Falvey's book is divided into five chapters, each considering Re-Animator along a different axis, and these varied approaches provide a multitude of fascinating perspectives with which to consider the film. The first chapter places Re-Animator in the larger historical context of horror cinema in the 1980s, with special attention paid to Empire International Pictures, a B-movie distributor for which Re-Animator represents the artistic high-water mark. Falvey makes a compelling case for Empire as a low-budget genre distributor of a particularly well-defined, if somewhat disreputable, sensibility and for its founder, Charles Band, as a major figure in the proliferation of low-budget horror in the 1980s. Falvey's detailed breakdown of Empire International is likely to be new information even for...