- Re-Animator
Stuart Gordon isn’t among the most well-known or revered horror filmmakers around; in some circles, he’s downright reviled. The Chicago native has drawn ire his whole career, even here in the pages of the Reader. None other than Dave Kehr, a measured and thoughtful critic even at his most vitriolic, called Gordon’s breakthrough Re-Animator “ludicrous and inept,” describing it as the “kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.” The director’s next two films didn’t fare much better, and somewhere along the line, the Reader essentially stopped reviewing his films altogether.
- From Beyond (1986) The spiritual successor to Re-Animator and another loose, intensely personal Lovecraft adaptation. The rampant sexual imagery and overt obsession with human bodies brings to mind David Cronenberg, but Gordon’s cartoonish, batshit style gives the seemingly horrific material a comic book feel. The director doesn’t merely commingle comedy and horror on screen, he illustrates the short gap between humor and fright, and in his most inspired sequences, somehow manages to merge them together.
