INTRO: In 1985, Brian Yuzna produced director Stuart Gordon’s feature debut, the low budget horror film Re-Animator, based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. The movie Gordon and Yuzna made was quickly embraced by genre fans, with many considering it to be one of the best horror movies of the ‘80s, if not of all time. So it’s no surprise that it was followed by sequels, with Yuzna taking over as director. Released in 1990, the first sequel, Bride of Re-Animator, proved to be more divisive than its predecessor. There weren’t a lot of fans who celebrated it as an instant classic. But if you’ve only seen Re-Animator and haven’t taken a look at its sequels, we’re here to tell you that Bride of Re-Animator is a very worthy follow-up. It might even be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Stuart Gordon made Re-Animator because he felt that too many Dracula movies had been made and he wanted to see more Frankenstein stories. But rather than do another adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, Gordon based his movie on a lesser known, but also public domain, story. One written by H.P. Lovecraft. The adaptation scripted by Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and William J. Norris centered on Herbert West, a med student at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. West has created a serum that he believes is a way to beat death. And it does bring people back to life when it’s injected into their corpses. Problem is, it tends to turn them into bloodthirsty maniacs. West’s classmate Dan Cain, who is dating the Dean’s daughter Meg, gets mixed up in his experiments. Then Meg gets involved when her dad is killed and she’s assaulted by the headless-but-living corpse of Doctor Hill. A rival of West’s who always had a twisted obsession with Meg. When the morgue at the Miskatonic University hospital is overrun with zombies created by Hill, Meg gets strangled to death by one of them… And the loss of Meg is a major part of the story for Bride of Re-Animator.
Yuzna didn’t originally intend to direct the sequel himself. Gordon was still on board when development began. He came up with a couple different ideas. One would have had Herbert West and Dan Cain cruising around the city in a hearse, looking for fresh corpses to experiment on. Another was inspired by John Hinckley Junior’s attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. The story would have started with Dan trying to re-animate Meg. Then he would be captured by government agents and taken to the White House, where he and West are ordered to re-animate the dead president. This is an idea Gordon would return to during the George W. Bush administration, but it didn’t go into production then either. A few years after the release of Re-Animator, Yuzna was able to secure a production deal with a company called Wild Street. They funded Yuzna’s directorial debut, the slime-coated horror film Society, and also had two-point-five million dollars they wanted to put into a Re-Animator sequel. Unfortunately, Gordon was busy working on other projects. Specifically, he was going to be making The Pit and the Pendulum for Full Moon. It was going to be filming at the same time Wild Street wanted to go into production on the Re-Animator sequel. So Gordon had to drop out. Yuzna took the helm, and set aside any story ideas Gordon, Paoli, and Norris had provided. He had Society writers Rick Fry and Woody Keith come up with something new. Something that drew inspiration from elements of Lovecraft’s story the first Re-Animator didn’t cover. And which followed in the footsteps of the best sequel Yuzna could think of: The Bride of Frankenstein.
Yuzna said, “Sequels are usually doomed. If the first film was really good, it’s almost impossible to tell the story again. What are the sequels that have had a real degree of success? I think you have to go back to The Bride of Frankenstein. It was good, an equal to the original. To me, Bride of Re-Animator is as much Mary Shelley as it is Lovecraft. Shelley wrote the story for modern horror. Her themes are so monumental; the grandeur of it all, the reaching for the stars, the idea that there’s nothing in the universe until you create it. Herbert West and Dan Cain are the two sides to Victor Frankenstein. And I love the pathos of the creation being rejected by the creator. … The first one was about sustaining and reanimating life, this one’s about the creation of life.”
Although it was made a few years after the first movie, the sequel picks up just eight months after the events of Re-Animator. The massacre at the Miskatonic morgue is still a mystery to some, but West and his reluctant assistant Dan have moved on. When we catch up with them, they’ve been spending some time serving as battlefield medics in a war in Peru. Which gives West some very fresh corpses to experiment on. During this time, he has discovered that amniotic fluid extracted from iguanas can make his re-animation serum even better. Soon, West and Dan return to Arkham. They move into a large house that sits at the edge of a cemetery. In his basement lab, West continues to experiment with his improved serum. And during the day, they do their best to appear to be normal doctors at the Miskatonic hospital.
Since Doctor Hill was able to control his body even after his head was severed, West has come to realize that consciousness resides in every part of the body. Not just the mind. So individual parts of a person can be re-animated, it doesn’t have to be a complete corpse. This leads to him conducting even more bizarre experiments. He creates hybrid creatures by combining body parts he steals from the hospital. And from the tombs next door. Things like a dog with a human arm. And a creature that is nothing but an eyeball attached to fingers. West begins to see that he would be able to create an entire new human being from assembled body parts. So he starts putting together a female body. The Bride of the title.
Herbert West and Dan Cain were played by Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott, respectively, in the first film. Yuzna was able to get them to reprise their roles in Bride of Re-Animator. But he couldn’t get Barbara Crampton, who had played Meg, to return for a cameo. At the time, it was said that she couldn’t get away from the soap opera she was working on to go to the Bride set. Crampton would later admit that her agent had advised her against making such a short cameo in the movie. The role of Meg was recast with Mary Sheldon, also a soap opera actress, for a scene where Dan mistakenly tries to revive her with West’s serum. That scene didn’t end up in the movie, though.
In Re-Animator, West had insulted Doctor Hill’s talking severed head by telling him to get a job in a sideshow. Another scene deleted from Bride along the way would have shown that Doctor Hill’s head was being displayed in a carnival sideshow. The Famous Talking Head from the Miskatonic Massacre. Hill’s head appeared to be destroyed at the end of the first movie, but when actor David Gale heard a sequel was in the works he called Yuzna and asked if there was anything for him to do in it. So Yuzna had Hill’s head written into Bride. He’s still around, he still hates Herbert West, and he wants revenge. Mel Stewart was cast as Doctor Graves, who works at Miskatonic and has been put in charge of the body parts left over from the massacre. He tries to figure out why they’re not decomposing. Messes around with a bottle of West’s serum that was left in the morgue. And when Hill’s head is brought back to the hospital, Graves finds out just how unpleasant the guy is. By the end of the film, Hill’s head will be flying around with a pair of bat wings that have been stuck on him.
Another character West and Dan have to be wary of is police detective Leslie Chapham. He’s determined to get to the bottom of what happened in the Miskatonic morgue because he has very personal ties to the massacre. Not only was his partner attacked by a resurrected corpse that night, but his own wife is one of those resurrected corpses. Now she’s a mindless zombie, locked up in a psychiatric ward, along with a couple of the other re-animated dead people. Charles Napier of Rambo: First Blood Part II and The Silence of the Lambs read for the role of Chapham. So did Michael Parks of From Dusk Till Dawn and the Kevin Smith movies Red State and Tusk. The role ended up going to Claude Earl Jones of Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Evilspeak.
Dan is still mourning and reeling from the death of Meg, but he gets two new love interests in this movie. In Peru, he meets an Italian woman named Francesca, played by Summer School’s Fabiana Udenio. Francesca comes to visit him in Arkham… and discovers that spending the night in the same place as Herbert West is not a pleasant experience. The other love interest is a cancer patient named Gloria, who Dan becomes infatuated with. He even comes to think of her as Meg. “Meg who lived.” Unfortunately, she doesn’t live for very long. After she dies, West realizes the perfect way to get Dan invested in his new corpse bride experiment. The body he puts together from pieces taken from multiple corpses, “the remnants of a meaningless existence”, as he puts it, includes: The feet of a ballet dancer. The legs of a prostitute. The womb of a virgin. The arms of a waitress. A lawyer’s hand. The hand of a murderess. The heart of Meg, stolen from Doctor Graves’ collection. And the head of Gloria.
The casting of Gloria came down to two contenders. Patricia Tallman, who genre fans would soon see taking on the role of Barbara in the remake of Night of the Living Dead. And Kathleen Kinmont, previously seen in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Kinmont won the role – and since she plays Gloria, she also plays the Bride with Gloria’s head.
BACKGROUND: Once Wild Street had the financing in place, Bride of Re-Animator was on the fast track to production and Yuzna couldn’t get it to slow down. Wild Street wanted cameras to start rolling on June 5th, 1989. In February of that year, Yuzna was thinking of basing the film on an outline that had been written by Dennis Paoli. By May, Rick Fry and Woody Keith had turned in a draft of their own script. Yuzna was hoping Wild Street would give them more time to do any revisions that might be necessary, but they stood firm on the June 5th production start date. So not only did Yuzna have less than a month to get the script in satisfactory shape, he also had to cast the movie in that time. And get the effects crews started on the many effects that would be required for the film.
There were so many effects, they had to be delegated to multiple companies. John Carl Buechler’s Magical Media Industries worked on the first movie, so they were brought back for this one. The company’s Mike Deak and Wayne Toth handled all of the effects that involved Doctor Hill’s head. Tony Doublin of Doublin FX created the fingers-and-eyeball creature, which was brought to life through Dave Allen’s stop-motion animation. Doublin also created a puppet to play a dog with a human arm. Most of West’s hybrid creations were the work of Screaming Mad George. Wayne Beauchamp did the mechanical effects. And KNB provided the gore, and created the Bride. Turning Kathleen Kinmont into the Bride was a six hour process for the KNB crew. They had a large leg brace they considered adding to the Bride design. When they decide not to, they kept the brace so they could use it in a different movie. Leatherface wears it in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3.
The effects artists said they tried to make their work over-the-top on this one, as Yuzna didn’t want subtlety. The director confirmed that, saying, “I hate movies that don’t go far enough. I like to be outrageous. … Stuart Gordon is against doing anything you couldn’t do on stage. As far as I’m concerned, every gimmick is worth pursuing. I really enjoy the fantasy stuff.” And that’s why the sights we’re shown in Bride of Re-Animator are even more insane than what we saw in the first Re-Animator.
Jeffrey Combs’ performance as Herbert West has made the character a genre icon, but for a while it looked like he wouldn’t be in this sequel. He had already been cast in Stuart Gordon’s The Pit and the Pendulum, with its shooting schedule that conflicted with the schedule Wild Street demanded for Bride. Faced with having to recast West, Yuzna considered giving the role to Brian Bremer, who he had worked with on Society. And would later cast in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker. Just eleven days before Bride of Re-Animator had to start filming, The Pit and the Pendulum was delayed. Combs would be able to play Herbert West again after all.
Once Combs was signed on and Yuzna was beyond the rush to get the project ready for filming, things seemed to go smoothly on Bride of Re-Animator. The cast and crew made it through the six week filming schedule without any serious issues, and everyone involved did a great job. Yuzna would end up feeling that the film was slightly compromised by the fact that it was done in a hurry. But there is no indication in the finished film that everything was thrown together as quickly as it was.
The biggest problems arose when it came time for the film to make its way out into the world. It was not received positively by critics, who compared it unfavorably to the previous movie. It was called a rehash, a lesser copy of what had been done before. It also didn’t receive a great release. Once set for a fall 1990 release by Taurus Entertainment, it was instead passed over to 50th Street Films, who sent an R-rated cut to theatres at the start of 1991. This theatrical release seems to have been rather minor, as there aren’t even any box office records available online. Then Bride of Re-Animator made its way to home video in both R rated and unrated form. The film did receive some love from members of the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, who nominated it for Saturn Awards in two categories: Best Horror Film, and Best Supporting Actor, Jeffrey Combs.
The movie has never slipped into obscurity simply because it’s connected to Re-Animator. It has always had a fan base because of that. It gives us another chance to watch Combs play Dr. Herbert West, which is appreciated. But it deserves more positive attention than it gets.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Bride of Re-Animator has the same uncomfortable atmosphere as the first film. But like many horror sequels, it also cranked up the humor element. There was already dark humor in Re-Animator, and Bride takes it even further. While Yuzna and the writers were smart to have West’s experiments reach another level in the sequel, they were also aware his experiments in this one are absurd. The eyeball and fingers creature, for example. There’s a moment where West has nothing else going on, so he sticks an arm and a leg together and brings them to life. He gets kicked in the face for his trouble. Yuzna had fun making these experiments come off as comedic.
The film never makes a joke of Herbert West, but he does have some very amusing lines. He just doesn’t intend for them to be funny. Like when Francesca storms out of their home after seeing that West has re-animated her dead dog and stuck a human arm on it. He tells Dan, “You’re better off without her.” He’s being completely serious, but it’s hilarious. Combs turned in another incredible performance here, securing Herbert West’s place high on the list of the all-time great mad scientists.
Bruce Abbott is also great as West’s sidekick Dan, who rarely agrees with what West is doing but always sticks around. Abbott felt that Dan was, as he put it, a “borderline wimp” in the first movie. He was glad to find that the sequel gave him more layers of the character to play. He told Fangoria magazine, “Dan gets a little demented, a little warped. He goes a bit further into the darkness. He’s more affected by the turmoil, the guilt.” The character is clearly still suffering from having Meg die in his arms. When Gloria dies as well, it pushes Dan over the edge. West uses his grief to his advantage, putting Gloria’s head and Meg’s heart into his Bride creation. Because the body has parts of both of these women Dan cared about, he’s just as into the Bride idea as West is.
Of course, everything goes terribly wrong. West’s experiments never seem to turn out as intended.
BEST SCENE(S): Those experiments gone wrong make for some great scenes, though. At one point, West and Dan are visited by Lieutenant Chapham while the finger creature is running around inside their house. They have to deflect Chapham’s suspicions while trying to keep the creature out of his sight. This scene could have come right out of a sitcom. A very twisted, strange sitcom.
One of the funniest lines in the movie comes after West has killed and re-animated Chapham. Like most of the people West brings back to life, Chapham becomes a total maniac. Dan grabs the detective’s gun and West, who has figured out a dark secret about Chapham’s past, wants him to shoot the walking corpse. He urges Dan to pull the trigger by telling him, “He’s a wife beater, Dan, use the gun!”
Much like The Bride of Frankenstein, Bride of Re-Animator makes us wait until the climax of the film before the Bride rises from her slab. In both films, it’s worth the wait. And Kathleen Kinmont was definitely paying tribute to the original Bride Elsa Lanchester with some of her movements. Everything involving the Bride is terrific. Trouble enters the picture when Dan has to choose between a living woman, Francesca, and this woman he and West created from pieces of corpses. The only disappointment here is that the Bride is only in the movie for roughly ten minutes. Even Yuzna was left wishing there had been more screen time for her. He tried to make up for that when he made Return of the Living Dead III, which follows a young woman’s unique transformation into a zombie over the course of the entire movie.
PARTING SHOT: Bride of Re-Animator is an exemplary sequel. It manages to recapture the feel of the first movie while finding its own tone with the increased humor. The script by Rick Fry and Woody Keith may have been rushed, but the story they told works perfectly. It continues the story of Herbert West in a smart and entertaining way, giving him new types of experiments to conduct, while also dealing with the fallout of the experiments in the first film. West always just brushes off the terrible things that happen. But Dan, Chapham, Hill, and Meg all paid a price for what he did in the first movie, and Bride of Re-Animator picks up on that. While also being a great homage to The Bride of Frankenstein.
Yuzna has always wanted Re-Animator to be a bigger franchise than it turned out to be. By the time Bride wrapped production, he was already thinking of the next sequel, Beyond Re-Animator. He wasn’t able to get that made until 2003. He hoped to follow Beyond with a trilogy of sequels, starting with Stuart Gordon’s story set in the White House. Then continuing on with films that would deal with West building a Hadron Collider. Tearing open a rift in time and space. And having to answer for things he did in Switzerland before the events of the first Re-Animator. None of these sequels have ever made it into production, and not for lack of trying. There’s still hope we’ll see Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and Bruce Abbott as Dan Cain again someday. But while we wait to see what the future holds for Re-Animator, Gordon and Yuzna made some great movies that we can keep going back to.
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
