There’s no film quite like 1985’s Re-Animator. Is it a horror film? A comedy? A Frankenstein/”mad scientist” spoof? A horror-comedy-Frankenstein/”mad scientist”-spoof? Whatever it is, it’s an absolute hoot, and its enduring success is in large part due to star Jeffrey Combs.
Re-Animator follows the medical-student misadventures of one Herbert West (Combs), who perfects a serum that reanimates dead bodies. Along for the wild ride are West’s roommate Dan (Bruce Abbott), Dan’s fiancée Megan (Barbara Crampton), and a scheming professor intent on getting in on all the action (David Gale). Heads roll, pencils break, and cats come back from the dead and go nuts. It’s H. P. Lovecraft shot through with a bonkers ’80s horror-film sensibility. (The film is loosely based on Lovecraft’s 1922 novelette Herbert West–Reanimator.)
On Friday, October 3, Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater will host a 40th-anniversary, 4K screening of Re-Animator, complete with a post-film Q&A with Combs. Tickets are just $25! Ahead of the event, we spoke to the veteran actor about Re-Animator‘s unique tone, the theater mentality of director Stuart Gordon, and the long shadow of Herbert West.
Milwaukee Record: How have the screenings been going so far? I have to imagine it feels a little surreal to be doing something like this.
Jeffrey Combs: A perfect word: surreal. To think that I did this movie 40-plus years ago! Actually, even though Re-Animator premiered in October of ’85, we shot it in between Thanksgiving and Christmas of ’84. It is a surreal thing. You work on something for three weeks, and do you think when you do something like that you’ll be talking about it 40 years later? I don’t think so. It’s pretty inconceivable to me. I’ve done a lot of movies between then and now, and boy, this one has legs.
MR: You’re well-known for your roles on Star Trek as well, but Re-Animator seems to be this beating heart, as it were, in the background of everything you’ve done.
JC: Very good metaphor there. Yes, it’s reanimated forever. It keeps coming!
MR: I’ve read that when you initially took the part of Herbert West, you weren’t familiar with Herbert West–Reanimator or H.P. Lovecraft at all. Did you do a crash course on both the story and other Lovecraft things before you started filming?
JC: You’re right, I didn’t know. Stuart Gordon, who’s from Chicago, said it was based on Lovecraft, and I kind of shined him. “Oh yeah, sure.” Here’s what I’d say: I did know about Lovecraft, I just didn’t know that the things that I used to read when I was a kid were actually rip-offs or homages to Lovecraft. He’s been utilized by other writers for decades, right? So once I started reading more, I realized that he had been in my world without me really knowing it.
The first thing Stuart did after I got the role was to give me a mimeographed copy of the original story. There was no internet, there was no just looking online for things. It was a little harder to get information. I’ve studied up since then, though, and I’ve done quite a number of things based on Lovecraft.
MR: The tone of Re-Animator is fascinating. It’s both very of its time, with a little bit of The Evil Dead in it, but it also feels unique. Is that something you recognized while filming? Something you struggled with? That kind of horror-comedy seems tricky to pull off.
JC: You’re wise to point out the word “tone.” If you get it wrong, the balance is off, and it seems self-aware and sort of making fun of itself. And we never tried to do that. I think the real key here is that all roads lead back to Stuart Gordon. He’s the one who envisioned this. Because he ran a theater before he directed his first film, he knew how to delegate and how to articulate all the different elements of his vision. He approached it as very serious. He never once said, “Let’s make a joke here.”
Secretly, though, Bruce Abbott, who plays Dan Cain, and I kind of went, “You know what? This is very, very gruesome, gory stuff, and we need to find release points.” Not yuk-yuk, wink-wink, but just places where, in character, we do things that release the unrelenting gore fest. That was a good combination of elements there. If Stuart had said, “Oh, this is going to be funny,” I don’t think you and I would be talking.
MR: You mentioned Bruce Abbott and this kind of theater mentality…
JC: Because of Stuart Gordon! He had this amazing ability to bring a theater ethos to cinema. Not many directors can do that. So this movie turns into a participatory experience for the audience. It’s reacting as a group, right? So that’s why this screening is the way to see this movie. What perfect way to do it, and to start off the Halloween season with a cult classic!
MR: Absolutely! Rewatching it recently I was struck by the chemistry between you and Bruce Abbott, and especially the chemistry when you, Abbott, and Barbara Crampton are all onscreen together.
JC: I think the secret to that, quite honestly, is a little thing called “rehearsal.” [laughs] Stuart said a month beforehand, “Let’s start rehearsing these scenes.” That’s just not common in movies. They don’t want to pay for that. They didn’t pay for it for us, but we saw the importance of it. So when a scene came up on a very tight, low-budget schedule like this, we were already prepared. It was kind of like the band had rehearsed, right? There was a comfort there. Usually on movie sets, it’s “Hi, how are you, nice to meet you, where are you going to be standing? I’ll be over here, I guess.” No, we had it. We were just prepared!
MR: Let’s talk about your performance in particular. Was there any inspiration behind it? I’ve seen people make comparisons to Anthony Perkins in Psycho. What was on your mind as you were crafting your performance?
JC: None of that. I don’t particularly look at other actors and go, “Oh, I’m going to do it that way.” If [the Perkins similarity] is there, it might be because we’re somewhat similar in our approach. Maybe that was something that was in the back of Stuart’s mind when he cast me. I don’t know, but it wasn’t my point of view.
Once again, going back to theater, I had been doing a play where I was playing a character much like Herbert West: formal, broken and vulnerable inside, but with a facade of arrogance. So I already was sort of in the neighborhood, shall we say. I just had to jettison all of the vulnerability and issues with the character I had been playing, and go toward straight-ahead, self-assured, get-out-of-my-way-I’m-the-king-of-the-universe-I-know-what-I’m-doing-and-I-don’t-care-what-you-think. It’s every mad scientist that I ever watched. It’s a motif, a style. But I didn’t want to go histrionic with it.
MR: How did it feel once the film was released? It got some pretty great reviews from big critics like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael. Was it gratifying right off the bat?
JC: Well, you have to realize you didn’t see these things right away. In those days, there was no internet, there was no database or forwarding of an email with a review. Again, it was like a mimeographed copy three weeks later.
But I remember it differently. I remember there were a lot of not-so-glowing reviews, especially in the middle part of America and smaller communities. “This is schlocky gore, stay away,” that kind of thing. But the key people saw it for what it was and elevated it. I appreciated that very, very much. But it was not beloved right out of the gate. I sort of hoped for something like that, but it’s been more of a steady, growing appreciation for this movie.
MR: With that being said, was there ever a point afterwards in your career when Re-Animator was kind of, I don’t know, an albatross for you?
JC: You know, every actor deals with a kind of pigeonholing, a kind of labeling. Again, coming from the theater myself, I was taught early on to diversify, to be different and versatile. That’s how you survive. Like any actor, you appreciate the praise, but you don’t really want to be marginalized like that. “Oh, if I need a guy with a needle and a lab coat, I’ll call you, right?” [laughs] I turned down a lot of those.
But it’s all good! I’ve had a nice, diversified career, and I really appreciate what Herbert West has done for me in every way. It’s a role of a lifetime.
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• 4K screening of ‘Re-Animator,’ Q&A with Jeffrey Combs coming to Pabst Theater October 3