Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), and Dagon (2001)

Bringing the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft to the screen is not an easy task. Much of the horrors Lovecraft talked about wasn’t described or explained too much, leaving it up to the reader. But when director Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, and writer Dennis Paoli got together to adapt Lovecraft’s 1922 story “Herbert West – Re-Animator” for a movie, they changed cinema forever. Not only did they show us more than Lovecraft would ever dream of, they created a perfect blend of outrageous horror, gore, and bizarre imagery that would immediately put them in the horror history books.

The following year, they took another short story, “From Beyond”, first published in 1934, and showed even more strange, bizarre, and gooey things we’d seen before, going beyond then what the short story told us.

Then 15 years later, these three deranged creators returned to Lovecraft to take us to a fishing village filled with very unusual citizens, in 2001’s Dagon.

While Gordon’s filmography might not be filled with classic after classic, when he hit a home run, usually when he’s working with Yuzna and Paoli, they knock the cover off the ball.

Films mentioned in this episode: