The Homoerotic History of Re-Animator (Part I)
On this day in 1985, the late great Stuart Gordon’s gory debut feature film Re-Animator was unleashed onto theatres, breathing new life into H.P Lovecraft’s most hated work and spawning an entirely new and exciting horror franchise. With career-defining performances and through the aid of over 900 glow sticks and 24 gallons of blood, Re-Animator’s mile-a-minute mad scientist mayhem received critical acclaim upon release (even winning a special critic’s prize at the Cannes Film Festival) and over time developed a cult status, now being widely considered both one of the greatest zombie movies and horror comedies ever made. While Herbert West and his undead antics has been revered by general horror audiences for decades, the film along with its sequel Bride of Re-Animator (1990) has enjoyed a particularly powerful afterlife in the hands of an ever-growing queer audience, who have since injected their own homoerotic interpretations into this horror classic.
But what is it about Re-Animator that resonates so strongly with queer audiences? Why is such a villainous character like Herbert West so celebrated by them? I will be attempting to answer these questions and more in this two-part essay series on Re-Animator’s homoerotic legacy, starting from its Lovecraftian origins all the way to developments as recent as 2021, covering nearly all official published works and notable interviews and discussions with cast and crew members that contribute to a queer reading of this franchise (excluding only Re-Animator: The Musical, comic adaptations, and The Resonator: Miskatonic U, mainly because I refuse to acknowledge that the latter even exists). Part I will be examining every queer instance surrounding the first film, and Part II will mainly focus on its sequel, along with more recent developments.
Speaking of, should there be any new instances that contribute to Re-Animator’s homoerotic history (and trust me, there will be), rest assured that this article will be updated promptly to include this new information.
Now, as Herbert West famously said while “making life” with Dan Cain, “Make the entry”.
PART I: “I GAVE HIM LIFE”
Right off the bat, it is important to acknowledge that much like most 80s horror movies, and really most classic horror stories in general, Re-Animator’s queer-coding does not stem from a positive place. While most are well familiar with Lovecraft’s racism (which is unfortunately abundant in Herbert West: Re-Animator), Lovecraft also had much to say about queerness in his letters to other writers, calling homosexuality a “perversion” and “repugnant to the overwhelming bulk of mankind”, resulting in any homoerotic analysis of Re-Animator being marred by the text’s bigoted origins. Similarly, problems arise when analyzing Herbert West as a queer-coded character, as the main arguments for this reading fall into homophobic villain tropes and misogyny.
A key theme spanning nearly all the official entries in the Re-Animator franchise is the queerness of Herbert West’s monstrosity — How he is able to seduce good-natured (hetero)normative every-men away from their regular lives and into his perverse and unnatural world of re-animation, of two men creating life without aid of a woman. Lovecraft’s short story takes this last bit quite literally, as much of the queer coding is fuelled through the almost complete absence of women in the narrative, while in contrast, the coding in the film franchise is fuelled more through their inclusion.
In Lovecraft’s serialized short story Herbert West: Re-Animator, much like the first film, the unnamed narrator (the Dan Cain character) meets Herbert West while they are both students at Miskatonic’s medical school in Arkham. While West’s physical description strays in a somehow even twinkier direction than the films (as he is now “a small spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes and a soft voice”), the song remains mostly the same as the Narrator is quickly swept off his feet by West’s theories regarding defeating death and quickly becomes his devoted assistant. As the pivotal film role of Dan Cain’s fiancé Megan Halsey is absent here (the only woman mentioned at all by Lovecraft is West’s landlady briefly in “The Plague Demon”), the story instead chooses to focus on the homosocial relationship between the Narrator and West. As Re-Animator and From Beyond’s screenwriter Dennis Paoli stated in The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft, “because there are no women in the story it’s not focused on sexuality. Read his prose — I think his prose is very sensual. I think there are homoerotic relationships” (285).
While it may be difficult to define the relationship between Herbert West and Dan Cain outside of their roles of “Scientist” and “Assistant” or as classmates, coworkers or roommates in the film series (Do they like each other outside of their work? Are they friends? Perhaps more than that?), Lovecraft’s Re-Animator begins with the Narrator describing West as his “friend in college and in other life”, and goes on to repeatedly state that he was West’s “inseparable assistant” and his “closest companion”. The duo spend nearly two decades attached at the hip through living and working together, and share a heavily-coded closeted existence. As the Narrator states that West sought to “continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly”, the pair live double lives as both respected practitioners and deviant outcasts, “creating life” together (wink, wink) in deserted farmhouses and isolated cottages, away from the eyes of the law, the general public, and the puritanical traditionalists at the university. A further layer of homoeroticism is revealed when one takes into account that all of the subjects the men choose to re-animate are men, with West being particularly interested in males with “especially vigorous physiques”.
Coincidentally, West’s dissent into madness that ultimately paints him as being irredeemably evil coincides with the Narrator noticing that Herbert is now looking at him in the same way as the muscular men he experiments on. It is also when the Narrator begins to use verbiage eerily similar to Lovecraft’s descriptions of homosexuality when describing West, stating that his interests “became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal”. It is there that the characters’ fates are decided: Despite being both his accomplice and essentially his life partner, the Narrator is allowed to live due to the “spell” West had him under now being broken, while West is doomed to the narrative thanks to his unnatural queer lifestyle.
Decades later in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985), while Herbert West and his serum are still the central cause for all of the death and destruction around him, through the introduction of a primary antagonist in the form of Herbert’s rival, the perverted plagiarist Dr. Carl Hill, Herbert’s status as the main villain of the story is dampened, becoming more of a morally grey character with villainous tendencies in contrast. However, through the inclusion of Dan Cain’s fiancé Megan Halsey, the normalcy Herbert West lures his assistant away from becomes explicitly linked to heterosexuality, causing his queer-coded villain status to fully blossom.
At the top of his class in his third year of medical school and dating the beautiful daughter of Miskatonic’s Dean (Meg Halsey), Dan Cain is presented to the audience as a bright kind and handsome young man with a great heterosexual future ahead of him, barring two obstacles: As a doctor, he has a very hard time coming to terms with death, and as a boyfriend, he is unable to live with Megan until they are married due to Allan Halsey’s traditionalist beliefs regarding sex before marriage. When Dan is introduced to a strange new student at Miskatonic, the heteronormative path laid out for him begins to fall apart before his eyes.
The second Herbert shows up at Dan’s doorstep, mere moments after Dan and Meg finish having sex (making Herbert’s first introduction to Dan in his private life involving him being naked), the stage is set for a rivalry between West and Meg Halsey. Meg is clearly shown to be uncomfortable and disturbed by West and the power he seems to wield over Dan, while West is shown to be irritated by Meg for similar reasons, exasperatedly sighing and saying “Damn the bitch” when she distracts Dan during their experiments, as well as pointedly saying “What does Meg have to do with this?” nearing the end of the film when Dan is trying to make sense of Hill’s plans. The main difference in their points of contention however is the source of their disapproval: Megan’s concerns over West stem from a place of fear, as she believes that West is a dangerous individual and a threat to her boyfriend’s life, whereas West’s concerns regarding Meg come from a place of jealousy, of wanting Dan all to himself, a fact that gets heavily expanded upon in the film’s sequel.
Described by Megan’s actress Barbara Crampton in the film’s documentary Re-Animator Resurrectus (2007), “I think there was definitely a triangle in the movie, and it was myself and Dan and Herbert West. Megan and Herbert West were foes fighting for the same man”. Interestingly, there is a noticeably awkward audio edit cutting out something Crampton says before “-triangle” in this quote, making one wonder if she too views their dynamic as specifically a “love” triangle. Regardless, West starts working right away to replace Meg with himself in Dan’s life by showing him how they share the same goals and that he can offer things to Dan that Megan cannot.
Starting with the latter, while Meg cannot live with Dan until they are married, West shows up and immediately fulfills her role by becoming his roommate instead, even gloating about this victory to Meg’s face by smugly repeating what Dan said to him when finalizing their deal, “Done”. In the Integral Cut of the film (which we will be delving more into later), when Meg accepts Dan’s earlier marriage proposal as a bargaining chip in order to separate him from West, Dan has little to no reaction, deflecting by saying he has to “talk to West first”. In contrast, when Herbert proposes the idea of Dan becoming his research assistant (his partner), despite his initial hesitation, Dan ultimately agrees to his proposal, once again one-upping Meg. Finally, while Meg can offer Dan the ability to create new life in the future through procreation, which Gordon himself states is the subtext of Megan’s character in Resurrectus, Herbert offers a queered version of that same reality, only through the penetration of a neon green syringe. By Herbert describing Dan’s cat Rufus’ reanimation as a “birth”, it establishes the two men as the “fathers” of their creations, fulfilling Meg’s role sexually in terms of reproduction. Ultimately this establishes a pattern of behaviour of Dan choosing Herbert over Meg throughout the film, a pattern only disrupted at the very end of the story (and even then, not exactly).
Throughout the course of the film, Dan often dawns a moral superiority over Herbert that emphasizes their difference, however visually and metaphorically the film works against him, revealing through parallelism how West and Cain are the same at their core and why Dan truly is, as Herbert states, the “perfect person” to assist him.
Herbert is able to appeal to Dan through their shared dream of prolonging life, perfectly illustrated in the film by their near-identical character introductions.
Before Herbert and Dan even cross paths and attempt to accomplish the same feat together, separately they are shown desperately trying to bring life back to the dead, with both of them being stopped and chastised for their actions by a female doctor. The distinct circumstances of these scenes exemplify the heteronormative and queer worlds the characters live in before meeting one another, as Dan’s scene takes place in a normal hospital setting, sanitized and professional and following standard medical procedure, while West’s scene is a frenzied unethical and illegal experiment behind a locked door later broken into by authorities. The genders of the patients (or in Herbert’s case, subject), further plays into this reading, as Dan tries and fails to breathe life back into a woman whereas Herbert is once again shown to be re-animating a man.
Perhaps one of the finest moments of parallelism in Re-Animator however occurs in Herbert and Dan’s first and last moments together, where the same Herbert West who cooly brushed off Dan’s friendly handshake at the start of the film is by the end desperately trying to reach for the man’s extended hand.
Herbert is shown to be more intimate with Dan than with any other character in the film, both physically and emotionally. While no other character ever refers to Herbert by just his first name (normally defaulting to “West”, “Mr. West” or his full name), Herbert grants this to Dan almost immediately, notably right after not extending the same courtesy to Meg. West also appeals to Dan’s emotions, unlike his normally cold disinterested nature he displays to others. When Dan finds his beloved cat Rufus dead in West’s freezer, Herbert speaks to Dan in a far gentler tone, saying “I knew you were fond of it”, versus snapping at Meg for invading his privacy.
Some would argue that this behaviour on Herbert’s part all falls under his emotional manipulation of Dan so that he will continue working with him, or that this is all just Herbert’s trademark misogyny at work, and admittedly there is a kernel of truth in both of these arguments. These explanations fail however to explain the natural physical intimacy between the two men, with Herbert almost constantly hovering in Dan’s personal space and in many moments clutching onto or cowering behind him in ways reminiscent of Meg, or really any damsel in distress hiding behind their male hero.
The most famous instance of their intimacy, practically the poster child when discussing any of the homoeroticism present in the Re-Animator franchise, is of course after Dean Halsey’s re-animation, where West drapes both a blanket and himself over a shocked Dan Cain, placing his hand onto his and comforting him during their unusually tender embrace.
In a unique twist of the queer-coded villain trope, “peace”, or rather Dan’s heteronormative world, is not restored by vanquishing the queer villain, as both Herbert and Meg die in the final act of the film, with Dan remaining as the final boy. Instead, Dan now embodies the text’s queer force by becoming the titular Re-animator himself, with Herbert living on through the use of his reagent and the continuation of his life’s work. It is evident through Meg’s final piercing scream when the film cuts to black that she, and by extension Dan’s heterosexual identity, will never again be the same, forever altered by West.
Decades later, an extended version of Re-Animator was included as part of Arrow Films’ 2017 Blu-Ray release of the film, dubbed the “Integral Cut”. With almost twenty minutes of additional footage and a whole new Hill-is-a-hypnotist side-plot, the Integral Cut most closely resembles Re-Animator’s original script, resulting in a film that is somehow, stunningly, simultaneously more and less queer than the unrated version we all know and love.
On the one hand, even juicier scenes showcasing the love triangle between Dan Herbert and Meg are included in this version, such as Herbert echoing Megan saying “Daddy will see that we’re serious” to Dan (paralleling Dan and Meg’s romantic relationship with Dan and Herbert’s working one) as well as Herbert referring to Dan as “Danny”, a nickname that only Megan is ever shown to use. The added love triangle scenes also help to further illustrate Herbert successfully infiltrating Meg’s role in Dan’s life through the shifting staging of the characters in each of their pivotal moments together, with Herbert quite literally taking Meg’s place blocking-wise next to Dan throughout the duration of the film, culminating in their final three-way argument.
On the other hand, what unfortunately comes along with all of this added queerness is both the decentralization and dehumanization of Herbert West’s character. As Herbert West’s actor Jeffrey Combs states in Re-Animator Resurrectus, “The original script had a lot more to do with Dan Cain and Meg. It was a movie about lovers getting caught up in this situation and Herbert West was an annoying catalyst”. Indeed, with Herbert West relegated to the sidelines and far more significance being placed on the romance between Dan and Meg, the Integral Cut reframes the narrative of Re-Animator as more of a heterosexual tragedy than ever before, with Herbert being depicted far more villainously.
The language used to describe West in particular in this cut not only emphasizes the harm he poses to those around him, but also paints him as a queer contagion contaminating others. While this is shown many times throughout the Integral Cut, such as Megan hysterically claiming that Herbert will “ruin” Dan, and Dan calling Herbert “just as sick” as Dr. Hill, a sexual predator, the most notable example of this occurs during the extended dinner scene between Dr. Hill and Allen Halsey, wherein Hill attempts to convince Halsey through the power of hypnosis that Dan Cain is a bad influence on his daughter. At first, Hill suggests that Dan’s relationship with Meg exists solely to advance his own career, a theory that Halsey immediately dismisses, defending the purity of their heterosexual union. It is only when Dan’s relationship with Herbert is brought up that Halsey’s opinion on Dan’s morality is swayed at all, describing Herbert as being both “dangerous” and “a cancer”, and that “Cain is with him all the time”. Even Hill starting his argument by bringing up Dan’s living situation casts a villainous homoeroticism over Herbert and Dan’s domestic life together, and shows that it is only through Dan’s association with Herbert that he is deemed just as bad (read: just as queer) as Herbert is, and must therefore be punished.
The increased vitriol the characters show towards Herbert West in this cut of the film however is by no means unfounded. While the original film kept Herbert and his backstory more mysterious and vague, here his past is fully exposed through Megan recovering her father’s file on him, casting a much darker shadow over his character and his intentions once it is revealed to Dan that he was previously institutionalized and could potentially be a murderer. Whereas the original film depicted Dan as a far more active and willing participant in Herbert’s research, scared but otherwise curious and intrigued about venturing into the unknown with him, here Dan is depicted as being far more conflicted, with Herbert having to manipulate a more untrusting Dan into doing his bidding.
Yet despite all this, the Integral Cut of Re-Animator achieves one positive feat by exposing a more vulnerable and sympathetic side to Herbert West that the original film failed to explore. We see him cry while being hypnotized, telling the truth to Dan when he says that Hill “wanted (Dan) to disappear” (a quote that comes off as a manipulative lie without the footage to support it in the original cut), and most importantly, in his most fragile state, trembling and begging for Dan to stick it in…
In the most famous scene to come out of the Integral Cut, it is revealed that West injects himself with a weaker solution of his own reagent in order to bypass sleeping so that he can continue his gruesome work uninterrupted. Suffering from withdrawal and becoming so weak he can barely administer his own injection, West resorts to pleading for Dan to do so for him. Initially rejecting him, Dan shows pity for the pathetic West and finally commits the deed. The scene signifies the changing power dynamic between the two men, as Dan starts off physically and morally in the high ground while Herbert is framed lower, only stooping to his level once submitting to Herbert’s desires.
And “desires” is certainly the right word here, as the moment the reagent flows through Herbert’s veins he leaps up in a reaction one can only describe as, well… la petite mort. The sexual nature of re-animation has been eluded to this entire essay, but here is where it is perhaps at its most explicitly homoerotic. I hardly feel the need to mention the phallic connotations behind a needle’s penetration, let alone one that injects a fluid into the subject that “creates life”, as West’s orgasmic reaction speaks for itself (even appearing to give him a moment of, uh.. post reagent clarity afterwards).
What strengthens this metaphoric intercourse is where it happens to take place, on Herbert’s bed, bearing a climatic response similar to what Meg experienced in Dan’s bed, also in Dan’s hands, earlier on in the film. Moreover, Herbert is the first and only man Dan ever personally injects with reagent. It is implied through Dan’s other re-animations of Megan and the Bride in Bride of Re-Animator that he only ever re-animates subjects he personally loves and has affection for, making Herbert being his only male subject all the more interesting.
There does however exist one more sexually suggestive scene between Herbert and Dan that is comparatively far less known, due to the fact that it is a deleted scene not included in any officially released cuts of the film. The scene in question, which I will simply be referring to as “Dan’s Nightmare”, begins with Dan pushing a dead body into the morgue and walking in on Herbert, Dean Halsey, and Dr. Hill having a heated argument. Halsey angrily turns to Dan and informs him that Herbert has told him about the “shocking things” going on in their household. When Dan immediately denies these allegations and accuses Herbert of lying, West is set off to prove that their work is legitimate, and uses the dead body wheeled in by Dan, revealed to be the corpse of his girlfriend, as his main piece of evidence.
Injecting his reagent into Meg’s heart instead of her brain (the first time this is ever done in the film series outside of individual parts, the only other time being for the Bride in the sequel), Meg’s lifeless body reawakens in an aroused state, naked and reaching out for Dan while sensually moaning his name.
Herbert then adds to the eroticism by leaning in close to Dan and egging him on sexually, telling him that Megan is “hungry for it” and will soon be “mad for it”. The scene ends with Halsey blaming Dan for these horrors, yelling “it’s all your fault!”, while Herbert cackles at Dan’s expense and Meg unleashes a bloodcurdling scream.
Besides being notably bizarre, the first immediately striking aspect of this scene is how visually similar it is to the scene where Dan first meets Herbert. From the location, characters, costuming and blocking, the mise-en-scène for both scenes are near identical, minus the woman’s corpse being wheeled in now being Meg’s. The scene even begins with Dan talking to the security guard Mace before entering the morgue, only this time he tells him that the corpse in question is a “death in the family”.
Whereas in the original scene the characters greeted Dan either positively or neutrally, here the authority figures in Dan’s life are explicitly angry with him due to his experimentation with West, while Herbert laughs in Dan’s face, taking joy in his suffering. Analyzing this scene through a queer lens, one could make the argument that this nightmare could symbolically represent a sexuality crisis, with Dan fearing that his heterosexuality is “dying”, or rather, feeling like it is due to his strange new world of queer feelings “torturing” him. Meg, representing his perfect idealized heteronormative life, literally lays cold and dead on an autopsy table, only reawakening for him sexually once Herbert has interfered and perverted her with his reagent. Since Herbert is shown to seemingly have no interest in women in the film, and in particular with Megan whom he actively detests and is jealous of, this makes his seductive words feel more directed at Dan instead of her, making this dream sequence all the more homoerotic.
Alternatively, “Dan’s Nightmare” could also be interpreted as a closeted person’s fear of being forcibly outed. As Halsey was dubbed “the world’s last living puritan” by his daughter in a previous scene, and we’ve previously discussed the sexual undertones relating to re-animation in general, Halsey expressing moral outrage against the “shocking things” happening in Herbert and Dan’s home practically sounds like a homophobe’s disgust upon discovering what two men are getting up to in the privacy of their bedroom. As it is already proven later on in the film that the more Dan associates with Herbert the more punishment he receives from both authority figures and institutions, such as when Dan’s student loan is revoked by Halsey, Dan’s subconscious fears of discrimination are substantiated, and could be a part of why he so vehemently denies Halsey’s claims regarding his experiments with West. Herbert, the “out” character in this scenario, is proud of what they do together and is ready to defend it to any authority (emotionally pleading “It is true!”), while Dan is not, and is shown to be afraid, confused, and ultimately repressed when confronted with the reality of his experimentation with West.
Shockingly however, this deleted scene does not take the cake in terms of the craziest outing moment in Re-Animator’s homoerotic history…
Penned by a “Hillary Clinton is a secret bisexual sex freak” conspiracy theorist in 1987, the last entry we will be looking at in this essay, Re-Animator: The Novelization, can really only be described in one word: Baffling. Containing completely normal adaptational changes like Dan smoking weed and nailing dead bats to his attic’s walls in order to ward off more from coming in, Herbert stuffing wads of cash into everything he uses in the apartment that Dan bought including toilet paper, and Dan’s former roommate being another twink who essentially became Dan’s sugar daddy who left medical school to pursue dance in New York… it has it all. But what it is most remembered for, and perhaps why it got reprinted in 2020 after a surge of renewed interest, is the fact that it is the only official published entry in Re-Animator’s history that openly acknowledges queerness, and even suggests the possibility that our main characters are gay themselves.
Now before we delve in, it is once again important to reiterate that that the “representation” presented here (if you can even call it that) is by no means “positive” representation worth celebrating. If anything, the novelization is the most homophobic entrant in the entire Re-Animator canon, thanks to the new edition of a detective character keeping his eye on Herbert and Dan’s hijinks. Enter Vinnie Papa, the very regularly named Arkham police officer who is called to the scene of the crime after Dean Halsey’s re-animation, tasked with interrogating the two students involved. Before even laying eyes on his culprits, he immediately pegs the crime as being some fruity business, as evidenced by his conversation between him and two of the hospital security guards that Herbert and Dan overhear.
Straight passing privilege at its finest. As the interrogation begins, West holds his own and confidently navigates Papa’s accusations, even “look(ing) down at his fingernails” while delivering sassy comebacks to his remarks, all until the question of their sexuality is directly posed to them.
Herbert’s silence when asked if he is gay is the biggest admission of guilt in their entire interrogation, hell, in the entire franchise. While Dan immediately rejects Papa’s line of questioning, telling him that he is engaged (leading to an especially gross comment from Papa that most pedophiles are married too), Herbert’s prior unflinching confidence vanishes momentarily until the subject goes back to the events in the morgue, adding a closeted subtext to West in this adaptation’s queer coding of his character.
The homophobic peak of the novelization is reached in its final act, when Herbert and Dan are intercepted by Papa while they are making their way to the hospital to confront Dr. Hill one last time. “Cleverly” using the officer’s prejudices to his advantage, in a jaw-dropping twist, Dan confesses to “having AIDS” in order to get the meddling detective off their backs. You heard that right. Why a doctor in the eighties would lie about him and another future doctor being gay and potentially having AIDS at the height of the crisis, a fact that if true could put their careers and lives at risk due to discrimination, God only knows. It does however follow a disturbing pattern in the novelization of tying queerness to disease, as in one passage Megan thinks of Herbert as being “dirty” and “virulent”, as well as Halsey once remarking that Herbert’s madness must be “contagious” if Dan also has it. These moments in the novelization reflect similar sentiments displayed in the original film, such as the example we discussed earlier when Hill refers to Herbert as a “cancer”.
While making AIDS associations with Re-Animator isn’t out of the question or offensive in it of itself, as it is a narrative about a gay-coded doctor obsessing over defeating death in the mid 1980s, presenting lying about having the disease as an ingenious get-out-of-jail-free card very clearly is. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of this entire moment, and maybe even the novelization in general, is Herbert’s personal conclusion after witnessing Papa’s homophobic reaction, which, to paraphrase, is “I’m never going to use my reagent to bring homophobes back to life. They can choke”.
For all the problems the novelization has (and believe me, I have hardly scratched the surface), it is fascinating that Re-Animator’s gay subtext was picked up on as soon as the film was first released in the eighties, in the film’s official novelization nonetheless. That alone helps give credence to what modern gay Re-Animator fans have been screaming from the rooftops about for the last couple of years online, even if the source of this evidence is fundamentally insane.
Re-Animator’s homoerotic subtext, much like the vast majority of queer-coding in the horror genre, is a complicated affair. As has been illustrated in this essay, not much has changed since the days of Lovecraft in terms of equating Herbert’s queerness with irredeemable villainy, of tearing apart happy heterosexual couplings, and infecting those around him with his deviant work. And yet despite all this, Re-Animator has continued to have a profound impact on queer audiences who celebrate Herbert’s monstrosity when the text refuses to. Regardless of whether or not he’s mad, he’s easy to root for — and while Combs’ electrifying performance and the natural chemistry between himself and Bruce Abbott heavily contribute to this, perhaps this is most of all thanks to Herbert’s unshakeable defiance against the status quo, him relishing in his “othered” status and his determination to show those around him that there is more out there than just the normative “default” path, even if that path goes beyond life and death. As Harry M. Benshoff explains in his book Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film:
“Queer activism itself has been seen as unruly, defiant and angry: like the mad scientists in horror films, queer proponents do want to restructure society by calling attention to and eventually dismantling the oppressive assumptions of heterocentrist discourse” (5).
The reason why both we as a queer audience and Dan Cain are allured to Herbert West and fall under his spell is because he is ultimately right; that the traditionalist beliefs we are forced to live under and abide by are outdated and ultimately limit both individuals and societal progress. We know Herbert’s frustration because we feel it everyday when confronted with the homophobia and transphobia of our current political and social climate, and we know the strength behind his resistance when we challenge societal norms just by existing authentically as ourselves. Through his creation and through somehow resurrecting in the sequels after repeatedly dying in his films’ finales, Herbert West continues to live on as a gay who refuses to be buried.
