Stuart Gordon: From Stage to Scream
To many, Stuart Gordon was known for directing two of the most stand out horror movies of the 80’s: Re-Animator and From Beyond. Taking H.P. Lovecraft’s original works, he found a way to twist these old tales into blood-soaked farces combining the best elements of both horror and comedy.
Notoriously, he had to fight the MPAA on both films from keeping them from getting the egregious X rating — a near death sentence in the box office. Little did they know, they were dealing with a director who had a long past of fighting against the establishment to get his vision seen.
Born on August 11th 1947, Stuart Gordon first got his start working in theater, of all things. While studying drama at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus, he started The Screw Theater in 1968 with his soon-to-be wife and actress Carolyn Purdy.
Notorious at the school’s theater department, many of his productions caused complete outrage within the community. The most notable of these being a play/performance art piece called The Game Show, where audience plants acting as real patrons would be pulled from the crowd and assaulted by the actors. Meanwhile, the rest of the audience were actually locked inside the theater, forcing them to stay and watch and usually creating a riot among the perturbed audience.
Another production of Peter Pan satirizing the counterculture of the 60’s actually got the husband and wife duo arrested for obscenity due to nudity in the show. From then on, his productions would have to be overseen by his professors.
Once graduated and relocated to Chicago, The Screw Theater was renamed to the The Organic Theater Company. Led by Gordon as artistic director, the Organic produced several plays in the local Chicago area. Most famously, the Marvel Comics inspired epic Warp landed the company a brief run at Broadway in 1972. Toted as the “world’s first” serial sci-fi play, Warp centered around main character David Carson (first played by John Heard) finding himself in a battle to save the universe in many Flash Gordon-esque styled adventures.
In the 80’s, he relocated once again, this time to Hollywood to take on film. Partnering with Empire Pictures, he was able to make most of his early films with the company, due to their smash-success with their earlier film Ghoulies. This partnership lasted until Empire fizzled out in 1989 with the film RobotJox, also directed by Gordon.
His first film, Re-Animator, is a celebration of the dramatic and absurd. Medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is obsessed with re-animating dead tissue. Despite the push back from one of his teachers, he develops a reagent that successfully brings the dead back to life. The only problem? The things he brings back to life aren’t quite the same once they’ve been dead. As more and more people are brought back to life, the situation only grows messier and messier.
Jeffrey Combs almost completely makes the movie. His over-the-top performance fits right in line with the film’s subject matter. This overly dramatic tone is latent throughout the entire movie, and evokes the feeling of a stage performance. Appropriately, Gordon adapted the film onto the stage with Re-Animator: The Musical in 2011.
The key factor of Re-Animator is its unabashed acceptance that what the film is about is completely ridiculous. Don’t be mistaken; Re-Animator is a complete B-movie, but the tongue in cheek attitude that the film takes makes it such an stand-out footnote in the era of 80’s horror. Not to mention the tons of gore and bloodshed.
From Beyond was produced the following year. This film was also based on the work of Lovecraft and even featured many of the same cast from Re-Animator. While not as famous as the movie that preceded it, the two are often seen as brother and sister pieces.
From Beyond concerns a machine called The Resonator — a device created by the mad scientist Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) that allows the human mind to interact with dimensions beyond our own. Creatures exist in these dimensions at all times, but our brains keep us from seeing them. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), is exposed to the machine and is admitted into a psychiatric hospital. Crawford, his psychologist, and a cop all reconvene into the house where the machine is kept, and can’t resist the urge turn it back on.
The tone of From Beyond, while less self-aware than Re-Animator, is still as ridiculous as ever — I mean, this is a film that involves flying extra-dimensional monsters, after all. However, while a lot of the tone in the previous film relied on Combs’ performance, this one is heavily driven by Barbara Crampton who plays the psychologist. She takes on a range of personalities as the machine changes her personality, going from the stuck up, academic type to the high-libido dominatrix driven insane by her addiction to the machine.
Both films were initially given the X rating for the amount of gore in them (Specifically, the scene in From Beyond where a woman has her eye sucked out of its socket by Combs), but Gordon persevered. With some slight editing and continuous pushing from both him and Empire Pictures, both were able to be released to wide audiences with an R rating. While both of these films are definite B-movies in their own right, they are well crafted and self-aware enough to lift themselves above your average cheap horror or exploitation trash.
Now, for a filmmaker who has spent a majority of his career either shocking people or grossing them out, what company do you think would be quick to produce his next big project? Well, Disney of course! Gordon and one of his long time producers, Brian Yuzna sold their spec script for Honey, I Shrunk The Kids to Disney, of all companies.
Gordon had originally planned to direct the film, but arguments with the lawyers and producers on the film caused him to back out. As the story goes, Gordon’s nose physically started bleeding from the stress trying to negotiate with Disney on the movie.
This, if anything, is the most characteristic move in all of Gordon’s career. Stuart Gordon was a man who, in the face of a hefty Disney check, decided to keep on doing what was creatively interesting to him. A movie like Re-Animator could have had a very dark tone considering the original text that it came from. But what did he do? Instead, he decided to take a stab at the ludicrous premise of it all, turning it into a comedy.
In the latter half of his career, he returned to his beloved The Organic Theater company, producing several more plays. One of these plays included a one man show starring Jeffrey Combs as Edgar Allen Poe, titled Nevermore.
Unfortunately, on March 24th 2020, Stuart Gordon passed away in Los Angeles. What he left us with was a legacy of an artist that didn’t care how others felt of his work, always keeping his creativity as the driving factor in his career. Gordon went down as an artist through and through, something that I think anyone who has any slight interest in film would appreciate.
A version of this story originally appeared on CreatorCoffeeShop.com
