[Pride 2021] 'I Gave Him Life:' Queer-Coded Villains and Willing Seduction in the Re-Animator Franchise

The seduction of the innocent is a trope almost as old as the horror genre itself, and one that is intrinsically entwined with horror homoeroticism. From early examples like LeFanu’s Carmilla to teen screamers like Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys and modern twists on the old tale like A.D. Calvo’s Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl, these stories always follow a familiar pattern: our hero or heroine is your average Joe, proceeding through life as expected, when they encounter a mysterious, Svengali-esque supernatural figure who turns their life upside down. This seducer provides our protagonist with glimpses into a new and exciting mode of living, far removed from the drudgery—and, crucially, the conventional morality—that they were raised with.

The homosociality of this subgenre (the protagonist and their seducer are nearly always of the same gender) makes it a fertile field for queer subtext, as Michael from The Lost Boys has smoke blown in his face by David and Carmilla’s Laura succumbs to the titular vampire’s “not unwelcome possession.” But even more key is the fact that these stories never end with the protagonist giving in to their desires: the morality tale must be furnished with a triumph of good over evil, with the protagonist rejecting the goblin fruits of their seducer and reclaiming their place in the sun. What makes the Re-Animator franchise (Re-Animator, 1985; Bride of Re-Animator, 1990; Beyond Re-Animator, 2003) a fascinating outlier is the way it bucks this latter part of the trend. 

Re-Animator tells the story of Herbert West, a mad scientist in the grand old tradition, obsessed with perfecting a cure for death he calls his “re-agent” serum. Twitchy and anti-social, he makes an odd seducer—no flourishes of coolness here—but his role becomes all the more clear with the introduction of our everyman character, Daniel Cain. Dan takes Herbert on as a roommate, only to be drawn quickly into his experiments after Herbert re-animates Dan’s dead cat, a body in the hospital morgue, and finally two of their med school professors.

The two men’s entanglement is capital-R romantic, with Dan falling almost immediately under Herbert’s sway even as his fiancée, Meg, begs him to realize how dangerous his partner in crime really is. Re-Animator positions the relationship between its two leads as a battle between heteronormativity and deviance (in one notable deleted scene, Herbert literally steps between Dan and Meg mid-conversation; in another, he entreats Dan to inject him with the re-agent serum, with language - “I need it! Please!” - that carries equal connotations of sex and drugs) but the interesting thing about it is that Dan, barring a few half-hearted objections, never really frees himself from Herbert’s influence. At the end of the first movie, with both Herbert and Meg presumed dead, Dan takes up the serum himself with the intention of resuscitating Meg; the camera cuts to black, and we hear a scream. Dead or not, Herbert’s influence has entrenched itself so firmly into Dan’s life that Dan no longer has any qualms about playing God.

Bride of Re-Animator picks up shortly after the first film left off, with little explanation regarding what passed in the interim. Meg is dead, Herbert is alive, and he and Dan have absconded to Peru to continue their experiments. The question of why Dan is still following Herbert around, given the trail of destruction and dead bodies in his wake, is never really answered: whatever the reason for Herbert’s continued influence over Dan (and it must be said, he seems like an absolutely intolerable roommate), it seems to have stuck. Moreover, Herbert’s own obsession with keeping Dan around is even more textual in this film: faced with the prospect of Dan leaving him, he quite literally approaches Dan with Meg’s preserved heart in his hands, begging him to stay. Herbert has stolen the heart in order to build Dan a new girlfriend around it, hoping this, in turn, will keep Dan in his life; he spies on Dan in bed with another woman, then parrots his own pillow talk back to him in order to convince him to stay; he reacts to Dan’s new love interest with clear and spiteful jealousy.

Herbert is obsessed with his work, yes, but it does not naturally follow that he would therefore be desperate to keep Dan around - he could always do it alone, or simply find another assistant who wouldn’t keep bringing dates home to disrupt his experiments. But it seems Herbert doesn’t want that. What he wants, quite literally, is to build a family with Dan - a daughter the two men create with their own hands, superior to anything that a heterosexual coupling might produce, proof of Herbert’s triumph over everyone who insisted that his ideas were folly. “I will not be shackled by the failures of your God,” he rants to one doubter (the same woman Dan slept with, earlier on). “The only blasphemy is to wallow in insignificance. I have taken the refuse of your God's failures, and I have triumphed.” To what failure does he refer? The failure to conquer death? Or simply the failure to create a world that recognizes Herbert’s talents, which does not have a place for a man uninterested in traditional hallmarks - marriage, family - of success? 

Dan’s struggles with his place in Herbert’s life are pushed to the forefront in Bride: he repeatedly threatens to leave, but never quite manages to follow through. In the end, as Herbert prepares to inject their creation with the serum, Dan catches his wrist: “Let me do it.” Herbert’s look of awe as he watches over Dan with their creation speaks of more than simple pride in his work: it says that he has accomplished what he wanted most. He has succeeded in his experiments, but he has also successfully kept Dan at his side. And Dan, for his part, is as enmeshed as ever.

There’s little to say about Beyond Re-Animator: Dan isn’t in it (the explanation given is that he turned state’s evidence against Herbert) and Herbert is in jail. It’s also just not a great movie, replicating as it does all the queasy gender politics of the original (did we really need another sexual assault scene?) without the compelling character beats. Of much more interest is the unproduced treatment for a fourth movie, House of Re-Animator, which was described by screenwriter Dennis Paoli as a political satire in which Herbert and Dan would be called upon to re-animate a dead George W. Bush. The film would end, in Paoli’s telling, with Herbert dying at the hands of his zombies and Dan injecting him with re-agent to bring him back to life. 

This ending would have brought the themes of the series full circle: Dan, having vacillated between his sense of morality and his entanglement with Herbert, would ultimately make the same choice he made at the end of the first movie and use the re-agent to save the person he loves. Herbert would triumph twice over, both in having been saved by his own invention and by receiving confirmation of Dan’s loyalty. Unfortunately, this movie never did get made, so it can’t really be considered the canonical end to the series. But we do still have the existing films as an outlier to genre traditions: rather than rejecting the seductions of our villain protagonist, Dan ultimately accepts his role in the world Herbert is creating. Queer-coding in horror is always somewhat problematic, with gayness conflated with villainy, but there is also a genuine joy in seeing this rejection of heteronormativity. If that also means raising the dead, well . . . nobody’s perfect.

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