Italian director Ivan Zuccon isn’t a household name, even among the select audience of Lovecraftian film enthusiasts. Yet he should be; he has directed no less than five feature-length Lovecraftian films and adaptations:
- L’altrove (2000, also released as The Darkness Beyond)
- Maelstrom – Il figlio dell’altrove (2001, also released as Unknown Beyond)
- La casa sfuggita (2003, also released as The Shunned House)
- Colour from the Dark (2008)
- Herbert West Re-Animator (2017)
These are all independently produced Italian horror films with modest budgets, but they have all received English-subtitled releases in some format (DVD, BluRay, and/or streaming), though the earlier ones can be more difficult to find, and few have garnered much critical attention.
That is a pity, because while Zuccon obviously is working within tight constraints in terms of budget, these are interesting films. None of them are a straight adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s stories, although La casa sfuggita and Colour from the Dark are strongly inspired by “The Shunned House” and “The Colour Out of Space,” respectively, and partially adapt those tales to an Italian setting. However, Zuccon likes to go beyond Lovecraft, to spend more time developing the characters in his stories and the weirdness they encounter. Which is particularly evident in his 2017 film Herbert West Re-Animator.
In many ways, the all Re-Animator media lives in the shadow of the breakout success of director Stuart Gordon’s classic Re-Animator (1985). Even when the pornographic parody Re-Penetrator (2004) came out, the film riffed off the iconic image of a syringe of vivid green reagent, and even Zuccon cannot completely escape that particular visual. However, Herbert West Reanimator is not a remake or adaptation of Lovecraft’s story; it is something much stranger: a film that tries to make Herbert West more Lovecraftian.
Despite Lovecraft’s original stories of Herbert West being set in Arkham, the series itself had no connection to any other aspect of his nascent artificial mythology. West doesn’t invoke Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu, doesn’t find the formula for his reagent in the Necronomicon, never tries to resurrect a Deep One hybrid from Innsmouth or anything of that nature. Later media, especially in various comics that derive from the 1985 film, have gone back and brought Herbert West into closer contact with eldritch entities and the familiar props of Lovecraft’s Mythos.
What Zuccon has done that is different is try to capture something of the cosmic nihilism and weird aesthetic of Lovecraft in his Reanimator story, while still keeping the Mythos at arm’s length. This is Herbert West against an eldritch universe where death is but a door; but this is not Herbert West vs. Cthulhu. That approach, so different from all the others that riff off of Lovecraft’s creations as if the prop version of the Necronomicon was the source of horror instead of the creeping sense of dread, has rendered a film that is at times beautiful, bizarre, disjointed, and difficult to grasp—but is always and very importantly weird.
Emanuele Cerman plays Herbert West, and Rita Rusciano plays Elizabeth West, his daughter; they are the main viewpoint characters among the small cast, deliver solid performances, and the contrast between their narratives is key to how the film plays out. Here, rather than Herbert West’s obsession with reanimation being a coldly inhuman drive for knowledge that morphs into a morbid fascination with reanimation for its own sake, West pursues reanimation for extremely personal reasons. Nor is he the only one; unweaving the web of personal relationships between living, dead, and reanimated, and their experiences with life, death, and undeath, is the crux of the story that is revealed as viewers learn more about what awaits on the other side of the veil. This metaphysical aspect is where things get Lovecraftian in the sense of other dimensions, strange entities, and sanity-blasting knowledge.
It is still a rather modestly-budgeted independent production, so there is a certain lack of polish at points. The music by Mauro Crivelli and Christian Valentini suits the film, though it lacks the stylistic flourish to make it as memorable as Richard Band’s (who was, admittedly, borrowing heavily from Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Psycho (1960)). The impressive practical effects and almost slapstick physical acting of Stuart Gordon’s film aren’t there; the gore on display reflects more contemporary and brutal horror film conventions. Some computer-generated effects are less than convincing, but fortunately, the whole film is not shot in front of a green screen. I suspect the limitations of the production encouraged Zuccon’s creativity in trying to capture certain images and convey mood through careful shot composition, camera angles, and use of color rather than rely on CGI tentacles, and often the simpler and more stylized effects work to the film’s benefit.
When viewed in comparison to Zuccon’s previous Lovecraftian films, Herbert West Re-Animator comes across as the most polished, the one that most shows his growth as a filmmaker. While there are many fans of Lovecraft’s work that look for faithful adaptation of his stories into other media, they sometimes miss the possibilities of re-imaginings like Herbert West Re-Animator. Works that take Lovecraft’s ideas and aesthetics and run with them in a way that holds interest and keeps the viewer guessing.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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