October 10, 2014

HALLOWEEN: Our Best Directors - 12. Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Stuck)

Note:  These damn lists.  I tell ya.  Theaters back in the day used to call Hitchcock movies "mortgage lifters."  When one of his movies landed in a theater, that theater was gonna be in the black for a few months.  Me?  Lists are my mortgage lifters.  One of the most trafficked posts on this blog is a serviceable look at the best Masters of Horror episodes.  I should just go full-on Buzzfeed.

"6 Signs You're Fighting a Japanese Ghost! (1: That Damn Hair!)"
"17 Vampires That Are Clearly Seeing A Dentist!"
"The 31 Sexiest Werewolf Transformation Half-Paw-Half-Hands!"


12. Stuart Gordon
(Re-Animator, From Beyond, Edmond, Stuck)
Roger Corman was making Poe movies and it was those movies that really got me to read Poe. I’m happy that maybe some of the films I’ve done with Lovecraft have done the same for someone.


Where to Start?
Re-Animator (1985)

Where has Stuart Gordon gone?  His last filmed piece of work was "Eater," a highlight of single-season horror anthology Fear Itself.  That was back in 2008.  Six years he's been absent from our precious glowing rectangles.  Leaving his fans to clutch their limited edition Re-Animator video discs and sift through the overabundance of cheap Lovecraft adaptations on Netflix.  Abandoning the minor masses that hold him as a paragon of horror's glory years and as a specific stylist of low-budget classics.

His films Re-Animator and From Beyond damn near created the sub-genre of gore-comedy "splatstick" (an ownership he shares with Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II and O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead).  He made Pacific Rim before Pacific Rim with Robot Jox.  He created a nasty "urban horror" trilogy in the 2000s with sour candies King of the Ants, Edmond, and Stuck.  And he directed the best episode of the Masters of Horror series, "The Black Cat," which put Jeffrey Combs in the shoes, suit, and alcohol-drenched misery of legendary author Edgar Allan Poe.


That episode inspired Gordon to create a play called Nevermore, a one-man-show that's played in Los Angeles since 2009 and again stars Jeffrey Combs as the troubled dreamer.  Along with that success, Gordon's also produced a stage musical version of his own Re-Animator.  This is only fair.  Stuart Gordon began his drama career working for Chicago's Organic Theater, where - and I never get tired of typing this - he locked the doors on patrons during the more intense plays.  What a dick.  While Gordon's currently thriving on the stage, he's also developing a hyper-sexualized version of Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep.  Had he directed anything in the past six years, he'd be much higher on the list.

Previous entries this month focused on recurring themes in directors' works, and that's because most of the entrants so far only have a few movies on their resume.  Gordon's filmography is overwhelming, as he's one of the few '80s horror directors to not only survive to the present day, but to thrive.  It's hard to point to one single unifying idea, although I've discussed his interest in joining sex and scares for more than just the usual exploitation gags.  Part of the fun with Gordon is the sense that there are no limits, not in the type of movie he makes, not in how far he'll to go to make you squirm.

Previous Entries:
13. Franck Khalfoun (P2, Maniac)
14. Adrián García Bogliano (Penumbra, Here Comes the Devil)
15. James Watkins (Eden Lake, The Woman in Black)
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