Behind the Couch

Cult film and stage director Stuart Gordon has died at the age of 72. Famed for his Lovecraft adaptations, including Re-Animator (1985) , From Beyond (1986) , Dagon (2001) , Castle Freak (1995) and Dreams in the Witch House (2005), Gordon was also a playwright, and began his career producing experimental, frequently controversial stage plays before moving on to film in the 80s. Born and raised in Chicago, Gordon majored in theatre studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he founded the theatre company Screw Theater. Together with his wife and collaborator, actress and writer Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, he formed the Organic Theater, described by a friend of the director’s as “the take-off-your-clothes, scream and bleed theater.” The company quickly garnered a reputation for radical, politically charged, anti-establishment productions, including an anti-Vietnam war re-telling of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan , which actually resulted in the arrest of Gordon and Purdy-Gordon on charges ...

1985 Dir. Stuart Gordon When the eccentric Herbert West (a manic Jeffrey Combs) arrives at Miskatonic University, Arkham, he and a fellow medical student become embroiled in strange experiments to reanimate dead tissue. With horrific consequences. Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story Herbert West – Reanimator , Stuart Gordon’s film is perhaps one of the most successful adaptations of the author’s work, and it triggered a resurgence of cinematic interest in the work of Lovecraft throughout the 80s and 90s. The film is an outrageous blend of splattery special effects, pseudo-sci-fi concepts, comic violence, pitch black humour and vivid horror. At times it boasts a similar madcap tone to Sam Raimi’s earlier splat-stick classic, Evil Dead , as Dr West’s increasingly desperate and ludicrous attempts to reanimate corpses reach feverish intensity. The idea to make Re-Animator stemmed from Gordon’s belief that there were not enough Frankensteinian stories. He believed pop-culture had...

2001 Dir. Stuart Gordon Despite its title, Gordon’s film is not an adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story of the same name. While it certainly borrows elements and themes from it, Dagon is an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth , Lovecraft’s 1936 novella which tells of a Miskatonic University student’s fateful visit to the titular dilapidated coastal town to study the architecture and weird folklore. While there, he encounters hostility from the bizarre locals who are revealed to be amphibious mutants; the result of an ancient pact between the towns forefathers and a race of sea dwelling creatures known as the Deep Ones… Gordon had planned to direct an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth back in the 80s, but funding constantly evaded him. When his friend and collaborator Brian Yuzna founded the Spanish production company Fantastic Factory in the early 2000s, Gordon was finally able to realise his project. Dagon is a no nonsense, old-fashioned horror flick that hits the...

1992 Dir. Stuart Gordon Not so much loosely based on HP Lovecraft’s The Outsider (written in 1921, published in 1926) as it is deeply inspired by it, Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak tells of troubled couple John and Susan (Jeffrey Combs! Barbara Crampton!) and their blind daughter Rebecca (Jessica Dollarhide), who travel to Italy to sell off an ancient castle John inherited. Not long after they arrive, things start to go bump in the night and strange events occur, not least Rebecca's claims that she is visited in the night by a stealthy prowler. When the mutilated bodies of the housekeeper and a local prostitute are discovered it becomes clear that the castle houses a secret inhabitant… Stuart Gordon is no stranger to the macabre visions of Lovecraft having adapted Herbert West – Reanimator, From Beyond, Dreams in the Witch House and The Shadow Over Innsmouth for the screen. With Castle Freak he didn’t so much adapt The Outsider as take its central themes – and one speci...