Re-Animator/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement - Herbert West: Reanimator was written in 1921 and 1922. The movie has almost completely supplanted it in popular culture.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Why the Bride was instantly fond of Dan. While on the surface it could be because she had Meg's Heart. There is an alternate interpretation. In the beginning of the movie, Dan was taking care of a sick patient named Gloria who served as the Bride's head later on. While she was alive, she confided in Dan how scared he was and while it probably wasn't his intention, his compliments and vow to take care of her through her surgery prompted her to hold his hand in comfort, may have prompted a Florence Nightingale Effect response from her. Combining her head with Meg's heart may have enhanced those feelings due to Meg's love for Dan.
    • Was Rufus the cat intending to attack Dan when he jumped at him or was he trying to find comfort remembering his former owner, before Dan killed him? While the scene suggests the former, its sequel, Bride Of The Re-Animator, showed through Francesca's dog that the animals do retain some semblance of memory of their owners. The dog, Angel, seemed happy to see Francesca at first, until she freaked out over Lieutenant Chapman's arm replacing his missing paw grabbing her, causing him to growl at her. During the extended sex scene with Dan and Meg, Rufus always dramatically leaps on the couple trying to get their attention. This leads this troper to believe that in his last moments, Rufus (who was being attacked by Dan and Herbert in an attempt to flush him out) was scared and trying to leap into Dan's arms in one last attempt at comfort before Dan threw him against the wall, killing him.
  • Complete Monster: Even though Hill was a horrible person, the Warden in Beyond takes things one step further.
  • Crazy Awesome - Dr. West
  • Crosses the Line Twice - Okay, West killing Dr. Hill can be justified, he had it coming... But him decapitating him wholly and then re-animating the head and body separately for what amounts to shits and giggles? Seriously!
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome - When West rams a bone saw straight through the heart of one of the reanimated, without hesitation or so much as a squick face.
    • "Dan...I told you I had an idea...OVERDOSE!"
    • Meg's father killing Dr. Hill's head whilst West deals with the body.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny
    • Those pesky severed heads! They always tip over.
    • "Cat dead. Details later."
    • From Beyond Reanimator

West: "Check the Death House. If the Warden found her, he probably took her there."
Phillips: "The Warden? But he's dead!"
West: "..."
Phillips: "God damn you!"
West: "Religion has nothing to do with this."

  • Funny Background Event- At the end of Bride of Re-Animator, West is knocked into the crypt containing many of his rejected experiments. In their midst is a white kitten puppet peaking over a corner.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel - While most of the violence is quite over-the-top, the appearance of the morgue zombies was painstakingly based on actual corpses of accident victims, and as such is disturbingly realistic and extremely scary.
  • Rooting for the Empire: Despite all the horrifying things West has done and the havoc as the result of them, the audience can't help but cheer him on and hope he succeeds.
  • Squick - Plenty, but the scene where Dr. Hill brings a whole new meaning to the term "giving head" stands out in particular.
  • Values Dissonance: HP Lovecraft was a racist [1]. Here's how he describes a black boxer in the Re-Animator short stories.

"He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon."

  1. In his younger days and earlier stories, very much so. Whether he was/n't or grew out of it is a matter of debate.