A great philosopher (a stoner that I met in the smoking area of the university at 3am) once said: “If your daughter loves Re-Animator, that’s your son now.”
If you interact with any queer or trans person on Twitter and ask them what their favourite horror movie is, I guarantee that Re-Animator will be in their Top 5, at least. In 1985, when Re-Animator was first released, it breathed new life into the horror genre. It is a story about the mad scientist Herbert West and his obsession with creating a “reagent” serum that can bring the dead back to life. However, when it was first released, it seemed to be the black sheep of the horror genre and never really earned the mainstream hype that it deserved. Little did the director, Stuart Gordon, know that one day a generation of queer, neurodivergent teenagers would watch the scene where Herbert West decapitates his rival and exclaim, “He’s so me! He’s my babygirl!” There seems to be a running trend in modern-day media, in which franchises end up cultivating a polar-opposite audience than they intended to, like how Succession gained a following of teenage girls who make Tom Wambsgans fancams rather than, well, normal functioning adults.
But, why has Re-Animator gained a queer following? After all, the director never intended for the movie to be queer-coded nor was it specifically advertised for queer audiences. However, this phenomenon can be mostly traced back to audiences shipping the two main characters, Dan Cain and Herbert West, calling them by the portmanteau “Danbert”. The ship itself is reminiscent of the Golden Retriever/Black Cat dynamic, with Dan as the well-adjusted, albeit slightly boring everyman with a streak of perversity, and Herbert as the twitchy, socially aloof mad genius who seduces Dan to the darker side of scientific discovery. Despite multiple warnings to Dan about staying away from Herbert, Dan’s path of a heteronormative future with his girlfriend Megan Halsey is destroyed from the hurricane of events that happen throughout the movie, all because of his fascination with Herbert. The relationship between Dan, Herbert and Megan is described as a “love-triangle” in a documentary about the film called Resurrectus. Even more interestingly, in the commentary for the DVD, actors Jeffrey Combs, who plays Herbert, and Bruce Abbott, who plays Dan, constantly crack jokes about Herbert and Dan throughout the film, calling Herbert and Dan “The Bickersons” and an “old married couple”, with Combs constantly referring to Dan as “Danny” in a lovestruck voice.
Not only that, but the motifs of body horror and reincarnation appeal to a lot of transgender Re-Animator fans, with said fans reading Herbert as a trans man and the famous neon green “reagent” as a hormone injection. In an infamous deleted scene, Herbert begs Dan to inject him with the reagent, pleading for Dan to “give it to him” and that he “needs it”. Fans have joked not only about how sexually charged this scene is but also that Dan is helping Herbert with his “t-shot”. There are also symbolic parallels to gender transition from Herbert hiding his work from God-fearing eyes, to its transformative effects on the body and mind, to the way it administered with a needle and syringe. The reagent transforms you into something “other” which others see as an abomination but Herbert sees as a triumph, with Dan becoming fascinated with the process of reanimation. Also, Jeffrey Combs can’t play a cis-hetero man to save his life, and queer audiences flock to this man’s projects like he’s the Pied Piper of the LGBTQ+ community.
In the end, the horror genre has always been a safe space for queer audiences, and Re-Animator is no exception. If you’re a queer horror fan and you want nightmares of Herbert West chasing after you with a syringe, stream Re-Animator on Prime Video!
“Medicine 1” by marosh is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.