New web and TV series re-tells the story of H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator
Everyone knows and loves the masterful 1985 horror comedy Re-Animator. Directed by Stuart Gordon and produced by Brian Yuzna and Charles Band, the proudly unrated sex and splatter shocker based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft won the hearts of horror fans and mainstream critics and put Gordon on the map. And now, 32 years later, an intrepid band of Italians are reviving the source story for a web and TV series.
Announced back in 2016 and now completed, Herbert West: Reanimator is the brain child of Italian indie auteur Ivan Zuccon (The Wrath of the Crows) and the man himself connected with us today to fill us in on the state of this most ambitious of projects.
From Ivan:
Herbert West:Re-Animator is a modular project. We start with a web series, them we’ll have a TV series and at the end of the journey we’ll have a feature film. The web series is currently in post-production and we are going to release it by the end of the summer. It’s a very ambitious project. Of course I know that Gordon and Yuzna made great movies on the same subject but I am crazy enough to try to find a different way, a more personal one, and tell the story with a very different angle. First, I’ll dig some elements of the original Lovecraft tales trying to keep the same atmosphere you can find reading the stories. Second, I am taking the distance from the Lovecraft tale at one point drawing an Herbert West with a different characterization. In the stories, he is obsessed by death and the idea to overtake the concept of death at any cost. So the struggle is between him and his obsession.
In the new movie West is destroyed by a huge loss and he wants to defeat death in order to have his beloved ones back. It’s just a different perspective but with the same result: lots of experiments with lost of failures and lots of reanimated and very aggressive corpses. It’s very dramatic without any kind of comedy accent we have seen with the Yuzna/Gordon installments.
Herbert West: Reanimator is an Italian production with Italian cast and crew and it stars Emanuele Cerman as Dr. Herbert West, Valentina Bivona as young Eleanor West, daughter of Herbert, Rita Rusciano as adult Eleanor West, Alessio Cherubini as Herbert West Junior as well as Nika Urban, Sofia Pauly and Valentina Framarin.
To learn more about the project, visit the official Herbert West: Re-Animator Facebook page.
