When Stuart Gordon passed away on March 24, he left behind a remarkable, and remarkably consistent, body of work, both on stage and screen. He also left behind a legion of fans and any number of collaborators mourning his passing, the latter including Dennis Paoli, his most frequent creative co-conspirator and fellow architect of a cinematic House of Lovecraftian Horror that remains unparalleled in movie history.
Its cornerstone, of course, is Re-Animator, which came out (of nowhere, practically) in 1985 to redefine what a gory horror film could be—one built as much on character as on splatter, and with a sense of humor based not on punchlines but on carefully crafted excess. The movie became an instant cult favorite, and launched a Gordon and Paoli oeuvre that also encompassed the Lovecraft-based From Beyond, Dagon, Castle Freak (influenced by the author’s “The Outsider”), the Masters of Horror installment Dreams in the Witch-House, and the stage production Re-Animator: the Musical. They also teamed on a new cinematic version of The Pit and the Pendulum and further brought Edgar Allan Poe to the screen and stage—literally, with their constant star Jeffrey Combs playing the troubled writer—in Masters’ The Black Cat and the acclaimed one-man show Nevermore: An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe.
It was a fearfully fruitful alliance grounded in a friendship that dated back to the duo’s teenage years. While still in high school, Gordon started a satire troupe called The Human Race, of which Paoli was a member, “founded on the humor of our heroes, Second City and Nichols and May, all that original Chicago theater at the time,” Paoli remembers. “We played the coffeehouse circuit in the city, and actually developed a following. We developed our own material, and we’d do 20 minutes of blackouts and sketches between folk singers. And we got paid—$30 a show! We carried that on into college, and did some shows there. And then Stuart became a theater major and started an off-campus theater with a couple of productions that really shocked, horrified and delighted the audience. He had to be off-campus, because the theater department never would have let them do anything like that!”
That combination of shock and delight was a sensibility that Paoli says he and Gordon shared from the beginning. “The first thing Stuart and I did together was laugh. We discovered immediately that we had the same sense of humor. We also both liked horror, especially the American International and Hammer films; the Christopher Lee Dracula pictures had more action in them than most creepshows. William Castle movies and their gimmicks were favorites too, partly because they were often unintentionally funny, but the apex of horror was Psycho, which was an inspiration to Stuart. He came at the genre from the theatricality, and I came at it from sci-fi. We’d sometimes cut class to go to a horror-movie double feature.”
Their tastes for the outrageous would be further funneled into the Screw Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, where their productions included Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus staged as “a postapocalyptic dumbshow” and a version of Peter Pan with the title character and the Lost Boys as hippies, the pirates as cops, and a nude flight-to-Neverland acid-trip sequence that got them busted. Paoli was also part of Gordon’s subsequent Organic Theater back in Chicago, which staged the world premieres of Bleacher Bums (co-written by Paoli) and David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (filmed as About Last Night…). Then it came time to move into the feature-film world, for which Gordon and Paoli reached back to one of their formative inspirations.
“Stuart, as an artist, never forgot anything—never let any influence go uninvestigated and unappreciated,” Paoli explains. “H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction was a staple from our high-school horror days. And in the ’80s, if you wanted to make a low-budget film—and that’s the only kind of budget a Chicago theater director could get—you made a comedy or a horror film. We made both.” There was another good reason to tackle the eldritch author: “Oh, and Lovecraft was in the public domain.”
Beyond that, Paoli notes, Lovecraft’s stories were a perfect vehicle for Gordon to continue the no-holds-barred approach of his stage work. “Stuart’s theater was always about giving the audience a thrill, or a shock, they’d never had before, and Lovecraft was out there. His work was clearly sci-fi horror, but like no one else’s. It had a visceral effect on the imagination, and was very disturbing—and we wanted not just to entertain, but to disturb. There was always a sense of pushing boundaries in Stuart’s work with everybody. He did a lot of ‘egging on’ with most of his actors and creative collaborators, and he and I had been challenging each other in improvs and one-upmanship contests for decades. We were ready.”
And while the demands of making a movie are very different from those of putting on a play, Paoli says that Re-Animator represented a smooth transition for Gordon. “His theater work had always been recognized as cinematic in style, and once he got to make films, he made sure there was rehearsal time on every project he did. That’s rare in the film world, but imperative in theater.”
One advantage of telling over-the-top tales on film is the ability to craft and shoot ghastly, elaborate, grisly sights that the real-time nature of the stage doesn’t allow. Gordon took full advantage on Re-Animator, marshaling multiple effects artists to create a full spectrum of shocking and extremely splattery sights. “We got credit for being the first ‘moist’ film,” Paoli says, citing a coverline on FANGORIA #46 (quoting makeup creator John Naulin in the article inside), “and this was Stuart’s idea entirely. That was a constant in Stuart’s work: Show what it’s really like. Show what it’s really like when you pull the skin off a skull. Show what it’s really like when you bury a bone saw in somebody. Show what it’s really like when you cut someone’s head off. Stuart noted this to me a number of times, and I believe it’s true: It’s hard to remember now, but go back to ’84-’85, when we were making Re-Animator—how many times in film did you see a body in a morgue? Almost never. Now you see a body in a morgue in every other TV program. Some of our favorite characters inhabit the morgue. CSI got credit for breaking that ground, but we broke that ground decades earlier.”
As they continued into From Beyond and beyond, horror continued to offer the duo creative opportunities that other types of films did not. “Horror is a terrific genre in that it is venerable, and has fundamental features and values established in works that are at once classic and groundbreaking, going back to the earliest tales of man vs. monster. It is also an elastic, generous genre, in that it was historically in constant development, from prose to drama and back, spinning off subgenres that became venerable themselves: sci-fi, detective fiction, high romance, true crime, psychological thrillers. So it welcomed rule-breaking, which suited Stuart and I just fine. And it is an honest genre; it does not ignore or turn away from the worst outcomes, the most extreme emotions, the maddest, baddest behavior, the most fantastic ideas—as William Blake said, what is now real was once only imagined.”
Indeed, even within their Lovecraft spectrum, the pair’s subject matter ran the gamut from the weird science of Re-Animator and From Beyond to the grotesque family drama of Castle Freak to the occult terrors of Dagon. Gordon and Paoli’s joint creative ethic, however, rarely changed. “We’d gotten fairly intuitive about that early on,” Paoli says, “and it never changed. What changed were deadlines and contracts and getting flown out to LA every once in a while, though the only time I’ve ever been involved in the production end of a film was during the rehearsal process for Dagon. We developed the ability to collaborate at a distance on Re-Animator, and e-mail and Final Draft only made that easier. And the relationship of sensibilities and finding artistic agreement had been developed early on. And for the record, we never compromised, neither of us ever settled; if we didn’t agree on something, we found a better outcome that suited us both.”
In the midst of turning out their string of memorable movies, there were inevitably projects they toiled on together that never made it to fruition. Chief among them was another Lovecraft adaptation, The Thing on the Doorstep. “We did version after version of that,” Paoli reveals, “from a half-hour take for an anthology film to various feature-length scripts. Anybody interested? We did a voodoo story, an alien autopsy story, treatments for a wrestling body-horror story and several historical adventure tales.”
Then there was Tor, which would have marked their entry into the giant-animal-amok genre, to be produced by Paul Maslansky (who started with fright fare like Raw Meat and Race With the Devil but saw his biggest success with the Police Academy franchise) and Benni Korzen (Alone in the Dark). “That was a very strange project,” Paoli remembers. “The producers had the rights to a mythological monster story, the monster being a giant tortoise. Now there’s a challenge: turtles and tortoises are among mankind’s least threatening pets, and they’re slow-moving—famously, arduously slow. Think of those classic shots of the population of Tokyo fleeing Godzilla in terror; how hard is it to outrun a tortoise? Yet the script worked pretty well: The Native American mythology was persuasive, the setting was archetypal Americana and therefore rich in possibility, the characters were readily identifiable with, and we’d never written a giant-monster movie. It was fun.”
A Variety ad for the unproduced Tor.
The 2000s saw the friends giving Combs the opportunity to deliver a tour de force performance as Poe in several productions of Nevermore beginning in 2009, and revisiting their first cinematic glory with Re-Animator: The Musical, which won them and William Norris a 2011 Ovation Award for Best Book for an Original Musical. It had been many years since the Organic Theater days, but according to Paoli, little had changed. “Nevermore and Re-Animator: The Musical are recognizable Stuart Gordon stage works,” he says. “They are immediate, they break the fourth wall, they are funny yet force you to look away. Lenny Kleinfeld, an early collaborator with Stuart on one of the Organic Theater’s earliest and biggest successes—the sci-fi comic-book trilogy WARP!—and now a crime novelist, called Stuart’s dramatic style ‘take off your clothes, scream and bleed theater.’ Poe doesn’t strip, except his soul, and he doesn’t bleed, except in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and Re-Animator is, well, Re-Animator.”
Looking back at his practically lifelong association with Gordon, Paoli (who recently retired from a long-running gig at New York City’s Hunter College) sees many things that makes Gordon stand out in the pantheon of horror directors. “His theatrical background, his appreciation of actors, his sense of humor, his powerful sense of story and image. His involvement in the development of the script, his insistence on rehearsal, his inventiveness with limited budgets and schedules. His demand for everyone’s best work, and their deepest commitment to the story. His ability to adapt his style; he adopted Dogme filmmaking in his last productions. The clear ethical arcs of his characters. No one of those characteristics is unique among the many geniuses who have made horror films from Nosferatu to Parasite, but to have them all makes Stuart one of a kind. Oh, and did I say fearless?”
And when it comes to his favorite memory of Gordon, Paoli responds, “I have a million, but here’s one: I remember taking our bows one night after a Human Race performance, and as we bent lowest, Stuart and I looked over at each other. Big smiles—we were doing exactly what we wanted to be doing. Now extend that to a lifetime. I will miss that smile.”
