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Chains of Creation: Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak and the Prison of the Gothic

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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By the mid-1990s, Castle Freak found Stuart Gordon at a fascinating crossroads — caught between the transgressive brilliance of his early H.P. Lovecraft adaptations (Re-Animator, From Beyond) and the low-budget constraints of Charles Band’s Full Moon Productions. The result is a lean, mean Gothic chamber piece that struggles against its limitations but ultimately bears the unmistakable fingerprints of its director: bodily horror, familial guilt, and tragedy masquerading as terror.

Working once again with his creative muse Jeffrey Combs and the always-captivating Barbara Crampton, Gordon turns what could have been a cheap European monster movie into something strangely mournful. The story — of an American family inheriting a crumbling Italian castle, only to discover a deformed, feral creature locked away in the basement — feels familiar, yet it’s given a raw, unsettling emotional core. Combs’ performance, as a guilt-ridden father trying to hold his fractured family together, brings unexpected pathos to the proceedings, while Crampton’s quiet sorrow grounds the film’s more grotesque flourishes.

What separates Castle Freak from the endless churn of Full Moon’s ‘90s horror output is Gordon’s eye for discomfort. Despite being shot on a shoestring budget and with a skeletal crew, he still finds moments of painterly dread — the cold stone corridors, the echo of chains, the creature’s mournful moans. And yet, for all its ambition, the film is tethered by its financial and creative confines. The gore lands, the atmosphere lingers, but the pacing sags. It’s a haunted house story without quite enough haunting.

In retrospect, Castle Freak stands as a minor but meaningful entry in Gordon’s canon — a film where his thematic obsessions (sexual repression, guilt, the monstrous within) are filtered through Full Moon’s direct-to-video pragmatism. The collaboration with Charles Band may have clipped his wings, but Gordon’s voice still resonates through the decay. There’s a sadness to the film’s cruelty, a sense that the freak chained in the cellar isn’t just a monster, but a metaphor for Gordon’s own creative captivity within the B-movie machine.

The Prognosis:

Castle Freak may not reach the delirious heights of Re-Animator or From Beyond, but as a bleak Gothic tragedy disguised as exploitation, it remains one of the most distinctive horrors of the Full Moon era — a mournful howl echoing through the ruins of genre cinema’s most daring mind.

  • Saul Muerte

Re-Animator (1985) – Mad Science, Maximum Splatter!

17 Friday Oct 2025

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“Herbert West has a very good head… on his shoulders. And another one… in a dish on his desk.”

If you haunted the horror aisle of your local video store in the 1980s, chances are you’ve seen Re-Animator glaring back at you from a lurid neon-green VHS sleeve. Released in 1985, Stuart Gordon’s cult classic is the stuff of midnight movie legend: a delirious cocktail of Lovecraft, gore, black comedy, and mad science that set a new standard for splatter cinema.

Loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West—Reanimator, the story plunges into the twisted experiments of medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs, in a career-defining role). West has discovered a serum capable of reanimating the dead—though what comes back is never quite what was lost. As corpses twitch, shriek, and explode back into grotesque parodies of life, West’s obsession pushes medicine, morality, and sanity to their breaking point.

What makes Re-Animator endure, 40 years later, is the sheer precision of its madness. Stuart Gordon, in his feature debut, creates a bold visual aesthetic: sterile hospital halls colliding with garish splatter, glowing syringes of radioactive-green fluid cutting through shadow, and a pace that never lets you catch your breath. It’s both theatrical and grimy, like Lovecraft dragged kicking and screaming into the grindhouse.

Then there are the performances. Jeffrey Combs doesn’t just play Herbert West—he becomes him. Clinical, arrogant, and perversely charismatic, West is one of horror’s most iconic creations, a character whose clipped delivery and maniacal focus have carved him a permanent place in the genre pantheon. Beside him, Barbara Crampton brings heart and vulnerability to Megan Halsey, grounding the film’s madness in a performance that makes her both victim and survivor. The chemistry between Combs and Crampton, along with Bruce Abbott as the conflicted Dan Cain, is the human spine of the film’s monstrous body.

And then, of course, there’s the gore. Re-Animator doesn’t just dip into blood—it wallows in it. Heads roll (literally), entrails spill, and practical effects run wild with gleeful excess. This is splatter at its peak: not just shocking, but imaginative, choreographed chaos that keeps finding new ways to disturb and delight. Gordon walks the razor’s edge between horror and comedy, and somehow, miraculously, never loses balance.

Four decades on, Re-Animator is still a head of its class. It’s soaked in Lovecraftian dread, powered by unforgettable performances, and dripping with the kind of splatter that defined an era of VHS horror. Whether you’re a first-time renter or a long-time cult devotee, Re-Animator remains that rare horror feature that shocks, entertains, and endures—an unholy hybrid of brains, blood, and black humour that refuses to die.

📼 Staff Pick!
“One of the goriest, funniest, and most unforgettable horror films of the ‘80s. Jeffrey Combs IS Herbert West. Be warned: once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it… and you won’t want to.”

  • Saul Muerte

Movie Review: Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls (2023)

05 Tuesday Sep 2023

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Since the early 2000’s Director/Actor Andrew Bowser has been honing his craft with a unique blend of comedy and fantasy. It’s fair to say that in recent years, his greatest creation thus far is Marcus J. Trillbury aka Onyx the Fortuitous, a comic book enthusiast, video game player, and quirky nerd, and features in a number of youtube clips that have gone viral. It’s little wonder then, that Bowser would invest in bringing his fabrication to a feature length scale in Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls. 

Onyx is struggling in life, both at home and at work, drifting aimlessly with his heart on becoming a successful occultist, when he gets a call to the mansion of his idol Bartok the Great with an invitation to raise the spirit of an ancient demon. 

Like a warped wonka-esque tale in which the golden ticket promises a wondrous experience, Onyx along with four other devotees have been carefully selected to take part in the ritual. Each taking on a specific role that may condemn their souls for all eternity. Is Onyx destined to fall once more and succumb to the greater evil or has destiny something else in store?

The Prognosis:

Bowser has no option but to go all in to enhance his alter-ego Onyx the Fortuitous on the big screen. There are some that may not warm to his persona but his eccentricity but others will find it warming and infectious. Beneath the comical, fantastical exterior is a smart and enduring narrative with a steady rhythm pulsating to a satisfying climax. 

Bowser also brings in the strength of a solid supporting cast to add weight to the proceedings, namely Olivia Taylor Dudley (The Magicians), and the reuniting of Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator). Where he stretches the believability with his vision, it taps into an unearthly charm and resonates with an insatiable charisma. May Onyx the Fortuitous find more tales of the occult to lure you into his zen.

  • Saul Muerte

Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls will be screening as the Closing Film for Sydney Underground Film Festival on Sunday, September 10, 2023. 

Retrospective: The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)

27 Sunday Jun 2021

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For those in the know, there’s a special place in the heart of the Surgeons team for the work of Stuart Gordon. If you haven’t already, please check out our podcast episodes on Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon, and Dolls.
Links are found at the end of this article.

At the time that we recorded these episodes, I remarked that we had neglected to include his take on the Edgar Allan Poe novella, The Pit and the Pendulum.
Now celebrating 30 years since its release, it seems as good a time as any to retrospectively look back at this film which starred Lance Henriksen.

Upon review, this clearly isn’t Gordon’s finest hour behind the camera, but that’s not to say that there’s not fun to be had in viewing the movie, and most of that is in part due to Henriksen’s performance, quietly subdued take of the evils that humans resort to in the name of lust and infatuation.

Henriksen plays the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada,  during the torturous time of 15th Century Spain. His tirade has no bounds until he meets Maria (Rona De Ricci) and is immediately enamoured by her beauty. Torquemada struggles with the conflict that arises between his infatuation towards Maria and his devotion to the Church and decides to repress his sinful ways and subject his cruel desires outwardly, charging Maria with witchcraft and a trial by torture.

Whilst imprisoned by a confessed Witch, Esmerelda (Frances Bay – Arachnophobia, Critters 3, In the Mouth of Madness). Here, Maria’s upturned world suddenly spawns new life and the possibility of something beyond our imaginations, but when her husband’s failed attempt to rescue sends him to the new torture device, the pit and the pendulum, is it all too late for resurrection to save him from certain doom.

The Pit and the Pendulum suffers from adding little substance to the subject at hand and while it isn’t a terrible film, it does fail to spark the imagination from a director known to stimulate the visual senses.  It does boast the great Jeffrey Combs aka Herbert West in Re-Animator amongst the cast, but there’s not enough primordial fat for either Combs nor Henriksen to chew upon to make the film stand out. Instead it simmers rather than scorches the fiery subject matter.

It could have been so much more, but quite possibly the adaptation was a step to far for Gordon to handle or make his own, reduced to the shadows of Roger Corman and Vincent Price’s classic take from the sixties.

  • Saul Muerte