Dolls From Beyond: A Personal Memoir about Stuart Gordon and the Re-Animation of my Love of the Grotesque
I was born in the mid 1980’s, a prime time for body horror and corn-syrup blood baths. It feels like my love of the genre was born the day that I was. My mom was a horror buff, and I spent many nights hiding behind the sofa watching episodes of Tales from the Crypt well past my bedtime, wondering why I was more afraid of what was lurking in the dark than of the dark itself. Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, released in 1985, sort of passed me by. Outside of Evil Dead, my mom wasn’t huge on uber-campy cinema, and Re-Animator may have been at the tip top of that totem pole for her at the time.
I do remember a night when I set up shop behind the couch and my mom popped on Gordon’s Dolls. I was about five or six. Having already seen The Fly I figured this couldn’t be that much more frightening. I was wrong. I was also wrong about the fact that I thought my presence in the room was unknown. She always knew I was there, and I imagine she got a kick out of the idea that I was probably scaring the hair off my head behind her. For some reason, the opening of the film reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film Poltergeist but without the loving parents. The protagonist was a little girl like me with a wildly overactive imagination, existing in a world over which she had no control. I didn’t feel afraid for her the way I had felt afraid for little Carol Anne in Poltergeist. Judy, the small-stuff hero of Dolls, seemed tougher, more relentless: she understood that her parents were awful, and it wasn’t beyond her to imagine them being eaten by her teddy bear gone rogue. Before seeing Dolls, I had never watched a movie where toys came to life, much less one where they had a thirst for murder. But Judy Bower was me all over.
Judy Bower in Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987)
I guess my exposure to horror at such a young age inspired the presence of the kind of imaginary friends that most children would not normally have, and these friends weren’t that cute either. I thought I had created Bub the zombie for myself, only to realize in my tweens that he was born of a hazy memory of seeing Day of the Dead as a teeny tiny child. Of course, just as with Judy, no one believed me that Bub was there. To me, he was real. To Judy, Mr. Punch the doll was real, and had her parents just believed her, well, let’s just say things would have ended with a lot less blood to clean up off the floor. Instead of being terrified of Gordon’s Dolls, I was mesmerized.
Whoever had made this movie was creeping around inside my head. How did they know how much I struggled to get my parents to believe that I actually saw the things that went bump in the night? That great-grams really did sit at the end of my bed and sing me to sleep? Unlike Judy, I wasn’t dealing with killer dolls possessed by the souls of criminals, but I was dealing with the hardship of dismissal: no one takes you seriously when you’re a kid, nor do they take you seriously when you’re an adult who listens to a kid.
In the film, Judy confides in Ralph, an adult who has been trapped in the spooky old mansion with Judy, her parents and two hitch hikers. The home is owned by puppet maker Gabriel and his wife Hilary Hartwicke, who gift Judy a doll named Mr. Punch to replace the teddy her evil stepmother discarded in the storm from which they were all seeking refuge. Ralph kind of, sort of, believes Judy that something supernatural is afoot when strange things start to happen. How else could you explain the blood on Judy’s bunny slippers? Ralph had faith that Judy was telling the truth, but he wouldn’t let himself say out loud that vile little dolls were responsible for the gory death of Isabelle, the very cool British-punk-rocker-I-wanted-to-grow-up-and-dress-like whose face was smashed in in a way I hoped mine would never be.
Was it Ralph who I would grow up to be like? The type of adult who believed that Bub was there, but refused to admit it to keep in line with proper adult behavior? Of course, I didn’t know. What I did know was that I loved this movie, but I was too young (and too in trouble for staying up so late) to find out who created a film about the inner workings of my developing mind, much less to understand what a film director even did.
Dolls stuck with me, as did my love of horror, for the rest of my life, but at some point, it became buried under schoolbooks and job applications. It wasn’t until Stuart Gordon popped back into my life that I realized I was doing all the wrong things and needed to do the right ones. I never stopped watching horror, but it was relegated to a fun treat in between studying for science exams and writing anatomical reports. I spent most of my summers at field schools around the world, excavating ancient human remains for communities who wanted to learn more about their ancestors (or needed the bodies moved to build a resort of sorts).
In a way horror followed me about. My life still revolved around death and gore, but the work I was doing was real, and it was incredibly sad. Watching films like Saw and Hostel made me feel weirdly guilty, a feeling I hated. As the kids (and me) like to say, I played myself. I started to realize that my fascination with death wasn’t grave based, it was art based, and it didn’t occur to me until, on a lonely rainy night after a six-week nightmare of a field program, I popped on Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraftian masterpiece Re-Animator, a film I hadn’t seen in over ten years.
Dr. Herbert West in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985)
There it was. I saw it as clearly as I saw Judy in Dolls, as clearly as Judy saw me. What if my fascination with death wasn’t in the realms of the real grotesque, but rather with what we interpret as real, what we slap on the screen to make each other squirm, and no one, for the most part, is actually getting hurt? (Contrary to popular memes, Cary Elwes did not actually saw off his own leg in James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Saw.) I must have watched Re-Animator six times that week, and blew through as much of Gordon’s filmography as I could get my hands on, especially my favourites from my teenaged years: From Beyond (a film truly from beyond and possibly one of the most grotesque body horror films of all time), Dolls, Dagon, The Pit and the Pendulum, Space Truckers and, of course, The Dentist, a film that to this day still makes my teeth itch.
Stuart Gordon brought me home to my roots, reminded me of the little horrophile I am at heart, and my career did a massive 180. I left behind forensic osteology, quite easily I might add, and jumped right back into cinema studies. Two years later I’m sitting at my laptop telling you the story of how the great master of horror, Stuart Gordon, changed my life. I’m sitting at the same laptop on which I write about grotesque children in biological horror for my PhD. Because of Stuart Gordon, I will soon be known as Dr. Spooky Babies (or so I discussed with my advisor, the great Dr. Steve Jones – check out his work on all things horror, it’s really incredible stuff). My love for the work of Stuart Gordon may sound tongue-in-cheek. It’s easy to gush about how much you adored an artist after their passing.
Gordon on the set of From Beyond (1986)
This piece isn’t really about me, although it seems that way. It’s about Herbert West, Crawford Tillinghast and Stuart Gordon. Most of all, its about Judy Bower and Mr. Punch, and how her unshakeable belief in Punch gave me my unshakeable love of horror. From the bottom of my little black heart, thank you Stuart Gordon. May you rest in peace… or pieces, if you prefer.
Dedicated to Stuart Gordon, 11 of August 1947 – 24 of March, 2020
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