It’s officially October, better known as “Spooky Season” or “Spooktober” in Casa Goat. As a time that inspires many a metalhead to simply be themselves out in the open — the darker side of human imagery, skulls, witches, demons, erections, having a welcome place in the open — we here at The Goat Review embrace both the spooky in sound and in picture. Today, our own Scuttlegoat and Transcendental Goose Boss steps forward to recommend you an album from the wild, splattery death metal side, Death After Life (by Impaled), and a classic of splatstick sexual deviance, Re-Animator (by Stuart Gordon). Partake in one or both or neither, just know that Death After Life and Re-Animator promise that there’s more to the end than a mouthful of dirt…
Impaled – Death After Life (2005, Century Media Records, Goregrind/Death Metal)
A guest contribution from Transcendental Being of Extreme Punctuation
The 00s truly was a different time for metal. Right at the height of nu metal infestation into groove territory, and melodeath Flanderization,1 when bands like Lamb of God and Arch Enemy were growing exponentially in fan base, bands like Exhumed and Impaled heard Carcass albums too and thought that the older riffs were better. So in that vein of goregrind inspired by drop-tuned, harmonic riffs, snarled, gruesome vocal barks, and samples aimed to make audiences squirm, these great Bay Area minds persisted in the lane of the rotting rather than the lane of post-80s, intensity-stripped thrash metal that grew amongst their peers.
While Exhumed‘s 1998 release Gore Metal spun the wheel first in terms of this brand of goregrind with a slightly more modern death metal approach — more breakaways into quasi-breakdowns, more phlegm and guttural depth in the vocals, less heavy metal flair in the solos — Impaled sought to elevate it. Samples had always been part of the game, but Death After Life sought to make a movie out of the craft. As such, rather than finding just the right recorded chainsaw splatstick sequence, Impaled brought in friends from weirdo acts like Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3, along with real string instruments, to create a unique narrative and richer ambience and tension than what had inhabited the realm before. And if we look at the trajectory of modern bedroom goregrind and slam as descendent of the Impaled movement, Death After Life has a production value too that clears what would inhabit afterward.
Full of camp, still, Death After Life isn’t some progressive soundscape that transcends the identity of what death metal can be. From buzzing riff to hardcore acceleration to dive bomb dropout, everything that Impaled constructs between its upscale ideas screams with the same grit and grime that you would expect from the genre. But born of minds who craved the realization of undead excellence, Death After Life simply gives more.
And its collaborative nature in the pursuit of proper camp earns it a pairing with…
Re-Animator (1985, dir. Stuart Gordon)
Since I, Scuttlegoat, opened the series on a horror comedy this year, a splatstick comedy, no less, it seems fitting to end the series on one, as well. Re-Animator is one of the earliest examples of the genre, even predating Evil Dead 2, which cemented the idea of combining gory horror with physical comedy in the public eye. Re-Animator is a series of accidents and coincidences in a filmmaking sense and a true testament to staying open within the artistic process. Director Stuart Gordon originally worked in alternative theater and had voiced his disdain at the flood of “Dracula” movies while “Frankenstein” was getting pushed to the wayside. Friends suggested he reads Lovecraft‘s Herbert West: Reanimator, which in itself takes more than a little inspiration from the Frankenstein story. What he originally wanted to adapt to the stage became a show. And upon realizing that there was no market for televised horror in the 80s, the idea got sold to producer Brian Yuzna.
Yuzna and Gordon’s collaboration would lead to a string of similarly-minded movies produced, written, and directed by the two. In that sense, Re-Animator is a nucleus type movie, bringing people together who would color the scene of horror filmmaking for years to come. The movie contains also first time appearances by Jeffrey Combs, as the titular character Herbert West, and Barbara Crampton, who would play alongside many times and in separate projects. Both would go on to become iconic horror actors. Combs is certainly the star of the film, though. His matter of fact and overly stern behavior always appears as a façade for evil stewing beneath, willing to scheme, murder and reanimate to reach his scientific goals. Crampton herself would develop to be more than a mere scream queen, although her role in Re-Animator is certainly to be brought into (and endure) peril.
On a comedic level, Re-Animator is not as outwardly brazen as later films would be from the this pair. The comedic elements were not in the original script and supposedly were developed on the spot by actors, director, and cinematographer alike. The doom and gloom of the setting and general atmosphere is undercut by a sense of awareness of how absurd the situations the characters are in are. Take the famous “decapitated head giving cunnilingus” scene. It is not presented as a joke per se, and the tension of the scene is maintained throughout, but you can feel that there is a sense of sadistic glee present. Rather than these moments extending to their logical conclusion, they reach beyond, maximizing their potential for horror and comedy alike. On top of that, Re-Animator looks slick for the low budget. It is surprising, considering all that, that the movie had a decent reception with mainstream critics at the time. Even Roger Ebert, more often prudish than not, remarked that Re-Animator felt “reinvigorating, if not re-animating.” While Pauline Kael praised it as a sort of “pop Buñuel,” highlighting the stylized lighting and heightened absurdity of the many of the most striking settings. Re-Animator is a classic for a reason, after all.
- See, I can do it too, Scuttlegoat. ↩︎
