The Cosmic Sexuality of Stuart Gordon

Unpacking the hilarious, off-putting, otherworldly sexuality of From Beyond and Re-Animator

by Ryan E. Torgeson

The fiction of H.P. Lovecraft is well-known to readers for recurring themes of alienation, the ever growing fear of the unknown, and an overall hostile and xenophobic outlook towards just about anything with a pulse. These extend beyond just the horrors that might be found lurking outside the front doors of Lovecraft’s protagonists, extending into fears of social interaction as well as a total fear of the American cultural landscape, spanning race, class, and culture.

One topic tellingly absent from an author so obsessed with human interaction and culture, however, was that of sexuality—or even intimacy in any real sense of the word. There are stories in his body of work that feature entities such as Shub-Niggurath, the mother of several Old Ones and a dark fertility deity of sorts, whose existence incorporates reproduction and creation. Or the Shoggoth, an indescribable being who can take on any shape and which might mock and transform into any living entity it wishes. The concept of birth (or rebirth) likewise appears throughout Lovecraft’s stories, either metaphorically in the form of ineffable celestial knowledge, or more literally, as in the accursed Whately offspring of The Dunwich Horror.

But even accounting for what might be called reproductive themes, Lovecraft’s work still remains mostly asexual. Children—or at least “offspring”—appear thematically and literally throughout his fiction, but from whence they came is of little concern to the reader. This is an outcome that might not be deemed so unusual after looking into personal accounts from Lovecraft’s own wife, Sonia Greene, to whom he was married for two years. “The very mention of the word sex seemed to upset him,” as Greene told Lovecraft researcher R. Alain Everts. And as Everts—who never met Lovecraft but did interview many of his friends and colleagues—elaborated, “Lovecraft… was himself loathe to discuss with anyone any aspect of sex and especially his own sex life.”

Even accounting for what might be called reproductive themes, Lovecraft’s work still remains mostly asexual.  

For someone whose primary experience with H.P. Lovecraft is through modern adaptations, this, and the general sexlessness of the stories themselves might come as something of a shock. After all, many modern adaptations of Lovecraft’s work—as well as works inspired by his ouvre—are rife with sexual undertones. 

This especially holds true for some of the best-known Lovecraft adaptations, namely the horror-comedy films of Stuart Gordon. Adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories often fall flat in their attempts, though not necessarily through the fault of their creators. While Lovecraft-inspired works such as Alan Moore’s The Courtyard, Neonomicon, and Providence, or interactive affairs like the 2015 From Software game Bloodborne, have proven that Lovecraftian horror can deliver  rich wells of themes and ideas, Lovecraft’s own work can be quite sparse when it comes to compelling human characters or dialogue—something which is especially troublesome for film or television adaptations. The onus is placed on Lovecraft’s adaptors to elaborate on the stories as they see fit, and to transform them into compelling visual—and not just written—media. 

In the mid-1980s, up-and-coming director Stuart Gordon released two Lovecraft adaptations back-to-back: Herbert West: Re-Animator and From Beyond. Joining Gordon under the writer / producer credits were Dennis Paoli and Brian Yuzna, the latter of whom’s work has already been covered in this publication. Together, these filmmakers asked the simultaneously absurd and inspired question, “What if we took the Lovecraft mythos and made it extremely gross, hilarious, and horny?”

With an electric cast consisting of Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combes, Gordon and Yuzna brought forth two incredible horror comedy films that also, in their own way, turned out to be wonderful adaptations of Lovecraft, adaptations where the cosmic and the sexual truly collide, and where the consequences of Re-Animator’s Herbert West and From Beyond’s Dr. Crawford Tillinghast’s pursuits of higher knowledge are just as dire as in Lovecraft’s original tales, even as they pursue vastly different thematic directions and styles. (Of the two, From Beyond deviates the most from the Lovecraft story that inspired it, but also borrows concepts from other Lovecraft tales.)

The collision of Lovecraft’s intense aversion to sexuality and Gordon’s injection of heavy sexual themes is precisely what makes his adaptations so compelling and worthy of examination—surprisingly, they expand upon Lovecraft’s visceral themes of alienation rather than detract from them.

The collision of Lovecraft’s intense aversion to sexuality and Gordon’s injection of heavy sexual themes is precisely what makes these adaptations so compelling.  

In Gordon’s two films, the consequences of the Lovecraftian pursuits of forbidden knowledge are usually pointed toward a objectified young woman (played by Barbara Crampton), a dynamic reflective of the horror genre’s tendency to blend sex and violence to tremendous effect. In Re-Animator’s unhinged climax (no pun intended), the animated severed head of Dr. Hill attempts to sexually assault Crampton’s character Megan. This scene is sleazy and bizarre, and yet played much more seriously and horrifying than the rest of the film’s comic absurdity. You might describe the images seen in Re-Animator as a sort of sexualized Frankenstein story, with West craving the ability to reproduce and recreate any and all human life, yet without the need of a human counterpart to procreate with.

In From Beyond’s commentary track, Gordon describes that film as ultimately being about “consumption” and “stimulation.” This meshes nicely with the Lovecraftian themes of all-consuming perception, and the concept of personal “rebirth” after being exposed to celestial cosmic knowledge. Gordon’s ultimate deviation here is that he lets these themes revolve around the power of knowledge and sexuality. Twice in the film’s runtime, Tillinghast is consumed by exposure to the unlocking of the pineal gland, and transformed in some way. In the first of these two transformations, he finds himself swallowed by a large phallic worm and reborn completely shaven, with a protruding (and rather phallic) pineal gland. Gordon’s fascination with these characters, and their sexual relationships with the cosmic, is obvious, and he seems almost to be teasing out a parallel between the pursuit and craving of knowledge in Lovecraft’s original characters and the primal urges and pursuit of sexuality.

Central to the plot of From Beyond is the Resonator, a device that stimulates the pineal gland and unlocks a “sixth sense” for things otherwise unseen by the human naked eye. To drop any and all pretense, this Resonator makes anyone in its wake extremely stimulated and extremely horny. Once again we see how the pursuit of knowledge by Gordon’s protagonists results in dire and bizarre consequences for the people around them, with Barbara Crampton’s character once again carrying the brunt of the traumatic repercussions. If this dire psychosexual imagery wasn’t already horrifying, Tillinghast’s pineal gland now acts like a small phallus protruding from his head, guiding him to different victims, whereupon he promptly sucks out their eyes and brain. This imagery is maybe the most blatant of all, with Tillinghast representing a literal all-consuming phallus, devouring everything in its misbegotten path.

These images and themes drawn out by Gordon and Yuzna create a psychosexual cosmic horror that is unlike anything else present in the genre. And yet at the same time, both of these films are hilarious, suggesting that perhaps we shouldn’t take them too seriously or entirely at face value—we are, after all, talking about the guy who went on to create the underlying story and concept for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Still, the way in which Gordon utilized serious horrific elements alongside serious slapstick and gonzo imagery is what makes his own niche genre of horny-horror-comedy so effective, so shocking, and so alienating.

It would be easy to dismiss Stuart Gordon’s approach to Lovecraft as pure, rauncy 80s horror schlock, or as a dismissive approach to the author’s work that merely uses H.P. Lovecraft as a jumping off point.

But we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Gordon’s approach—taken at face value, it’s clear that Gordon has found a literal resonance with the themes already present in Lovecraft. His insertion of heavy psychosexual themes into these decades-old tales should be embraced as an absurd and often hilarious counterpoint to the very things that made them horror classics to begin with.

Lovecraft himself was an absurd individual, yet his motivations and ideas are still being discussed and explored to this day. Gordon was simply able to extract yet another essence of what made his works so compelling—a goopy, horny essence, that succeeded on its own terms. And for all their schlocky allure and overt sleaze, they are no less off-putting, no less troubling than the mythos that inspired them, however far they may have come in the translation.

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