This past weekend I traveled by train up to Boston for the wonderful Boston Underground Film Festival, a staple of the local film scene, and one of the finest most wonderfully raucous places to enjoy genre cinema. Amongst exciting new titles like Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys and Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight, our brand new sparkling 4K restoration of Stuart Gordon’s deliciously depraved Re-Animator got to play for an appreciative and packed house. The weather let up enough to usher in a crowd eager to see the film looking its best. The festival is always well attended but it was nevertheless an honor to know Ignite and Eagle Rock’s gorgeous restoration sold out the historic Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. It’s maybe my favorite place on earth to see movies, so it was quite a thrill to be there on behalf of the movie. Some of my favorite movie going memories were there, from a lovely 35mm presentation of Astaire and Rogers in Swing Time to the Boston premiere of Manoel De Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica, accompanied by dear friends and collaborators. You can measure a life at the movies and I’ve done a lot of living at The Brattle.

I rendezvoused with Ignite’s resident illustrator Alex Kittle, the Tech director and a projectionist at the Brattle, beforehand. We got dinner at Le’s in the Garage and then headed to the theatre where I spoke to some of the assembled crowd about their excitement at seeing the film looking its best. Barbara Crampton had flown in earlier that day at the invitation of Boston Underground’s Director of Programming and Barbara’s long-time friend Nicole McControversy. Barbara was, as usual, a complete delight, as she’s been every step of the way during our restoration process and in the gathering of special features. She’s made herself an indispensable part of the team and we couldn’t be luckier to have her on the road championing our work. You can catch her in person at a few upcoming screenings of the film. Before McControversy and BUFF programmer and presenter Evrim Ersoy welcomed Crampton to the stage they had a surprise for the audience: a dance contest. Four exhibitionist members of the crowd came up on stage and danced for a few seconds to win a copy of the new 4K complete with the Dr. Hill Bobblehead, furnished by BUFF. Competition was stiff, to say the least.

Horror legend Barbara Crampton and Alex Kittle, Tech director and a projectionist at the Brattle.

Barbara Crampton came up to introduce the film and detailed some of her journey from young ingenue to horror royalty, which you can get a better sense of in Katie Rife’s marvelous profile in the book included with the new 4K. It’s been a storied and exciting career and most exciting of all she’s just getting started. She gave me the rundown of the projects she’s already finished shooting and hopes to get financed in the near future and she’s got a full dance card to say the least. She’s still shocking and surprising some 40 years after her debut. And speaking of, the film began and the applause and hollering of the crowd began almost immediately. In one of my favorite bits of behind-the-scenes gossip, Bruce Abbott told me in our 40th Anniversary oral history, also included in the book, and Crampton reiterated during the Q and A, that no one knew how funny the movie was going to be until they started filming. Heaven knows they figured it out. The film played like gangbusters before this most appreciative crowd at the Brattle, with peels of laughter and shrieks of shocked delight (not least my own; I forgot about one of its best jump scares and lost my senses) drowning out the movie at times.

Scout Tafoya, Ignite's Editor-in-Chief, and horror legend Barbara Crampton.   

At the Q and A afterwards Crampton sat with venerated horror journalist Michael Gingold, a friend of the actress and a fan of the movie since its first run. The pair discussed their respective histories with the film. Gingold once turned the heads of a costumed performer at a theme park when they learned they shared a love of Re-Animator, and Crampton’s career still provokes besotted and wide eyed admiration from fans eager to hear her tell stories from the set of the likes of Chopping Mall and Jakob’s Wife, a personal favorite of her own body of work. She detailed her and director Stuart Gordon’s mutual learning of the filmmaking process on the set. Gordon had to be taught by director of photography Mac Ahlberg about continuity and lighting, which led them to rely more on long takes in keeping with Gordon’ roots in the theater. He would ask for reverse angles that would break conventional editing rules and Ahlberg would talk him through the reasons to do something as well as the reasons not to. Crampton for her part had never filmed anything out of chronology and so kept a detailed chart of where her emotions would need to be on a given day so as not to be caught unawares by the demands of a given scene. Crampton shared that a big part of getting the film down to a manageable, marketable length was the input of legendary producer Albert Band, who sat in the editing room with Gordon and Lee Percy until they got it down to its current length. Crampton was shocked they managed, knowing how precious filmmakers can be. But the shorter length served the text and the performances, allowing them to get a real grip on each character before the mayhem takes hold. And certainly there’s no better test of a film’s success than the roar of an approving crowd, the sound of which that night at the Brattle will stay with all of us for a long time. This was a rare evening, made possible by dozens of people, and it was a joy to share it with that crowd. The film couldn’t have looked better, and being in the audience for the first public screening of this marvel was a privilege. Run don’t walk if the film plays near you, and be sure to get your hands on the 4K as soon as possible.

Scout Tafoya is an author and filmmaker, and Ignite's Editor-in Chief.