The Maze is proud to present an excerpt from my essay Portrait in Flesh: The Brains, Heart, and Guts of Brian Yuzna—part of Re-Animator 40, the companion book included with Ignite’s Ultimate Limited Edition and Deluxe Edition Box Sets. I have a long history with Brian’s movies, and you can see in the videos below I’ve spent a long time watching and considering his work and his place in the culture.

I put together this Five Obsessions video about Yuzna’s philosophy of filmmaking and his unique approach to branding himself and staying afloat in an uncertain market without ever compromising his taste and obsessions. As you can tell it’s easy to spot his unique zeal for gore and discomfort and the very real things he was interested in unearthing with blood and death. 

A few years ago I made this edition of my series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com on Yuzna’s Return of the Living Dead 3, one of the best American films of the 1990s, a film that manages to evoke true pathos without forgetting its job as a horror film and the latest entry in an extremely upsetting film series. It was a true joy to bring attention to this film, the box art of which was one of those indelible, unforgettable sights from the horror section at my local video rental stores. 

Brian Yuzna’s steadfastness of approach, his survival during the wilderness years of American horror cinema, when critics were eager to pillory its purest expressions and its most juvenile pretenders alike. It seemed like you couldn’t win as a horror director for a long time and yet Yuzna never gave in and never betrayed himself. It was a pleasure to write this piece. Without further ado a brief snippet from my essay on the man and his work behind the camera, the full text of which is in the booklet attached to our brand new 4K disc of Re-Animator, which I commissioned, and edited with invaluable help from Jim Quan.

Excerpt from Portrait in Flesh: The Brains, Heart, and Guts of Brian Yuzna (page 105)

Yuzna got hold of a 35mm Bolex camera and began filming the animals at his Chapel Hill farm, then started planning his first narrative film, a short called Self Portrait in Brains. Like the hero of Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood or Herschel Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red, Yuzna’s hero treats death like art, shooting himself and painting a canvas in the process. He liked the movie enough that he decided to expand it into a feature, but it got worse the more he tinkered. He found a sales agent in the back pages of Variety and managed to sell it in a few territories. He was learning about the business, one step at a time. He uprooted to Los Angeles when it became clear movies didn’t get made in North Carolina. He met special effects technician and budding producer Bob Greenberg, who started bringing him to the independent film sets his friends and associates were organizing, among them B movie producer extraordinaire Albert Band. His sons, Richard and Charlie, were becoming ubiquitous fixtures of Albert’s low budget empire, the former a composer, the latter the star director of  their production house, Empire Pictures. Charlie and Albert promised to get Brian’s next picture off the ground, but he quickly found himself patching up problems with Empire’s books and helping Charlie out of jams with his own movies. It occurred to him it’d be easier to just act as his own producer under Empire’s auspices (more specifically, their offices and post-production accounts). Without telling anyone what he was doing he started putting together the financing and logistics for his first film as a producer, along with Greenberg, who would pass away before the decade was out. The project? The brainchild of three equally hungry friends: actor and writer William J. Norris, gothic literature professor Dennis Paoli, and Chicago theater stalwart Stuart Gordon. Their script was based on a neglected set of H.P. Lovecraft stories Brian had never heard of. They followed a character named Herbert West, Reanimator.

The film was a veritable banquet of new talent, from the writers and director heading up the project, to the untested stars Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, and as the title character a young man named Jeffrey Combs. Herbert West is searching for the secrets of life and death and racking up quite a body count in the doing, starting, as Cahn once warned, with animals. The film was an instant if quiet success, as loved as it was hated by the more couth among the critical establishment, and its peculiar charisma promised bright futures for all involved. Gordon re-teamed with Crampton and Combs for another Lovecraft film, From Beyond (1986), which Yuzna co-wrote and produced, though he could hardly wait to get back to the world of During the press tour for their “little movie that could”, he was already filling Gordon’s ear with ideas for the sequel. Gordon recused himself from the project, seeing a road beyond what he’d already achieved. Between directing a Band-produced project entitled Dolls (1986) and writing Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989) from his office on the Disney lot with Yuzna, Gordon was on his own course. Yuzna wasted no time letting the world know there was a new mad scientist in town.

In 1989 he released his first properly budgeted directorial effort, the ebulliently maniacal Society, one of the finest practical effects movies all time. Movies like Return of the Living Dead, Creepshow, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and A Nightmare On Elm Street had turned the gore and the gallows humor of vintage E.C. Comics into high art (Creepshow was a conscious adaptation of the comic line’s stories and style). Yuzna wasn’t about to close out the decade with anything less than the last word on Reagan’s America and practical effects movies. Zeph E. Daniel, writing as Woody Keith, and Rick Fry had given Yuzna a script that depicted the pastel-clad upper classes of Southern California as a blood sacrifice cult who practice incest and murder to keep the upper crust bloodlines flowing down through the centuries. Yuzna decided on a different approach. He reached into his nightmares and his memories of a marvelous cheap programmer called Doctor X, directed by Michael Curtiz, from the days before the production code was enforced, when a more warped sensibility governed genre programmers. In that film a scientist reconstructs limbs out of a substance he calls “synthetic flesh”. In Society, Yuzna realized he needed a conclusion more nightmarish than what was on the page, and came up with what would be called “The Shunt,” in which the upper class disrobe and merge skins with one other, subsuming rejects and propagating their species like insects. The film is full of crude and uncanny images courtesy of make-up effects artist Screaming Mad George (born Joji Tani), who had made his name on the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, turning teens into giant roaches and Freddy Kruger into a killer television set. Yuzna and George bonded over their love of surrealist paintings, and so images worthy of Salvador Dali defined the bent world of Society, which has the sweaty sheen of the soap operas from which star Billy Warlock had matriculated. This was the blackly comic end to a decade of trickle down economics and “I’ve got mine” national identity rebranding.

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