What do the movies Scream, The Blair Witch Project, Misery, and The Silence of the Lambs all have in common? They’re all classic horror favorites from the 1990s, some of the all-time best, in fact. While those smash hits were inspiring fright and delight in moviegoers throughout the ‘90s, there was another movie – one just as great as the others – that sadly missed its chance to play in theaters and was condemned to collect dust on video store shelves for years. That movie was 1991’s The Resurrected, a highly underrated H. P. Lovecraft-inspired horror flick that deserves a wider audience.
Directed by Dan O’Bannon, writer of the first and best film in the Alien franchise, The Resurrected follows a private investigator’s attempts to uncover the strange happenings occurring in a remote cabin in Rhode Island. There he discovers that an esteemed chemical engineer has been receiving deliveries of human remains and is performing dangerous experiments in the basement. It’s a highly atmospheric and very well-made movie that does a lot with its seemingly simple premise. Here’s why The Resurrected is one of the best horror flicks of the ‘90s.
A Superb Cast
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One of the best traits that The Resurrected has going for it is its stellar cast. The movie features Chris Sarandon, John Terry, and Jane Sibbett, who all perform their roles perfectly. Terry gives a great classical noir-esque performance as the detective on the case, and Sibbett is especially good as the concerned wife committed to saving her husband. Although The Resurrected isn’t likely to make any film fan’s list of Chris Sarandon’s best performances, he does an excellent job as the diabolical Charles Dexter Ward. His performance is utterly convincing, as he plays the unhinged yet vaguely sensitive villain with just enough lunacy to be memorable, but never pushing it to scenery-chewing ridiculousness. In short, Sarandon seems to have a lot of fun with the role of Ward, and brings a creative energy to the role that elevates the entire film.
Chilling Atmosphere and Grisly Special Effects
From the first few frames, The Resurrected pulls the viewer in with its intoxicating, downbeat atmosphere. The dreary New England setting, complete with a perpetually overcast sky and a constant mask of fog, provides the perfect playground for the devilish plot to unfold in. The cabin that much of the movie takes place in is brilliantly realized, the production design team clearly going to great lengths to ensure each damp floorboard, rotten windowsill, and peeling-paint wall is given the same great attention-to-detail. When the story finally moves into the basement laboratory, the atmosphere takes on a hellish quality – much of the dark catacombs are obscured by shadow, with just enough shown to stir the imagination.
Creatures seem to be watching from the darkness at all times, which is creepy in its own right; but soon O’Bannon lifts the curtain on his Lovecraftian mutants, and it is more than worth the wait. As so eloquently put by Confluence of Cult in their review for the film, “The final 30 minutes of The Resurrected feature some of the very best, most fascinating, most disgusting practical creature effects the horror genre has to offer outside of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Chuck Russell’s The Blob.”
One of the Best H. P. Lovecraft Adaptations
While it will probably never receive the love and acclaim that Stuart Gordon’s spectacular Re-Animator and From Beyond get, The Resurrected is right up there with them as one of the best film adaptations of an H. P. Lovecraft story. The film is an adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which follows a man’s doomed quest to duplicate his deranged ancestor’s occult experiments. In adapting the story, O’Bannon and writer Brent V. Friedman retained much of the original themes while transplanting it to the current day (1991). Although adaptations of such stories will always get some degree of criticism from die-hard fans of the source material, The Resurrected does a truly admirable job at capturing the essence of Lovecraft’s story. Lacking the maniacal dark humor of many other Lovecraft adaptations, The Resurrected focuses solely on telling the grisly story and capturing the author’s specific worldview, which sees the world as being constantly on the brink of collapsing into darkness.
Dan O’Bannon Returns to the Director’s Chair
The Resurrected was the second and last film directed by screenwriter, director and visual effects supervisor Dan O’Bannon. Though he didn’t direct many films, O’Bannon was an extremely important figure in sci-fi and horror movie history. As The Guardian so aptly puts it: “While his name should be vaguely familiar to cinemagoers as the writer and creator of Alien, to fans of genre films, it should be tattooed somewhere on their person.” In addition to writing Alien, O’Bannon worked on Star Wars and Total Recall, and contributed writing to the cult films Dark Star, Lifeforce, Dead and Buried, and Heavy Metal. His directorial debut came with the legendary 1985 zombie-comedy Return of the Living Dead, which is often celebrated as one of the greatest zombie flicks ever made. Returning both to the director’s chair and to the subject of the undead, O’Bannon’s second feature is equally great, but unfortunately was denied the privilege of screening in movie theaters. Fortunately for horror fans, The Resurrected has since been resurrected, and now patiently awaits rediscovery and reappraisal on high-quality home video formats.
