phantom limb /ˈfan(t)əm’lim/ n. an often painful sensation of the presence of a limb that has been amputated.

Welcome to Phantom Limbs, a recurring feature which will take a look at intended yet unproduced horror sequels and remakes – extensions to genre films we love, appendages to horror franchises that we adore – that were sadly lopped off before making it beyond the planning stages. Here, we will be chatting with the creators of these unmade extremities to gain their unique insight into these follow-ups that never were, with the discussions standing as hopefully illuminating but undoubtedly painful reminders of what might have been.

With this entry, we’ll be looking at House of Re-Animator, the intended fourth installment of the Re-Animator franchise. According to what fans could occasionally glean from various horror websites in the mid- to late-aughts, House would have found both Herbert West and his reluctant friend/partner-in-crime Dan Cain working in the White House (!), resurrecting then-President George W. Bush (!!), who was at the time was rumored to be portrayed by William H. Macy (!!!). Scuttlebutt abounded for years, though the movie sadly never materialized.

With the recent, all too untimely passing of horror master and intended House director Stuart Gordon, Bloody Disgusting thought it was high time to get the lowdown on one of the most fascinating sequels-that-never-was. Joining us for this talk is screenwriter Dennis Paoli – House co-writer, longtime Gordon friend and collaborator, and a writer known for such films as the original Re-Animator, From Beyond, Castle Freak, The Dentist and Dagon.

For those who haven’t yet seen the three Re-Animator films, a quick recap: Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is a brilliant but egotistical young medical student devoted to defeating death itself with a reagent serum that reanimates the dead…albeit with horrific side effects (namely, the resurrected mostly become mindless, violent, zombie-like creatures). West eventually befriends Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), a fellow student who becomes a reluctant assistant to West. As they attempt to experiment with and refine the reagent, the duo find themselves embroiled in a number of different gory, violent scenarios, until Herbert is eventually imprisoned for his crimes. Years pass, with West continuing his work behind bars, until a new assistant and a series of horrific events lead to a prison riot which sees West go free, escaping into the night to continue his research elsewhere.

So how did the House of Re-Animator project originate? With yourself, Stuart Gordon, or Re-Animator franchise producer Brian Yuzna? “My recollection is that it was Brian’s idea. He had been responsible to a great degree for the original Re-Animator. He was the original producer who got in touch with Stuart, and he was a producer of a number of Stuart’s other movies. Brian is a great producer to work with. Of the three of us – Stuart, Brian and I – I would say the real true believer in the genre is Brian. Stuart and I have loved horror films since [the time we’d met] in high school. But Brian was the real prime mover, and significantly dedicated himself to the genre – to the extent that he recognized that the genre is full of not just sequels, but franchises. The Frankenstein franchise, the Dracula franchise, the [Universal] Monsters franchises. But also Corman’s Poe franchise, the work Corman did in developing Poe’s work into film. Brian really saw that as a model that appealed to him, and that he was really built for. He’s very, very good at developing not only those kinds of projects, but franchises – not just a sequel, but a series of films. He was responsible for developing the Re-Animator series, the franchise including Bride of Re-Animator [and Beyond Re-Animator]. I was only involved in the original Re-Animator. Re-Animator co-writer Bill Norris and I did a treatment for Bride, but Brian decided to go in another direction. And frankly, Stuart and I were never really that interested in working on sequels, including sequels to our own work.

“But Brian came to us with this idea – and it was Brian’s original idea, we thought it was pretty good. Especially at the time that Brian first proposed it, which was back during the first Iraq War – probably about 2004. So Brian came to us pretty early in the millennium with this idea – House of Re-Animator. Notice how he’s using the Frankenstein titles – Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein. It immediately struck a chord with Stuart. If you look at Stuart’s films, and he doesn’t always get credit for this, [but] from a particular perspective they have a political stance. While he was never about doing political films, he was a political person. He had strong political beliefs. And since he put so much of himself into his films, and he demanded so much of the selves of everybody else who worked on his films, including me, our politics were always going to be at least in the background of those films. This film was an opportunity to put politics in the foreground.

“Especially when Brian came to us and said ‘I have an idea – House of Re-Animator. And the House is the White House.’ And that sold us. We were not only happy, but anxious to get to work on the project. We were not particular fans of the Iraq War, we were not particular fans of the Bush Administration, or of certain particularly right wing political structures that have subsequently, over the course of the first couple of decades of this millennium (and going back a number of decades into the previous one), have been developing in such a way as to take control of a large wedge of American politics in a particular way. That way being [having] billionaire-backed funding to buy certain political agendas and institute them in the government. We thought that sounded like something we could use to write a Re-Animator story. Because if the House of Re-Animator is the White House, that means you have to be reanimating…well, hmm, let’s see – who would you re-animate, given that particular storyline? Of course, you’re going to be reanimating the Executive Branch. You’re going to be reanimating the President, eventually.”

This film would have been Stuart Gordon’s return to the character that began his film career, as producer Brian Yuzna had helmed the second and third films. Would House have accounted for the previous two movies, or would it have acted as more of a direct follow-up to his original film? “In the sense that Herbert was a criminal. If I’m putting the various Re-Animator stories together correctly, Herbert had become a convict, and had a criminal record, and we used that. We did wind it back to the original film, too. The dynamic of House of Re-Animator was going to be the renewed and developed relationship between Herbert West and Dan Cain. So that was going to take us back to the original Re-Animator as well.”

So – what exactly was the story of House of Re-Animator? “There are at least twelve treatments that span seven to eight years, [covering] two different administrations, and two really different approaches to what the story could be. They all have some things in common, but the original idea for the story from the early 2000s is, to some degree, quite different from the developed idea from the early part of the second decade of the 2000s, for a couple of reasons: one reason was, Stuart was really attracted to the project at the beginning because the Bush Administration looked so ripe for being characters in this particular Re-Animator story. If you remember, Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney had heart problems. So the original treatment starts with him in a meeting with the billionaire backers of the Bush Administration and a number of oil billionaires from the petroleum industry, which turns into a celebratory party because they have gamed the system and gotten almost carte blanche backing from that administration, as oil companies have from multiple administrations. During the party, he overdoes it, and has a heart attack and dies. That was our hook.

“Brian, although he very much respected Stuart’s work and my work, and was willing to go with us in any direction we wanted to go, always had the idea and perspective that the characters should not necessarily be recognizable political figures. That the idea [should be] that the President of the United States would be reanimated. That idea alone was central to the movie, and the President (like the President in a lot of American films in which the President is a character), isn’t necessarily recognizable as any particular other President. It’s usually some generic kind of President. It’s Michael Douglas or Morgan Freeman. It’s ‘a’ President.

“We were specifically interested at the beginning of the project in making it about the Bush Presidency. We developed the story from that particular hook, with Dick Cheney dying and necessarily having to be reanimated to keep that administration stable, especially in the middle of a war. But then, as the war dragged on and as the administration changed, we would go back and revise the story. Until the last version story that we did was more generic, in the sense that it was a more generic President of the United States, and it isn’t specifically the Bush Administration or any recognizable figures from it. But the idea that the government is still at the beck and call of billionaires and power brokers was still part of the story.

“So the story developed through several different models, and eventually several different structures, but the core element of course is that the President of the United States becomes a reanimated zombie. Which, if that isn’t fundamental satire, I don’t think it exists.”

So how does West find himself in the White House? “Once the Vice President dies (and in the later versions, it’s actually the President – there’s an assassination attempt and he’s killed), there is a great pressure among the functionaries in the administration to keep power. So there is a figure or two behind the scenes in the administration that wants to keep it in power. They have, as you would imagine, an extensive knowledge of the backgrounds of important people throughout the country. When it’s reported to one of the power brokers in the administration by a functionary that the Vice President is dead, the power broker processes the news and then replies ‘No, he’s not.’ In the later version [it’s the President whose death is reported, and then denied]. Since it’s in their interest to keep the [Vice Pres or Pres] alive, and they’re aware of Herbert West and his reanimation serum, they decide to seek him out.

“But in our story, he’s disappeared. He’s on the run, and has fallen off the map. No one knows where he is. So they have to contact the next best thing – Dan Cain. So they go and essentially kidnap Dan Cain, because he’d worked with Herbert West, and have him try to redevelop and reconstitute West’s reanimating serum. He doesn’t want to do it, he’s sworn all of that off and has tried to rebuild his life. It’s taken him decades to try and put all of the terrible things that happened behind him. He’s the same idealist he was in the original Re-Animator. He wants to do what all doctors want to do – defeat death. But that idealism, in a political modality, makes him not want to support any administration that would consider putting a zombie in charge of the Executive Branch of our government! So he refuses at first, but in one of the versions [of the treatment], we have him have a family. So they threaten his family, [and] he tries to work on it, but he can’t quite get it right. There are, of course, consequences to that, and a certain amount of mayhem goes on [resulting from] his reanimating fluid which leads to certain, let’s say, unfortunate, bloody circumstances.

“When push comes to shove and they threaten Dan’s family, he says ‘I’m sorry, I don’t seem to be able to reestablish the reanimating fluid, but I do think I know how to bring Herbert West back.’ And so he has them release a press release that he, Dan Cain, is in the process of developing a serum to extend the six to twelve minute brain death, in hopes that would eventually allow for the reanimation of the dead. He knows that – one, Herbert will hear about this, and two, if we remember from the original Re-Animator, Herbert cannot stand the idea that somebody else will get credit for his work. So of course Herbert shows up to take credit, and to accost and assault Dan for taking credit for his work. Because he’s the same old egotistical narcissist that we remember Herbert was, besides being a great genius. So that’s how they get Herbert, because he injects himself into the story because of his ego.

“Once Herbert’s in the story and he’s recruited to reanimate the Vice President, there are certain story developments wherein the First Lady is killed, the President is killed, and so eventually everybody who shows for a presidential press conference or at the Kennedy Center Honors is essentially a reanimated corpse. But they’re able to recruit Herbert because they give him a great lab. They give him the best laboratory he’s ever had, and carte blanche to do what he wants. Therefore Herbert and Dan are reunited, they’re given the laboratory of their dreams, and complete power to reanimate the most powerful figures in the free world. And that’s essentially Act One of the very first version, and the better part of Act One for subsequent versions of this story.”

Joe Dante’s ‘Homecoming’

Though Mr. Paoli was a tad hesitant to reveal too much detail beyond this initial set up, he did give a bit of insight into where the story would have gone beyond the first act. “Several of the versions, especially during the Iraq War, focused on the cost of war. And we developed the idea of ‘zombie soldiers’. Because the war was going on much longer than they had anticipated, and there were more casualties, and they wanted to keep the casualties low because it was costing them political capital. They decided, since they had Herbert West, that they wanted him to reanimate soldiers and develop a zombie army. So they would take casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan, and bring them back, have them reanimated so they didn’t look like casualties, and they could send them back into the field. That’s a powerful and quite easy to grasp satiric perspective on the war in Iraq. The idea of the dead casualties from that war coming back [as zombies] has been done a couple of times, as in that Master of Horror episode [Joe Dante’s Homecoming], so we eventually couldn’t do that.

“That was one direction we were going to go in. The other direction being – once you’ve got a zombie President and a zombie Vice President…well, if you remember from the previous Re-Animator films, the dead reanimate pretty angrily. It’s pretty much the reptile brain that reanimates. Then you get to the power brokers. What they want is control over the politicians. Their money usually buys them control. Well, money doesn’t buy you control of a zombie. There aren’t zombie dollars. So they had to find another way to control the politicians that they had reanimated. So we looked at possibilities for developing [that idea for the second act].

“The other thing that developed over the story was this new relationship between Dan and Herbert. Herbert only sees what’s in front of him. Herbert is only moving forward, because science only moves forward. He only wants to make his reanimating fluid work better, and to reanimate more perfectly, and to develop a better serum. He’s just a mad scientist. Dan looks back. He understands that their history together wreaked havoc and ruined lives, especially the life of the woman that he loved. So he carries guilt around with him, and blames himself primarily. But when Herbert returns to the scene, he understands that he’s now responsible for making this madman even more powerful.

“So there’s a great conflict between Dan and Herbert, as there always sort of was. That’s what we bring from the first movie into this one. So we worked that out in the story as well. If that conflict is what this film is about, then one of them has to die at the end. And, of course, if one of them dies at the end, what does that mean?” Whoever survives will reanimate the other? “Yes, you have imagined correctly. And we of course investigated both of those endings [one with Herbert dying and being reanimated, the other with Dan being the one to die and get brought back]. We were willing to try both of those endings, whichever one fit the story that we eventually wrote. But even if it’s Herbert who dies – it’s a Re-Animator film! It doesn’t mean he’s dead. Let’s put it this way – it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the series.

“I think there was an Island of Re-Animator in the works at one point. Just as there was with the original Frankenstein franchise, or with the Hammer Dracula franchise, there are dozens of ways to keep the franchise going. [But] it had to be the right ending for this particular story. You want it to really function as a powerful ending. And if those two guys became the main adversaries, it would have a certain amount of character-driven story value. That, of course, would have been the ending. But it wouldn’t necessarily mean the ending of the series, of course, because it’s the Re-Animator series.”

Potentially killing off Herbert West, the titular character – that would have been one hell of a surprise! “One of Stuart’s rules was always ‘Go all the way.’ It was one of my script rules, too. ‘Go all the way.’ If you looked at some of the memorials to Stuart, one of the things that a number of people said, be they actors, people who worked on special effects, people who wrote for him (myself included)…we all had the same experience with Stuart. You’d write something if you were a writer, or you would act a scene if you were an actor, and then he would come to you and say ‘That was great, but can you give me more? More of this, or more of that?’ And you’re going ‘Well, I was going to build to this more. You were going to get that later in the script, in the scene, etc.’ And he would always say ‘No. Do it now. We’ll find something better later.’ And, you know, you always did. So the idea was to go all the way, right away. And just go all the way, every chance you got, and you would eventually find the way to top yourself. It always took the story in a new and even more mad direction. That’s what was great about working with Stuart. Especially in this genre, where you can go all the way, and you’re expected to go all the way, and to be as mad as you possibly can. It was Stuart’s style. It was the culture Stuart developed on the set, among his collaborators. You never worried about that. You never worried about ‘Oh my gosh, we’ll do something, and then we can’t undo it.’ Well, no. It’s not that you can’t undo it, it’s that you can then do it better. You can then do more. You can be more entertaining, you can be more outrageous. And that’s the principle of our work.”

Had any tentative casting been done beyond the expected return of Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West? Was Bruce Abbott up for returning as Dan Cain? And, of course, there were those rumors that William H. Macy [from Gordon’s David Mamet adaptation Edmond] would have played George W. Bush. “Bill Macy would have been George Bush in the original version! He actually even sorta looks like him a little bit. I thought he’d be great. That fit perfectly. And we had the President do some spectacularly awful things. We [also] would have of course asked Bruce to return as Dan Cain.”

So why did the project ultimately not come to fruition? “[It would have had] a larger budget than the other Re-Animator films. You’re doing a mockup of the Oval Office, you’re doing a mockup of the Rose Garden, you’re doing a highly equipped science lab. In a couple of the versions, there was a cryogenics lab where they could keep bodies fresh-frozen. There was more production value, so you were going to need a bigger budget. So it was probably a harder film to put together, [budget-wise]. Plus, it’s got political content. A lot of people don’t want to touch that. You know, you killed the President of the United States! I have an idea that, if we had made the film, we would’ve gotten on some political list some place!

“So I don’t know what the ultimate problem [really was], but it’s my experience the problem is always funding. If you get some money, you didn’t get enough. And you only have enough when you have enough, and when you have enough [you get] to make the movie. I don’t know why it didn’t get produced, but if I had to guess – it’s because they didn’t raise the money.”

Is there a possibility that the screenplay could be rewritten to account for another President in office? What does the future of Re-Animator look like? “No idea! Would I do it? In a heartbeat! Would I work with those guys again? In a minute. Now, whether it’s this project or some other project, I don’t know. But we did develop a more generic version of House of Re-Animator, which is still [possible to develop]. The danger now is that you would go back to the very specific version, that it would be a very recognizable President and Vice President you would be reanimating. But there’s a generic version too, which would work as well. But I’d love to work with those guys again.”

Very special thanks to Dennis Paoli for his time and insights.