As Cannes 2025 begins, we’re looking back at a landmark moment in horror history.

40 years ago (May 11 to be exact) Stuart Gordon’s bloody magnum opus Re-Animator premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Miloš Forman’s jury awarded the big prizes that year to Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business, Birdy by Alan Parker, and Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. It was the award for Re-Animator that would prove most predictive of its reputation. The little horror film that could has had a brighter and more persistent cultural impact than any of its more serious minded competition. When it premiered at a marketplace screening, a handful of critics crept in and were blown away by what they saw: brilliant colors, madcap gore, zany set pieces and seriousness of purpose. Gordon’s time at the Organic Theatre Company had served him well, creating a one-of-a-kind atmosphere of ripe melodramatics and blasphemous sensation.

The film was awarded a special designation for genre films by a group of critics at the festival, it was picked up for distribution on the spot, and the rest was history. We’ve managed to find the original press release with quotes from Roger Ebert, who called Gordon’s direction “confident, headlong and exuberant.” Ebert wasn’t the only one, Pauline Kael raved: “These jokes hit you in a subterranean comic zone that the surrealists' pranks sometimes reached, but without the surrealists' self-consciousness (and art-consciousness). This is indigenous American junkiness, like the Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder Young Frankenstein, but looser and more lowdown.”

When it went into wide release later that year Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote: “Re-Animator has as much originality as it has gore, and that's really saying something. Stay away if you haven't a special fondness for severed body parts, or an unflinching curiosity about autopsy scenes; this one takes place mostly at the morgue, and it doesn't leave a thing to the imagination. But as directed by Stuart Gordon, a television and stage director making his feature debut, Re-Animator has a fast pace and a good deal of grisly vitality. It even has a sense of humor, albeit one that would be lost on 99.9 percent of any ordinary moviegoing crowd.”

The film was a barnburner at the festival, no stranger to controversial films or emphatic displays of affection and disapprovals. Boos, like the ones that greeted Leos Carax’s similar blissfully weird Pola X, and rapturous applause for minutes at a time (like the record breaking 22 minute ovation that later greeted Guillermo Del Toro’s equally bloody Pan’s Labyrinth), are regular fixtures of the Cannes theaters and the response from the crowd was as boisterous as any midnight audience you’d screen it for today. Cannes wasn’t exactly ever reticent about showing horror films. Go back as far as 1968 and you would have caught Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko...or you would have if demonstrations hadn’t broken out. The festival was canceled before awards could be handed out. Even further back, the luscious Shaw Brothers ghost story The Extravagant Shadow squared off against The Virgin Spring, which would later provide the inspiration for Wes Craven’s infamous Last House on the Left. Though Cannes always reserved the midnight slot for daring work, they debuted an official Midnight Screening section in 2011, and since the days of Re-Animator playing after dark films like Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst, David Cronenberg’s Crash and Maps to the Stars, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon have kept the tradition of Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon’s cult classic alive on the red carpets and gala screenings of Cannes. There will never be another Re-Animator but it’s a beautiful thing that people will still be shocked in their tuxedos and gowns at the world’s premiere film festival.

For more coverage and an understanding of what went into making Re-Animator check out our exclusive 4K with a booklet containing an extensive oral history, complete with more first reactions from critics at the time and the cast and crew. I had a whale of a time putting it together, as well as editing interviews with Barbara Crampton & Jeffrey Combs. Our edition is a true labor of love, and we can’t wait for your copy to arrive.

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

EMPIRE ENTERTAINMENT – Press Release

RE-ANIMATOR - THE TOAST OF CANNES

For both critics and fans, "Re-Animator" was the toast of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

A special midnight screening, to give the film its world premiere, turned into a mob scene as hundreds of eager fans arrived. A second screening in an adjoining cinema had to be arranged, at the last minute, to accommodate the overflow of close to 500 people. By 1 a.m., both cinemas were standing room only.

National critic Roger Ebert, of Chicago, described the reaction: "Re-Animator" had them screaming, stomping their feet and making taxi-whistles of enthusiasm.

Ebert continued: “Although the Cannes festival’s official entries are devoted to serious cinematic art, there are hundreds of films here every year that are more dedicated to cinematic profit. Many of them are sex, horror and action pictures, and the competition among them is so fierce it is a badge of honor to have your film selected for the Saturday midnight screening at the Star cinema.

“It was at the Star that I first saw Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, in 3-D, with a bloody liver suspended in midair over the audience, and John Waters’ Polyester, starring Divine in the first scratch-’n’-sniff movie.

Director Stuart Gordon’s movie (Re-Animator), is not quite in the same category; it’s better, for one thing, and it betrays the touch of a true stylist. But for the midnight crowd the other night, it was gory, blood-soaked and shocking enough that additional screenings had to be scheduled, and there were fights among fans trying to get in to see it.”

A jury of 16 of France’s leading film critics shared Ebert’s enthusiasm and named "Re-Animator" as the best science-fiction, fantasy or horror film of the festival.

Cinema Group of Paris, one of France’s leading film exhibitors, was quick to react to the praise for "Re-Animator" and acquired the film for screening in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and French-speaking Switzerland.