Few filmmakers have announced themselves as such a powerful presence in the world of horror with their very first film than Stuart Gordon. Though he had been a successful theatre director, Re-Animator was his first movie, taking its inspirations from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, which were still only slowly becoming popular at the time. Because of the serialized nature of the short stories, Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli originally envisioned their adaptation as a TV series. But limitations were much stricter on TV horror in the late ‘80s, whereas—despite the firm hand of the MPAA—it was a time when just about anything could happen on the silver screen. Keeping the tongue-in-cheek black humor of the source material intact, Re-Animator became a pioneering horror comedy, still widely regarded as one of the best of all time. It’s also one of the goriest of its time, due largely to the fact that Gordon made the decision to release it into theaters unrated (drastically reducing the number of theaters the film could play in) rather than deal with the censorship dealt out by the MPAA.

In post-production, Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna made a deal with Charles Band to offer services covering editing and distribution, offering Band a portion of the profits and giving Re-Animator a theatrical release through Band’s still-new Empire Pictures. The independent studio would go on to be a fondly remembered titan of ‘80s creature features and bizarre, low-budget offerings, beginning with 1984’s Dungeonmaster. 1985 saw their first real box-office success with Ghoulies, so when Band met Gordon and distributed Re-Animator, Empire was truly at the top of its game.

This kicked off a long-lasting relationship between Gordon and Band. After the success of Re-Animator, Gordon went on to immediately make two more films for Empire. Dolls shot first—though it would be released second—and is almost a complete turnaround from Re-Animator, catering much more to Empire’s in-house sensibilities. For one thing, it’s a much tamer movie, and for another it clearly shows off Band’s love for little creatures running around confined locations and killing people, setting the template for Band’s most long-running series, Puppet Master. In fact, Dolls even stars veteran character actor Guy Rolfe, who would go on to play the titular puppet master of that franchise no less than four times.

Immediately after filming Dolls, Gordon re-teamed with Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli for another H.P. Lovecraft reunion, From Beyond. It even re-teamed Re-Animator stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. With so many of the exact same elements in place, it would have been so easy for From Beyond to just feel like the same movie, but in reality it could not be more different. While Re-Animator certainly has an element of body horror to it, From Beyond truly takes it to the next level. It’s much more about the relationship between the body and the mind, as well as the destruction of one at the cost of expanding the other. Combs and Crampton basically switch roles from Re-Animator.

Combs, this time, played the victim in over his head—even if he made a transformation toward the end. Crampton took over the role of the obsessive scientist who is willing to take huge risks, including the lives of herself and others, for the sake of discovery. From Beyond proved that the same team of people could work within the same genre and still produce something entirely different. That, if anything, is what paved the way for Castle Freak.

Gordon continued his creative relationship with Band even after Empire Pictures crumbled. Catering to the then-booming direct-to-video market, Band launched Full Moon Entertainment in 1989 with the release of Puppet Master. The budgets were even lower than they had been at Empire, but that didn’t sacrifice the quality of Gordon’s work, as he directed one of Full Moon’s absolute best, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum in 1991. That one featured Combs in a smaller supporting role with no sign of Crampton, as well as another actor who would be crucial to the success of Castle Freak: Jonathan Fuller, who we’ll get to in a minute.

Like most Full Moon features, Castle Freak began life with a title and a poster. Stuart Gordon was called into Band’s office and shown the poster, asked what the film was about and was essentially told that it was about a castle and a freak and other than that, he could pretty much do whatever he wanted. As always with Full Moon, the primary concern seemed to be that whatever it was, it got delivered on time and on budget. According to Gordon in an interview for the book It Came from the Video Aisle: Inside Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment Studio, Castle Freak came together incredibly quickly—which was not at all uncommon for Full Moon—and had a rushed production schedule. “The thing that was kind of amazing was that I met with Charlie about it in February and we were shooting it in June. It was very fast. And we shot the first draft of the script, which is something you never do.”

That in and of itself is amazing because Paoli’s script is genuinely one of his best. It’s a classic gothic melodrama with almost jarringly realistic characters adjusting to harsh realities even before the titular Castle Freak comes into the picture. It is also the most un-Full Moon movie that Band ever produced. It bears almost no similarities to other features from the company. No little monsters, no tongue-in-cheek, relatively light tone; and it is definitely not as tame as the likes of Trancers or Subspecies. Castle Freak is the goriest and darkest film Full Moon ever produced; it’s a blunt and even grimy movie, but rather than wallowing in filth, it simply portrays the realities of death and trauma.

The movie shot in Italy at Band’s own castle, which the producer regularly used as a cost-effective location and continues to use to this day. Full Moon’s sophomore effort, Meridian, had been among the first to shoot there, followed by the likes of Pit and the Pendulum, but Castle Freak truly makes the most out of the location. It’s a huge and empty place and living inside that ancient castle truly showcases what a purgatory the leads have made for themselves. They’re the main characters, and the castle looks so much like a haunted house, but this family is so defined by pain and tragedy and a lack of communication that it feels like they’re the ones haunting it.

In an interview with Birth.Movies.Death, Gordon related the themes of Castle Freak back to Dolls, despite their incredibly different tones. “There is a lot of love in that movie, I think. It’s a disturbing film, but the message in both Dolls and Castle Freak is how important it is to care for your children, and to raise them properly, really. The line in Dolls says, ‘Being a parent is a privilege, not a right,’ and I think that’s the message of both films.”

One of the absolute highlights of Castle Freak, without a doubt, is its casting. Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton are back, front-and-center as a married couple (John and Susan Reilly, respectively) who could not have possibly drifted further apart. They had both proven capable of expertly walking the line between horror and comedy in their previous efforts with Gordon, and Castle Freak casts all of that aside to allow them both to give extremely raw performances. This is the movie where it truly feels like Gordon had created a makeshift theatre company for himself, using the same actors in incredibly different roles. Combs’ and Crampton’s characters share nothing in common with what they had done in either Re-Animator or From Beyond. But it’s not even either of them who prove how diverse Gordon’s in-house acting troupe could be. It’s Jonathan Fuller.

In his feature film debut, Fuller had portrayed Antonio, the romantic lead desperate to save his wife from the clutches of the Spanish Inquisition in Gordon’s earlier movie, The Pit and the Pendulum. He gave a strong performance as a faithful and sympathetic hero. And then he worked again with Gordon as Giorgio, the title character of Castle Freak. Many directors have said that they usually would want to cast actors rather than stunt men as their lead monsters, not negating that—as proven by Kane Hodder and countless others—stunt men can give fine performances. But Castle Freak is almost unparalleled. It’s incredibly rare for someone to cast the romantic lead of one feature as the growling monster in the next. It’s especially rare considering Fuller had to don a full body prosthetic makeup for the film, something that hadn’t really been attempted since The Manitou in 1978.

This decision pays off in spades, though, as Fuller’s physical performance is incredibly unsettling. He writhes almost snakelike through the catacombs of the castle, incredibly animalistic at times, but it’s the human beats that truly make Giorgio terrifying. He inverts the innocence of Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, who is destructive but removed from his trauma still has the heart and instincts of a curious child. It’s hard to imagine Giorgio throwing a girl into the water to see if she’d float. No, Giorgio’s instincts feel crueler, like a child pulling wings off a fly. He’s an incredibly voyeuristic character, spying on every woman he comes across, particularly Rebecca, the blind teenage daughter of Crampton and Combs. It’s hard to tell exactly how sexual Giorgio’s impulses even are, and not only because of his mangled and unusable nether-region. Even when he assaults and kills the sex worker that John brings back to the hotel in the movie’s most shocking scene, it’s a grotesque attempt to mimic an act he had just seen, apparently without any context or understanding of the act itself.

In an interview with Flickfeast, Gordon told a story of bringing his young daughter to the set, worried that she would be terrified by the Giorgio makeup. He was so worried that he even asked Jonathan Fuller to eat in his trailer instead of having lunch with the rest of the cast. When Gordon’s daughter noticed that Fuller was absent, she asked, having already known him. And upon hearing he was alone, went to eat with him in his trailer, completely unshaken by the makeup.

That makeup design, which is perhaps recognizable to people who haven’t even seen the movie but just walked by the cover in the video store, was created by the late John Vulich. A true talent in his field, Vulich worked on everything from Day of the Dead to The Lost Boys, designed the incredibly unsettling zombies for Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead, as well as the many monsters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Among his horror work, though, Castle Freak might be the most unsettling, grotesque creature he ever created. It even directly influenced the design of Victor Crowley for Adam Green’s Hatchet.

Like Re-Animator and From Beyond, Castle Freak is often considered to be based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft, in this case, “The Outsider.” In reality, though, the story only provides direct influence for a single scene. In “The Outsider,” a nameless narrator thinks about his life of darkness and exile while navigating his way toward the light. In the end, he confronts a hideous figure staring back at him and reaches out to it, only to come into contact with the glass of a mirror. It’s hard to imagine Giorgio waxing poetic about his loneliness and his condition, but that ending of the story does make for a striking moment in the film, as Giorgio—after freeing himself from his dungeon cell—touches a mirror and confronts his own image for the first time in his life.

Throughout the early 1990s, Full Moon had distribution through Paramount, allowing a higher end (or at least higher budgeted) product than the kind of movies they would become known for later on. Band kept cranking out Full Moon features through that time, from sequels to franchises like Trancers and Puppet Master to creations like Dollman, Mandroid, Doctor Mordrid and tons more. There was a banner in the Full Moon offices that read “200 Films by the Year 2000,” and by all account that was a mission statement that Band wanted to hold himself to. Things were produced so quickly to the point that Paramount did not even know that Castle Freak was happening. They weren’t informed of the movie at all and did not even learn of its existence until they happened to be visiting the offices one day and saw the dailies of the scene in which Giorgio assaults the sex worker down in the dungeon.

As mentioned, Full Moon was known for relatively tame horror, the kind of thing kids could use as a stepping stone after they’d grown out of kiddie horror like Ernest Scared Stupid and Hocus Pocus, acting as a bridge to the classic adult horror most fans were already watching at that age anyway. Castle Freak was definitely not that and it was just rotten luck that the Paramount execs, who for the most part never cared nor paid much interest in what Full Moon was doing, happened to be visiting on that day. They were appalled by the footage they saw and it turned out to be one of many reasons why Full Moon lost their deal with Paramount, forcing them to later partner with the Kushner-Locke company to begin producing movies at a much lower cost than the (already low) number they’d made them for in the past.

Castle Freak wound up being the very first Full Moon movie not to have any distribution from Paramount whatsoever, but while the company was affected by that loss overall, it didn’t really impact the movie’s video rental success. Not only did Castle Freak prove to be a video hit, it also gained the company some rare accolades from genre critics. Fangoria in particular had never been all that kind to Full Moon, giving a lukewarm review to the original Puppet Master and mostly negative reviews (with a few exceptions, including Pit and the Pendulum) to just about everything that followed. Because of this, it truly felt like a victory when Castle Freak won the esteemed Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Limited Release/Direct-to-Video Film in 1995.

Even now, Castle Freak is one of the most successful—if not the most successful—Full Moon film that never spawned a franchise. In 1998, there was a Castle Freak action figure distributed at the likes of FYE, Suncoast and Spencer Gift. It featured a loincloth to hide his mangled nethers, but kept the rest of his body very much intact, and even came with a cat o’ nine tails and half-eaten cat as accessories. Since that time, there have been Castle Freak Halloween masks, as well as DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Within the past year, Castle Freak made its comic book debut in the pages of Dollman Kills the Full Moon Universe, with a solo miniseries announced at the same time. Cinestate, the company behind the Puppet Master reboot, is also currently working on a remake of Castle Freak. This reboot, directed by talented Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich FX artist Tate Steinsiek, is being produced by none other than Barbara Crampton herself and is said to be taking the basic concept in some surprising new directions, which much more of the original Lovecraft influences in play. I for one can’t wait to see how it turns out. But much more than that, I’m excited that this gross, nasty but deeply human movie that is so unlike anything Stuart Gordon, Full Moon or any of the cast had made before it continues to live on. Like Giorgio himself, it might get buried or tucked away for awhile, but it always breaks loose.