If horror movies have taught us anything (and I’m a firm believer that they’ve taught us many things) it’s that it’s never a good idea for man to play God. Despite what Captain James T. Kirk says about space in the opening of the original Star Trek series, death is really the final frontier. Horror cinema has long been fascinated with death and dying, and is set to once again explore just that topic in the upcoming chiller The Lazarus Effect.

In the new film, opening on February 27, Olivia Wilde and a team of researchers have uncovered a way to bring the dead back to life. However, just as they’re about to make their findings public, the Dean at the university they work for shuts down the project. Undaunted, Wilde and her crew try to re-create the research, but she’s killed during the process. In a moment of grief, her fiance manages to bring her back from the other side, but she’s not the same woman she was in life…

All in all, The Lazarus Effect feels pretty typical of the “bad things happen when you bring the dead back to life” trope that’s so common in the genre. That being said, it’s a classic horror component, one that’s been done many times before – and so we thought this was a good time to highlight some of our favorite films that feature man playing God and bringing back those who’ve sloughed off this mortal coil with less than stellar results.

Re-Animator

Stuart Gordon’s 1985 cult classic uses the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft as a starting point, then sets out for territory all its own. The end result is one of the most amazing films of the decade, which is no small feat when one considers that the ‘80s were something of a golden age for the genre.

­Re-Animator would turn character actor Jeffrey Combs into a genre legend when all was said and done. Combs’ portrayal of quirky scientist Herbert West is pitch perfect – one part Victor Frankenstein, one part every nerdy kid you ever knew from science class. The aspiring doctor’s quest to bring the dead back to life has some unexpected results when his glowing green serum revives the cadavers he’s borrowing from the morgue – only bringing them back as crazed zombie-styled monsters. Audacious, gory, hilarious and featuring an unforgettable scene with a nude Barbara Crampton and a severed head, Re-Animator is a must-see if you’re into the science-run-amok subgenre of horror.

Pet Sematary

For years, author Stephen King talked about a book that was so horrifying that even he wasn’t comfortable publishing it – which, of course, made fans clamor for it all the more. The book was Pet Sematary, and the author finally gave in and made it available to the masses in 1983. Six years later, the novel that was too horrible to be unleashed on readers was a major motion picture. Funny how that works…

Mary Lambert’s adaptation of King’s novel about a father who stumbles across an isolated pet cemetery that brings things buried there back to life is a middle of the road entry in the series of adaptations based on the author’s work. It’s not as dire as something like The Mangler, but no one’s ever going to mistake it for Kubrick’s take on The Shining, either.

Film character Jud Crandall (the late Fred Gwynne) reminds us that “sometimes, dead is better” in the twisted tale, but grieving father Louis Creed can’t accept that when his toddler son Gage is killed by a semi in the road in front of their house. Devastated by grief, Louis ignores the warning and buries his child there in hopes that maybe he can undo the tragedy. Bad move.

King’s book is powerful in its portrayal of the absolute horror of having a child die. The film, on the other hand, is more interested in being a typical Hollywood genre offering, although Miko Hughes gets props for being creepy as the resurrected bad seed.

Frankenstein

No list of movies about bringing back the dead is complete without mentioning James Whale’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Shelley’s tale is essentially patient zero when tracking how the “scientists playing God with disastrous results” archetype has spread throughout the years. Whale’s adaptation of the book is one of the all-time great horror films and helped make Boris Karloff a genre icon.

I’m not even going to write a plot synopsis, because pretty much everyone knows the story of how Victor Frankenstein put together a body made of various cadaver parts and brought it back to life using electricity. It’s one of the genre’s most enduring stories. It’s also even more prophetic and cautionary today, in a world where technology and science are evolving faster than our ethics can keep up with them, than it was back in 1931.

Frankenweenie

Okay, so Tim Burton’s short film Frankenweenie isn’t exactly as horrifying as some of the other films on this list. That being said, the filmmaker did get grief from his bosses at Disney for making this kid-friendly riff on the Frankenstein story too scary for the target audience.

Young Victor Frankenstein’s world is turned upside down when his dog Sparky is killed after being hit by a car. Missing his best friend, Victor sets out to revive his pet – with the requisite unexpected results. Things don’t go quite as horribly wrong in Frankenweenie as they do in Whale’s version of the story, but it’s hard not to love this Burton-ized riff on the classic tale. If you’re looking to get your kids interested in horror movies without traumatizing them for life, the original Frankenweenie or the 2012 remake is a good starting point.

Return of the Living Dead 3

Saying good-bye to someone you love is tough – particularly when it’s forever. This is the driving theme behind Brian Yuzna’s underrated 1993 film Return of the Living Dead III.

It’s unusual for the third film in a horror franchise to be a standout entry, but Yuzna’s takes the Return of the Living Dead series in a new direction. Rather than just present us with another zombie apocalypse, the film ventures into teen romance and becomes something of a horror-fied version of Romeo & Juliet in the process.

When a motorcycle accident leaves his girlfriend dead, a teen (J. Trevor Edmond) uses the infamous Trioxin gas being tested on his father’s military base to bring her back to life. Rather than returning as a brain-hungry monster, Julie (Mindy Clarke) is instead mostly normal – except she can’t feel pain or eat regular food. The problem is that she’s undead – can love conquer her steadily increasing craving for human brains?

RotLD3 is interesting in that it presents a zombie as a sex object – something that divides genre fans across the board. Some find the idea of sexy, fetishized zombie Julie revolting, while others love her. No matter which side of that debate you come down on, it’s hard to deny that this was the last good Return of the Living Dead film.

Flatliners

With an A-list Hollywood cast (including Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts), and a famous director (Joel Schumacher), Flatliners was poised to be the biggest “what happens after we die?” film in ages. The movie was a box office hit (it took in $141 million back in the summer of 1990), but has sort of faded away in the nearly quarter of a century since its debut.

That’s unfortunate, because while the movie eventually descends into a sort of silly earnestness that only Hollywood really loves, it’s a visually striking exercise. Sutherland and his crew are obsessed with “flatlining” to find out what happens after you die, then being brought back to life to report on their experiences. Unfortunately for them, it’s not all long tunnels with lights at the end and angels playing harps on clouds.

No, instead our star-studded cast discovers that the afterlife they’ve found is far more hellish than heavenly, and each is haunted by sins they sought to forget.

While more a thriller than a straight horror effort, Flatliners is just dark enough to appeal to fans who like the darker things in life.

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