Re-Animator landed like a firecracker in the middle of 80s horror cinema. A wild, vibrant adaptation of the HP Lovecraft tale, Herbert West-Reanimator, it was both extremely funny and remarkably close to the writer’s source text. Jeffrey Combs plays the darting-eyed Herbert West, a gifted yet utterly mad young medical student who invents a serum which brings the dead back to kicking, screaming life.

A sprightly Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton play his fellow students, who can only watch in horror as their Miskatonic University campus fills up with angry revenant corpses from the morgue, while David Gale is brilliantly glowering as Dr Hill, West’s nemesis.

With glowing reviews from mainstream critics, Re-Animator quickly became a cult favourite, establishing Stuart Gordon’s reputation as a talented genre director. A slew of other horror and science fiction films followed, including From Beyond, Dolls, Robot Jox, Fortress and King Of The Ants. As Re-Animator makes its UK debut on Blu-ray courtesy of Second Sight Films, here’s our interview with Gordon, in which we cover a few of the highlights from his filmmaking career, American genre writers, plus his recent theatre work, from Re-Animator: The Musical to his cannibal drama, Taste, which has seen members of the audience fainting during some performances…

Even after almost 30 years, Re-Animator’s still incredibly anarchic.