In 1968, the University of Wisconsin put on a production of Peter Pan, but it’s not exactly what you think. The Lost Boys take on the guise of free-love hippies whose fairy dust is LSD and whose Pirate oppressors wear police uniforms. Flying to Neverland, a group of skyclad dancers shimmy to Iron Butterfly’s “In a Gadda Da Vida” against a psychedelic light show backdrop. It’s this spectacle that leads to the arrest of the production staff, including a youthful director with a precocious need to upset authority. That director was Stuart Gordon. And now, with heavy heart, Gordon has returned to Neverland.
The world woke up on Tuesday, March 24th, 2020, expecting more reports reminding us of our own mortality. In the grips of COVID-19, everyday has a rising death toll as we watch numbers climb and full, long lives are reduced to statistics. It’s the kind of biting observation that director Stuart Gordon would have appreciated, known by his colleagues for his pitch black sense of humor and relentless desire to not censor himself. So, when reports came out that the iconic director passed away on Tuesday, completely unrelated to the apocalyptic pandemic sweeping our world, it was hard not to think Gordon got in one last punch line before his swan song. He went out on his own terms, as he did pretty much everything in his life.
I could spend this time going through Gordon’s history, his 37 plays with the Organic Theatre Company, his 14 feature films, his TV projects. But I’m not writing an obituary. I could tell you how Re-Animator jolted me into the world of H.P. Lovecraft and helped shape my eldritch imagination. But that’s my story, not his. His is a story of doubles, a complicated and coercive landscape that ultimately brought people together in morbid, dark whimsy. The polar yet symmetrical nature of comedy and horror, writing and image, and ultimately, the great human myth of what comes From Beyond…
Unlike the standard first experiences of horror aficionados (usually beginning with “I saw [insert terrifying, seminal work of horror here] way too young…”), Gordon’s history with the genre started with Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). His parents disallowed him to see horror movies as a child, citing the years of nightmares he got from Boris Karloff’s performance as the titular mad scientist. But this almost earmarked his trajectory toward all things horror, despite being a self-proclaimed “scaredy-cat.” He would later note that many of his fellow Masters of Horror are “pussies” with affectionate gusto. Horror directors are big scaredy-cats, but we love the things that scare us. “Loving the Masters of Horror despite them scaring the sh*t out of you,” he would say. How do you know how to scare someone if you aren’t frightened yourself?
Gordon was a writer, a director, a producer, but most of all, he was a clown. Since he was a young boy, he wanted to be a clown, even spending some time working at a circus. He understood something about horror and comedy: an intrinsic polarity between humor and horror that separates and unites them, a simultaneous existence that draws from catharsis. Re-Animator (1985) has a biting wit amidst its entrails, due in part to Gordon’s charmed writing and another to Jeffrey Combs’ vaudevillian performance. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) came from gothic lore: a mad scientist and an experiment gone horribly wrong, but for kids! His works play on the crossover, on duality, the mastering of polar opposites to entice the same human experience.
It’s no wonder so much of Stuart Gordon’s work is body horror. The metonymy of characters in body horror, their external grue strikingly representative of internal struggles, is a featured motif in many of Gordon’s works. It’s something he himself struggled and worked with, having strong political ideas often coming forward through interpretations of classic literature. How often old stories come back with the same characters wearing different clothes. Duality is a theme of the classic uncanny, all the way back to The Student of Prague and never letting go of our collective unconscious.
And speaking of duality, Stuart Gordon never worked alone. Dennis Paoli, his first and longest writing partner, started performing and writing with Gordon in high school for their comedy troupe The Human Race. Carolyn-Purdy Gordon, his wife who was arrested alongside him during that fated performance of Peter Pan, is now known for being murdered in many of Stuart’s films. Brian Yuzna, the producer who took him in and helped him make his first feature, became a long time compatriot of his work. Barbara Crampton was a soap opera actress before biting her teeth into Gordon’s horror – and now finds herself a bonafide scream queen and producer on the Castle Freak remake. None of these are fleeting partnerships, but instead deeply rooted in the art of performance and collaboration.
Horror fans know Gordon for his enigmatic interpretations of H.P. Lovecraft, but the romance with literature went far deeper than that. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998) was pitched to Disney with Gordon sitting beside Ray Bradbury, in full white suit. He knew Roald Dahl and produced Switch Bitch, a collection of dark, sexy stories Dahl would be somewhat forgotten for but Gordon would capture on stage. He worked directly with Kurt Vonnegut during Organic Theatre’s stage production of Sirens of Titan in the 1970s, revisiting it in 2017 with the Sacred Fools Theatre Company in Los Angeles. He adapted Edger Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum in 1991, The Black Cat in 2007, and in 2009 directed a one-man show starring Jeffrey Combs as the troubled, alcoholic author entitled Nevermore…An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe. The man cast a long shadow in the literary world. He cast a long shadow over everyone he worked with.
It was, after all, Gordon’s Organic Theatre Company who would premiere David Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” in 1974. Mamet, who was just a kid bringing scripts to Gordon and telling him, “I’m going to win the Pulitzer Prize one day!” and Gordon saying “Sure, kid.” (David Mamet won the Pulitzer in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross).
This encompassing presence, this shadow, smiling sardonically over all of us, it comes from the balance Gordon found in his genres. The symmetry of comedy and horror relieves us our stresses, lifts us our burdens. It comes from reaching people on a personal level, and elevates his life, and his stories, to that of legend. Gordon believed that cutting worked against the drama of a movie, and you could say he operated that way in life as well. He wore his heart, his story, on his sleeve. You can find many interviews with Gordon sharing his experiences, and take a masterclass of your own just by hearing the man share his ability to say yes to new opportunities. He was just that kind of guy.
Many of us are sharing in this collective moment of remembrance, Gordon’s long, acerbic shadow cast over us as creators, as friends, and as fans. We were the audience he made us, finding the fun in freaky. I would be so bold as to cast him alongside Homer and Virgil, telling the truth of rage, of tragedy, and of laughing through it all. Showing us everything, but leaving enough to the imagination. He was two of a kind, two sides of one coin, and forcing us to remember we will live on when the credits roll on this topsy-turvy world. There’s a lot of division out there around us, but the universal truths that will bring us together lie in works of fiction. Stuart Gordon knew that. He also knew that using a real dead cat works just as well as a dummy.
Related Article: Making Horror Weird: A Talk With Brian Yuzna
