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Illustration of Herbert West's reanimated corpses
Original AI-made illustration based on the descriptions in the sources. Not an official design.
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Herbert West's reanimated corpses

BooksUndeadScience gone wrong1900 to 1967

A six-part serial in which a medical researcher keeps injecting corpses with a reagent that brings them back violent and degraded. It is regarded as one of the earliest depictions of zombies as scientifically reanimated bodies rather than products of sorcery. Critics rate it among Lovecraft's weakest work, but its film adaptation gave it a long afterlife.1

Battle it
First appeared
1922
Serialised in Home Brew, February to July 1922
Source work
Herbert West–Reanimator (1922)
H. P. Lovecraft
Made in
USA
What causes it
Science gone wrong
A medical student's chemical reagent restarts the bodies of the freshly dead.
How you become one
A corpse is injected with West's reagent.
Intelligence
Some intelligence

When did it first appear?

Serialised in Home Brew, February to July 1922

field notes

What the sources say

1

Most of the revived are animalistic and impossible to control; one becomes an inarticulate cannibal1

2

A revived boxer is put down with revolver fire1

3

Lovecraft wrote it for five dollars an instalment and disliked it; the page reports it began as a parody of Frankenstein1

4

It is the first story to mention Miskatonic University1

5

It was the basis of the 1985 film Re-Animator and its sequels1

Sources

  1. Herbert West–Reanimator - Wikipedia

Every fact on this page comes from these sources, written in our own words. Spotted a mistake? Tell us at [email protected].

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Same era: 1900 to 1967

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