As for supplements … wow, where to begin? We can start by saying that Ignite’s release contains a Frankenstein-esque assembly of supplements culled from various video releases of the film dating back to a special edition laserdisc from 1995, but also adds more than two and a half hours of new featurettes for the 40th Anniversary. Let’s start there, with “Re-Animator at 40: A Conversation with Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, and Brian Yuzna,” a 45-minute discussion about the film with its producer and two main stars. This is a fun conversation, with Yuzna and Crampton dominating much of it, although Combs definitely gets in some fun anecdotes and memories. “Piece By Piece: Cutting Re-Animator” is a new 15-minute interview with editor Lee Percy, while “Suzie Sorority and the Good College Boy” is a new 15-minute interview with Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, who was married to director Suart Gordon and has the brief role of Dr. Harrad in the film. For those interested in Re-Animator’s fascinating cultural legacy, there is the 18-minute featurette “The Horror of it All: The Legacy and Impact of Re-Animator,” in which horror directors including Joe Lynch and Mick Garris discuss how the film has impacted their work, as well as “I Give Life: A Look Back at Re-Animator: The Musical,” a 27-minute retrospective featurette about one of the most unlikely horror musicals of all time (well, if you don’t count the opera adaptation of David Cronenberg’s The Fly). “Re-Animating a Horror Classic: The 4K Restoration of Re-Animator” is an unfortunately brief (barely over two minutes) look at the film’s 4K scanning and digital restoration. And from the archives we get “The Organic Theater Company of Chicago,” a short 1977 documentary that includes an interview with a young Stuart Gordon.

The rest of the supplements, most of which are housed on the Integral Version Blu-ray, have been culled from various releases over the years. There are three audio commentaries, two of which originated with the 1995 laserdisc release: The first, by director Stuart Gordon, is the more serious and studied of the two. Gordon discusses his own background in the theater and how he came to make Re-Animator as his first movie, including all the intensive research he did with doctors and morgue attendants to get all the details right (he also professes to having a weak stomach, which is an amusing irony). The second commentary, which includes four original cast members (Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, and Robert Sampson) and producer Brian Yuzna, is basically a cut-up from start to finish. They obviously had a great time recording this commentary, as they spend the whole time laughing, making jokes, poking fun at each other, and telling funny stories. There isn’t a great deal of information in the commentary, but it is a lot of fun to listen to. The third audio commentary, which features Gordon and Re-Animator: The Musical actors Jesse Merlin and Graham Skipper, first appeared on Arrow’s 2017 Blu-ray release.

There are also 16 extended scenes and one deleted scene. All of the footage included here, which amounts to roughly 23 minutes, consists of extensions or longer alternate versions of scenes already in the unrated version. Most of it is extraneous and was originally cut for purposes of pacing, but I think the movie benefits from some of it, especially a crucial conversation between Dr. Hill and Dean Halsey that helps explain the Dean’s sudden attitude change in dealing with Dan, which is too abrupt and inexplicable in the unrated version. In addition to extended footage, there is a brief dream sequence that was never included in any cut of the movie.

From the 2007 Anchor Bay DVD, we get Re-Animator: Resurrectus, a 70-minute retrospective documentary that includes interviews with all the aforementioned people, as well as the film’s cinematographer and a number of make-up effects artists. The rest of the supplements all originally appeared on the long-since-defunct Elite Entertainment’s 2002 Millennium Edition two-disc DVD set. From that release we have video interviews with director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna (48 min.), writer Dennis Paoli (11 min.), composer Richard Band (15 min.), and Fangoria editor Tony Timpone (5 min.). In Gordon and Yuzna’s interview, which is by far the longest, they essentially interview each other, talking about how the movie came together, who was involved when and how, and the experience of taking the film to the Cannes Film Festival, as well as laughing about the details they sweated over when making the film, such as justifying how a decapitated head could talk without any lungs. The camerawork here is atrocious, with awkward, badly timed pans and too many sudden zooms, but it is certainly worth watching. Paoli’s interview is just over 10 minutes in length, and he talks mostly about the development of the script and who wrote what. In Band’s interview, which runs about 15 minutes, the composer (who sports Herbert West-style glasses, which is a little creepy) spends much of the time defending his decision to essentially lift major motifs from Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score (most people got the joke, but apparently the Bernard Herrmann Society was none too pleased ...). At just under five minutes in length, Timpone’s interview is the shortest, although it is a hoot to watch as he discusses his memories of first seeing the film in 1985 and Fangoria’s Re-Animator make-up contest in which the winner was awarded one of the prosthetic severed David Gale heads from the movie. If you didn’t get enough of Band in the video interview, in “Music Discussion With Composer Richard Band” (16 min.) he briefly introduces four segments from the film and how he went about scoring each one.

There are also a host of supplements from Arrow’s 2017 Blu-ray, including “Barbara Crampton in Conversation,” a 16-minute interview with the actress conducted in 2015 by Alan Jones; “The Catastrophe of Success: Stuart Gordon and the Organic Theater,” a 13-minute featurette; and “Theater of Blood: Re-Animator: The Musical, which runs about 12 minutes and primarily features an interview with composer and lyricist Mark Nutter. Lovecraft fanatics will appreciate the inclusion of “A Guide to Lovecraftian Cinema,” which runs 54 minutes and gives a thorough overview of the various cinematic adaptations of Lovecraft’s works courtesy of Chris Lackey, who co-hosted “The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast” from 2009 to 2023 and now co-hosts “Strange Studies of Strange Studies.” Finally, for the truly committed, there is “Doug Bradley's Spinechillers: ‘Herbert West: Reanimator,’” which is an audio recording of Jeffrey Combs reading all six of Lovecraft’s original Herbert West short stories (which runs about 1 hour 40 minutes). There are also theatrical trailers (including a new one for the 40th Anniversary release), TV spots, and a stills gallery.