Brian Yuzna’s 1990 sequel to Re-Animator had its effects farmed out across several shops working at once under a compressed schedule. KNB EFX Group (Robert Kurtzman, Howard Berger, Greg Nicotero) built the title character; John Carl Buechler’s Magical Media Industries handled creature suits and Dr. Hill’s reanimated severed head; Anthony Doublin supervised mechanical elements and hairwork. George’s own shop, S.M.G. Inc., took a different piece of the film entirely: the laboratory’s failed experiments and the climactic crypt sequence.
What George built
The Bride herself — Gloria, played by Kathleen Kinmont, stitched together from harvested parts including a dead fiancée’s heart — was KNB’s build: layered foam latex applied directly to Kinmont to simulate exposed muscle and stitched seams, hours in the chair each day, styled after Elsa Lanchester’s original Bride of Frankenstein look updated for splatter- era anatomy.
What George’s shop made instead were the lab’s other reanimated failures — Herbert West’s earlier, uglier attempts at bringing dead tissue back before Gloria. The standout is a spider-like construct built from five severed human fingers fused around a single central eyeball, crawling on its fingertip legs. He also built a re-animated dog stitched together with human arms in place of its hind legs, and the half-formed mutant creatures that emerge in the film’s crypt climax. Brian Yuzna described George’s work on those creations as punk and surrealist. The failed experiments are much stranger than the sequel’s more conventional gore effects.
After the release
Decades later, the finger-eyeball creature keeps turning up on Blu-ray cover art and in horror art books even though it appears on screen for only a matter of seconds.