'Re-Animator' Director Tackling Cannibal Play (Exclusive)

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Stuart Gordon

Here’s a story with some bite: Stuart Gordon, the filmmaker best known for 1980s horror classic Re-Animator, and producer Adam Goldworm are reteaming to bring a horror stage play titled Taste to Los Angeles.

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Written by Benjamin Brand, Taste is based on the true story of Armin Meiwes, aka the Rotenburg Cannibal, a German who achieved international notoriety for killing and eating a voluntary victim whom he had found via the Internet.

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The play seems to be well-timed to whatever is nibbling around the zeitgeist as eating human flesh seems to be all the rage these days. In May, a chef in Tokyo cooked and served his own genitals. Also that same month, in an horrific incident in Miami, a man was shot dead after eating the face of a homeless man.

Gordon, who more recently directed an adaptation of David Mamet’s Edmond, actually got his start his start directing theater in Chicago, where he helped launch David Mamet's career as a playwright by producing and directing the world premiere of Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974. That play was adapted for the 1986 film About Last Night.

He also turned his Re-Animator film into a stage production, with Re-Animator: The Musical, winning six LA Weekly Theater Awards in April including musical of the year. The play just completed its second run in Los Angeles and is moving to New York City and then Edinburgh, Scotland.  

Brand co-created Bollywood Hero, IFC’s comedic miniseries that sent an out-of-work Chris Kattan to star in a Bollywood musical. 

Taste will be a reteaming for Gordon and Goldworm, the founder of boutique management/production company Aperture Entertainment. The director helmed two episodes of Masters of Horror, which Goldworm produced, as well as an episode of Goldworm’s NBC series Fear Itself. The episode starred Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss and was called Eater, coincidentally about a serial-killing cannibal.

Brand is repped by Gersh, Aperture and Morris Yorn.