[1][2] The story was the basis of the 1985 horror film Re-Animator and its sequels, in addition to numerous other adaptations in various media.

He details his time as a medical student at Miskatonic University, during which is when the narrator becomes fascinated by West's theories, which postulate that the human body is simply a complex, organic machine which can be "restarted".

The next day, the newspaper reports that a grave in Potter's Field, violently molested the night before, displays the claws of a beast.

Some time after the fire, West's research is stunted when Dr. Allen Halsey, the dean of the medical school, refuses to allow him access to human cadavers or the university's dissection lab.

West has a stroke of luck, though, when he and the narrator are called to help tend to the many dying victims of a local typhoid outbreak.

Eventually, Halsey succumbs to typhoid, and, as a final act of twisted respect for his former rival, West steals his corpse to reanimate.

Now licensed doctors, West and the narrator go into practice together in the small New England town of Bolton, purchasing a house near the local cemetery to have easy access to corpses.

Still intent upon successfully reanimating a human being, they claim the body of a boxing champion who died of a head wound in an illegal back-alley street fight.

On the battlefield, West befriends his commanding officer and fellow medic, Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, and shares with him his theories and methods on reanimation.

The two men assume that he was vaporized in the blast, although West is since known to speak fearfully of a headless doctor with the power of reanimation.

A year after returning from the war, West has moved into a house which is directly connected to an ancient system of catacombs from settler times.

While reading the newspaper one night, West comes across an article detailing a series of strange, seemingly nonsensical events involving a riot at an insane asylum.

The narrator is forever haunted, considered mad, by his knowledge of what transpired and the lack of resolution regarding the raised corpses.

[citation needed] He drops in numerous Frankenstein references (even hinting at the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as Shelley did).

[5] In an overview of the Re-Animator films, Bruce Hallenbeck commented that "'Herbert West: Reanimator' is not one of Lovecraft's better tales; it's over-the-top, clichéd and blatantly racist.

... What it does possess in abundance is a love of the Gothic horror tale; ultimately, the story is both an homage to and an affectionate parody of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.