Medical horror is increasingly being recognized, unofficially, as a subgenre of horror since movies portraying scary medical procedures, psychopathic doctors, and other hospital-medicine themes have around for decades. Carl Schenkel’s The Surgeon (1995), a Canadian-German production, would make a representative case for the subgenre.
The movie’s original title, Exquisite Tenderness, is a medical term used for the point of maximum pain in a patient/person and it has thematic relevance to the premise – the psychopathic surgeon Dr. Julian Matar (Sean Haberle) curing his disability with a fluid produced by the human brain under the influence of great pain. While on a rampage to eliminate the medical professionals responsible for his termination, Matar’s ultimate target is his ex, the gorgeous Dr. Theresa McCann (Isabel Glasser), who is now seeing a new colleague Dr. Benjamin Hendricks (James Remar).
The Surgeon isn’t tagged as sci-fi despite being fairly solid on the medical science part. Regeneration, on cellular and tissue level, is known as the key to healing in the field of medicine. Instead it is categorized as slasher horror and thriller, nothing to invoke this scribe’s disagreement. One could argue that the thriller part precedes the horror, but splitting hair isn’t the point here. For fans of all three genres, it doesn’t fail to entertain and covers up its otherwise obvious plot holes to a fair degree of success.
For romance and nudity fans, though the movie has a steamy swimming pool scene, but don’t be carried away in expectations. It’s called a thriller for other reasons only.
