Last week I began a dive into the output of Lucio Fulci, prolific Italian genre filmmaker famous within horror circles as a purveyor of extraordinarily gory, creepy, atmospheric, and sometimes not-quite-coherent horror films. I approached his work in search of some heavy “horror” and was surprised to find among his earlier films a very different tone. Sure, there were blood-soaked or nightmarish moments, but these were more thrillers with moments of graphic violence, and sometimes they could even be lyrical, emotional, visually stylish, or even classy in ways I wouldn’t have expected of him. But that is the point of such an exercise – to learn what I didn’t know. Still, I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface.
That said, this week, I’d like to take a look at three of his most acclaimed horror films, all of which I’d previously seen, and all of which embody the grisly, oneiric, often putrescent aesthetic with which he’s most associated: The City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery. Taken together, they are often termed “The Gates of Hell trilogy,” though they are all actually discrete, standalone films with no continuation of story from one to the next, and some actors returning in different roles (at least Catriona MacColl is in all three). While there is no narrative thread between them, other than a weakened boundary between worlds, more than anything else, they share a mysterious, ominous, Lovecraftian vibe and a unique approach to horror cinema. Whereas The Psychic only a few years earlier had been a tightly wound, perfectly constructed supernatural puzzle box, each element fitting into place just so, following his success with Zombi 2, Fulci dove head first into a nightmarishness cut loose from the strictures of narrative, resulting in some of his most acclaimed, most disturbing, and most niche work. It’s an interesting progression. So, let’s get to it, shall we? (This time, given how decentralized narrative is, I won’t be issuing spoiler warnings. If you think you might like to watch these unspoilt, go do so now. They’re available on many platforms.)
The City of the Living Dead (1980)
Catriona MacColl almost turned down her part as she felt the script was just “a series of special effects without a story.” She wasn’t entirely wrong, but I think that if one is willing to go along for the ride, it can be a ghastly good time. This is not my favorite entry in the trilogy, but I think it stands as both a wild, atmospheric midnight movie and a clear transitional experiment as Fulci really tried committing to the horror first and foremost. What story there is feels quite insubstantial, but the series of nightmare images, the horrors upon horrors upon horrors, can be mind-blowingly effective. It’s the kind of movie that might not always frighten so much as disgust, but it’s also trying to crack your mind open, just as its undead figures like to one-handedly tear open skulls, squeezing out the gooey brains within (apparently undeath does wonders for your grip).
If you want classic horror atmosphere, it’s got howling wind, fog, and old rickety houses. If you want something gross, it’s got head drillings, disembowelments, and all the viscera you can stomach (tee hee). If you want crazy, why-is-this-happening moments, it’s got bleeding eyes, storms of maggots, unexplained resurrections, surprise blow up sex dolls, goopy cross impalements, exsanguinating wallpaper, and so, so much more. If you want a compelling story, you should remember one you read some other time because that’s in short supply, but if you want unrivalled, creative awfulness, this movie is for you.
In short, a psychic, Mary Woodhouse (MacColl), at a séance, has a vision of a priest in an old misty cemetery hanging himself, and she goes into a fit, somehow understanding that he has just fulfilled an ancient, 4000 year old prophecy and opened the gates of Hell. The only way this can be reversed is for his corpse to be found and destroyed before All Saints’ Day (a few days hence). Unfortunately, the shock of it all is too much for her and she drops dead. Fortunately, her grave diggers are pretty lazy and leave her coffin in the ground with only a spattering of dirt on top, citing “union hours” such that when she suddenly comes back to life in her coffin (which is never explained) and starts desperately clawing at the interior, shredding her fingers in the process, intrepid reporter, Peter Bell (Christopher George), hears her screams and rather than, you know, opening the coffin by its latch, rescues her by slamming a pick axe into the lid multiple times, almost destroying her face in the process.
It’s intense and scary – her initial terror at coming to in such circumstances, her desperate, self-harming attempts to free herself, and the axe blade coming so close to her head as she is “rescued” by this hard drinking newsman. Anyway, she convinces him of the need to go to Dunwich (a clear nod to Lovecraft, whose work was a clear inspiration for the feeling of all three of these films, though none of them are adaptations of any of his stories), home of the dead priest, and thus, they set off to save the world.
Meanwhile, in Dunwich, odd things start happening. Rotting toddler corpses appear out of nowhere, startling teenage sex offenders. A crack opens up in the wall of the local dive bar, the fresh crevasse possibly leading to otherworldly terrors. A teenage girl is attacked by a mysterious hand shoving rotting, wormy goo into her face, prompting a heart attack. The denizens of the local funeral home start disappearing and turning up in people’s kitchens, I’ve already mentioned the maggot storm, yes maggot storm, and of course, there is the most famous oh-dear-god-why moment of the film (if you can’t take heavy gore, you might skip the next paragraph). Story wise, they eventually close the hell gate…or do they? Duhn, duhn Duuuuhn!!!
Ok, so the centerpiece of the movie: two teenagers are making out in the front seat of a car someplace creepy. The girl stops, having heard something, so the boy (Michele Soavi, director of Stagefright, among many others!) turns on the headlights and for a split second, they see the dead priest in front of them, hanging from a noose, his eyes boring into hers. Then he’s gone. Then he appears outside another window and stares her down until his dark magics start to work on her and her eyes start bleeding – first just a trickle, but it becomes a torrent; then her mouth begins to foam and she starts vomiting out her own guts. This continues for quite some time until, I don’t know, a liver or something comes out. I remember the first time I ever watched this, my jaw on the floor. “What is happening? Why is it happening? Ugh! Ew! Wow! How are they doing this? This is incredible. When will it stop? Why won’t it stop?” This time, I could clearly see when this is no longer a real human head, but a bloody, sheep intestine regurgitating dummy, but on first viewing, I was so shocked by the audaciousness of this crazy, awful, disgusting thing that I didn’t even clock the replacement. It is repulsive, and also just so weirdly amazing (and oh, that poor, poor actress – the bleeding eyes alone must have been so uncomfortable).
There are moments in the movie that don’t work – some acting is leaden, the dubbing is typically bad, and there are things that just do not make much sense. Also, Fulci follows some of his artistic impulses to their logical conclusions, which while being inevitable signs of an auteur, doesn’t always result in the most effective choices. For example, he always had a thing about close-ups of eyes – but here there are whole scenes of dialogue where we only see the speakers’ peepers. But, hey – good for him for following his joy. However, the stuff that does work is breathtaking: the pervasive doom of it all, the unexplained, and probably unexplainable horrible occurrences, the fun play with goopy zombie creatures, surprise skeletons, and EC comics inspired lighting – it all results in a non-cerebral, non-narrative play of horror-ness. And while this engenders a certain surreality, I think this first outing in pure horror is just a taste of what was soon to come.
The Beyond (1981)
Having flexed certain cinematic muscles in the last film, here Fulci’s less narrative, more poetic, and still very, very, very gory approach to horror really comes to fruition. Heads are impaled on iron nails, distressing things are done to eyeballs, bodies are dissolved by lye and acid (not at the same time), faces are destroyed by little hairy creepy crawlies, the dead rise, a child’s head explodes, and there are more close ups of eyes than you can shake a bloody railway spike at – but all of this grue serves an end beyond simple spookhouse shocks and disgust – the gestalt effect is bleakly poetic: a mad dream in which everything at first appears menacing but more or less understandable, but by the end of which, reality comes unmoored and you find yourself hopelessly, eternally adrift. It is an odd, chilling little picture and it has plenty of charming, lovably idiosyncratic, though not always successful, elements, but taken as a whole, it is a real masterpiece of the genre.
Liza Merrill (MacColl returning) inherits a run-down New Orleans hotel where 60 years earlier, a sorcerer had been lynched, tortured to death, and walled up in the basement for practicing black magic. Attempting to fix up the place and make it financially viable, Liza encounters problem after problem. One worker falls from a scaffold, startled by a creepy image in a window. The basement is flooded and the plumber called in to check it out is soon found dead, his eyes squished, floating next to a decrepit, much older corpse. The housekeeper’s head ends up impaled on a spike. What a money pit!
But desperate for cashflow, Liza’s not going to be deterred, plus, as she says, she’s “lived her whole life in New York and if there’s one thing I’ve learned not to believe in, it’s ghosts!” (for any fans of Community, all I can hear is Britta saying “and I lived in New York City!”) So she keeps plodding ahead, surprisingly unbothered by both the weird goings on and the crusty-white-eyed blind woman (who might not actually exist) who tells her that the hotel stands on a gate of Hell and that it’s in danger of opening. She befriends a grumpy local doctor, John McCabe (David Warbeck), whose apparent belief in science is stronger than his ability to reckon with the supernatural weirdness directly in front of him, and together they fall down a rather hellish rabbit hole.
My tone may be glib as, for all that I love this movie, it is full of odd, weird, nonsensical moments. The acting is stiff (and I’m being kinda charitable). The dialogue strains one’s ability to suspend disbelief (such as when a county clerk (Fulci himself in a cameo) explains that he has to leave his office for a two hour lunch because after weeks on the picket line, the union won this concession – in America in 1981? Not bloody likely – it’s just a hilarious giveaway that this was written by a European – still they do understand something about America – the doctor keeps a loaded revolver in his desk, like you do…). The dubbing is worse than usual and though it was mostly filmed in Louisiana, there’s still some great set dressing signage, such as the notice outside the morgue: “Do Not Entry!” Still, all of these elements that may be deemed faults just make me love it more. That and they also add some levity to an otherwise overwhelmingly desolate, dread filled nightmare of a film.
One of the things I love is how I can’t track the moment when things change. When is the gate to Hell opened? When do Liza and John pass its threshold? When did everything completely stop cohering? It’s never obvious, and while this lack of narrative clarity may be deemed a weakness, I think it’s central to the film’s success. At the beginning of the film, there is a hot, sticky, fetid atmosphere of doom, but the story feels more or less straightforward (weird, gross, and badly dubbed, but straightforward). As far as halfway through the story, I felt like events more or less logically followed, but by the end, everything had come loose. Characters may exist, but also may not. We see an item someplace and then it is gone. Nothing makes sense anymore, but the transition from very weird but essentially understandable, to total dream logic is so smooth as to not notice it happening. Furthermore, this is accompanied by a sojourn into dream geography.
Early in the film, Liza finds an old landscape in the hotel which we had seen the tortured warlock painting before he was killed. It shows a barren grey land, scattered with bodies of the dead. Attacked by an undead employee, Liza and John leave the hotel for his hospital, finding the streets of New Orleans now mysteriously empty. So too is the hospital, except for its dead, which have all started to shamble about. This prompts a somewhat ridiculous action sequence wherein the doctor just cannot pick up on the fact that every time he shoots a dead person in the chest, nothing happens, but if he shoots them in the head, they fall down (also, his revolver seems to hold at least 9 rounds – is that a thing?). Stubbornly, he just keeps aiming for body shots until finally, they escape down a stairwell only to emerge in the basement of Liza’s spooky hotel. After passing through an opening in a wall, they find themselves in the desolate landscape of the previously discovered painting with no sign of the former cellar, no means of egress. Looking at this endless, inhuman expanse, their eyes go white and they are frozen in existential horror.
All three films of the “Gates of Hell” trilogy are often labelled “Lovecraftian,” but this has to be one of the best expressions of Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror I’ve seen committed to film. An often fair criticism of old H.P. (beyond the unfortunate racism and xenophobia) is that his stories were rarely character driven, but rather, characters found themselves delving deeper and deeper into the bowels of some otherworldly madness, mere witnesses to the horrors within, doomed to be destroyed by that which they uncovered. That is somewhat the case here, but somehow the above described passage from typical spooky reality into full-blown nightmare makes it work, and the film is really chilling at the end – the horror lands. Reality has unraveled so seamlessly that characters’ (often bad) decisions feel more or less natural and you go along with them. And the place they get to at the end is so ethereally awful, with no warmth, hope, or humanity. It is not the Hell of a Christian mythos, but rather a cosmically unforgiving no-place – a state of lifeless, listless hopelessness more than a metaphysical location.
And along the way, the horror beats are just at the top of the form. There aren’t many jump scares, but one at least really got me. The gore is so very over the top and squirm inducing – the sort of stuff that makes you laugh for how strongly you’re reacting to it, such as the scene when an architect falls from a ladder in the above mentioned clerk’s office and an army of tarantulas come out of nowhere, for no clear reason, and proceed to Eat. His. Damn. Face. Gah! For minutes of full on, gross out, fleshy, bloody, crawly, bitey, “dear god, why is this even happening and I’m pretty sure tarantulas don’t work this way, but still, ewww, ick, ugh!” horror fun. Sometimes the special effects are not totally believable and you can spot the moment when there is no longer a real human face (or a real arachnid for that matter), but a bloody prop, but it really doesn’t matter – the extremity of it all is so over-the-top that the very concept of what is happening (not to mention the rivers of the red stuff) just makes my brain scream. It is delightful in its way.
It also must be said that this is a beautiful film: the steamy setting, the mysterious quality of being lost in a fog, the play of light on beads of sweat forming on a man’s brow as he scrambles to survive. There are often comparisons made between Argento and Fulci, especially as they both took a turn for supernatural work around the same time (Argento’s Inferno has some definite similarities to this week’s films). But whereas Argento took an aestheticized approach to occult horror in his “Three Mothers Trilogy,” Fulci’s work, and particularly The Beyond, is no less artful, for all that it is clearly less aesthetic (if that makes any sense – it works in my mind). The framing of the shots, the edits, the lighting, the totally effective gut-wrenching sequences of bodily destruction – all of it is so intentionally and masterfully executed, and absolutely unique.
The House by the Cemetery (1981)
It’s a bit strange to consider this third entry a part of a “trilogy” with the other two as it lacks any gate to Hell and its tone is decidedly less grand, less apocalyptic. Still, as a more intimate “family moves into a spooky house and spooky things happen” movie, it is still bizarre and wild, with characteristically strange (one might even say ‘crazy’) character beats, atmosphere thick as really melancholy butter, very bloody practical effects (though perhaps less over-the top than the other two) and a surreal, dreamy quality that feels akin to that of the first two films. It also might be the strangest of the three, which can make it the most fun or a bit of a slog depending on how you take your weird.
There is a story, but having fully settled into his personal style of bizarre phantasmagoria, Fulci doesn’t seem particularly invested in us really understanding it. Paul, some kind of scholar, relocates his family from NYC to a small New England town to continue the research of a colleague who recently went mad, murdered his mistress, and hanged himself. Along with his reluctant wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl back again – maybe it’s her presence that makes these three a trilogy) and their young, gratingly dubbed son, Bob, Paul settles into this creepy house where we’ve already seen a young couple (one of whom is played by Daniela Dora who we recently saw bleeding from the eyes and regurgitating her gastrointestinal tract in The City of the Living Dead after similarly complaining to her boyfriend about his creepy choice of make-out locations) brutally murdered and dragged into the basement (she can’t catch a break).
Of course, this is a bad place to bring your family and it ends poorly for everyone. A mysterious ghost girl keeps telling Bob to stay away from the house, but he’s got no say in the matter and sooner or later, everyone falls prey to the dark force below, the enjoyably named “Doctor Freudstein,” a mad scientist, now giant, worm and slime filled, murderous mound of flesh, who had conducted his evil experiments here many years ago and has been prolonging his life by harvesting the body parts of any who make the mistake of darkening his door.
When we discover the doctor in the end, it is an odd turn, but the film is full of such very strange moments that it doesn’t feel at all out of place. That eerie, menacing, utterly weird quality runs through the whole film. From moment to moment, it’s effective and gloomily unsettling, but it can also feel ridiculous – more so than the first two films this week, I think this really depends on the viewer’s mood and openness to going on this either envelopingly spooky, or absurdly insane ride.
Early on, when they’re still in New York, Bob (a, let’s say, 4 year old boy) has a large framed photograph of an old farmhouse on his wall. Only he can see the ghost girl open the curtains in the photo as she warns him not to go in the house. His mother seems slightly irritated that her son is a bit crazy. Later, of course it turns out to be the house they’re going to – why would it have been on a small child’s bedroom wall in the first place?
One of the more evocative scenes features the ghost girl standing in front of a shop window where she is shocked to see the head fall off a mannequin as its neck burbles up a fountain of blood. When it happens, we don’t know for sure she’s a ghost, but she already feels somewhat unreal and the whole sequence feels puzzlingly hallucinatory. Later in the film, Bob’s seemingly sinister babysitter, Ann (Ania Pieroni, very recognizable from Argento’s Inferno and Tenebrae), who bears some resemblance to the un-headed mannequin, has been sharing odd, menacing looks with others throughout the film (especially Paul – there is a scene that features a volley of close-ups between their respective eyes – and at least one shot of Lucy’s eyes, noticing, as no one speaks but something is happening), and has tried breaking into the forbidden murder basement, finds herself trapped down there and gets her head graphically sawed off. First of all, it’s peculiar that the ghost girl has such a premonition of the death of this side character and not a member of the family she’s trying to warn away (I mean, everybody dies), but it seems stranger to me that this little ghost girl is going window shopping in the first place.
Everyone in the town thinks they’ve seen Paul before, that he had recently visited with his daughter. He denies this and it is never resolved. Had he been here with Ann perhaps? Was it some kind of doppelganger? Was he somehow fated to come to this place? Whatever it is, there is a cryptic feeling of bad portent that hangs over the town and somehow settles on Paul and his family, and he does fall into a kind of obsession, uncovering the truth of Dr. Freudstein. Also, and wholly unrelatedly, he has an epic fight with a fake bat that clamps onto his hand and won’t let go no matter how much he stabs it (seriously, this bit went on for about 25 minutes).
Sometimes characters pick up on the bad vibes and are duly creeped out, but sometimes, they are so blasé about truly disturbing things that it makes you wonder if they see what you have seen, if anything is real. This can add to both the lyrical, looming unreality and the what-is-going-on potential laughability of it all. A favorite moment for me takes place the morning after we’ve seen an estate agent visit the house when no one was home only to get repeatedly stabbed with a fireplace poker and then dragged into the basement, leaving a long streak of blood across the floor. So now it’s the morning and we see creepy babysitter Ann in the kitchen, shot from above, cleaning up what is obviously a huge puddle of blood outside the cellar door, with a look that communicates, “I should probably clean up before someone starts asking questions.” Then Lucy walks in and we shift camera perspective so we see the Ann’s face in the foreground, with Lucy behind her (which means we no longer see the blood). From the previous set up, we know what Lucy should be seeing and it makes sense when she asks, clearly put off by Ann’s dire scowl, what the babysitter is doing. Ann pauses and just says, “I made coffee.” Satisfied, Lucy walks out of frame and a beat later, she’s carrying a tray with coffee service into the bedroom and telling her husband how strange she finds this girl. She never responds to the giant pool of blood. She never mentions the giant pool of blood. Did she actually see the giant pool of blood. Did I?
You can take this as a hilarious mistake, as bad acting, as nonsense, but I feel like giving the benefit of the doubt and calling it intentional. I think we are being wrong-footed at every turn and not in service of some kind of convoluted plot twists as might have been true in an early giallo thriller, but rather in service of a non-rational state that the horror seeks to inculcate. This runs through the film, culminating in a final moment where it seems that Bob alone has escaped Freudstein’s attacks, only to realize that he is now a ghost child himself, walking down the lane with the girl and her mother, now part of the Freudstein family (maybe he was always a part of the family – I don’t know). It is a somber, haunting ending to a delightfully specific film.
—
So those are the “Gates of Hell” films. I’ve watched a lot of horror movies and I swear, there’s really nothing else like them. And while some threads can be found between them and the earlier works discussed last week, they are also so unlike where Lucio began his journey into darker fare. That said, they won’t be for everyone. Some won’t be able to stomach the gore and some won’t have patience for the slow, dreamy non-linearity. But if you have any appetite for such things, especially in such a combination (delivering the most insane, bloody terror along with something poetic and occasionally elegiac), these are just masterpieces: ridiculous, disgusting masterpieces.