Maintaining my weekly writing schedule can sometimes be a challenge (case in point, I’m a couple days behind). Just choosing a topic can be difficult, especially since I don’t want to just review the latest thing I’ve seen. Rather, my goal is to only write about topics/films/books that I really find interesting or noteworthy. And so for the last few months, I’ve settled into a bit of a routine. I had my stint on “Lesbian Vampire” movies. I spent a month looking at Slashers and the “Final Girl.” I had a couple posts in a row on Argento. And now, most recently I’ve been digging into another notable Italian maestro, the prolific, varied, enigmatic filmmaker, Lucio Fulci.
Having first watched some of his early thrillers (all new for me) and then some of his most iconic horror work (all films I’d seen before and knew I liked), for my final post in this series, I wanted to look at a couple of pieces that might help contextualize him and his oeuvre: One of his last films, the 1990 quasi auto-biographical A Cat in the Brain (1990) and the recent biography, Fulci for Fake (2019). For some additional context, I’ve also referred to a book I picked up at Argento’s book store in Rome, “Lucio Fulci: Poetry and Cruelty in the Movies.”
Fulci For Fake (2019)
Simone Scafidi’s biography is framed with a somewhat odd narrative conceit. We follow an actor, Nicola Nocella as he prepares to play Fulci in a dramatization of his life. He spends hours in the makeup chair, sits around in his underwear drinking whiskey and contemplating images from films, and makes pilgrimages to interview a wide range of people who were either close to Fulci or are authorities on his work. The interviews are real, but nothing else is – there is no biopic and he is an actor playing an actor. Apparently the title homages a film by Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973), a largely fabricated documentary about an art forger. I have mixed feeling about the frame – the film probably could have functioned just fine based on the interviews alone, but there is maybe something to it. In accompanying this “actor” as he tries to get under the skin of his enigmatic subject, we try to do the same. But however much information we have, however many family members share their memories, Fulci remains more than a little unknowable. Which would be true for anybody; we all contain fathomless depths, and going on this actor’s journey helps highlight this truth. Approaching the mystery of this idiosyncratic, private, driven figure, both we and Nicola may get close, but we will always come up against a wall at one point or another, and watching him go through the process perhaps suggests a possibility of how we might engage emotionally with this investigation as well.
As for the interviews, they are very warm, very personal reminiscences. A portrait is painted of a workhorse professional, proficient and flexible as he, chameleon-like, moved from one genre to the next, capably crafting effective work regardless of the subject matter or intended effect, and a probably loving but still emotionally removed father and husband, a figure clearly not without faults. Scholarly and technically adept, he’s presented as a very thoughtful, intelligent, practical artist, one who’s private life generally remained private, though it was sometimes touched by great sadness (his first wife committed suicide and his daughter broke her back in a horse riding accident).
Given my focus here, it is striking to hear some of the interviewees track his turn to horror. Now it’s probably clear after the last couple of posts that I am a big fan of (what I’ve seen of) his horror work in the 80s, but I can still totally understand how one could view even the best of them as weird, funny, messy, or even boring little films – ultra-violent, lurid B movies that don’t make sense, with odd acting choices and terrible dubbing. That said, I was fascinated, having learned more of his very accomplished early career, to hear friends and family speak of how he had never been so artistically satisfied before he left narrative coherence behind in pursuit of horror effect. One speaker countered the suggestion that these horrors suffered from their budget, that some potential had gone unfulfilled, that some kind of flaws were on display, stating that what the movies looked like and sounded like, every element in them, was actually exactly how Fulci had wanted them to be.
This suggests an interesting if obvious reading – everything is intentional – criticisms that something feels cheap or is unrealistic or non-logical are as aesthetically constructive as suggesting that “Guernica” would have been a better painting if Picasso had only learned how to paint photo-realistically. Clearly, here is a technician and an artist who fully grasped the methods of a typically understood “well-made-film” and simply decided that his path involved something quite different.
It is also quite sad by the end. Following a bout of illness in 1984, he simply didn’t seem to still have the power to do what he had once done. This led first to a decline in quality and then, as investors and producers lost faith in him, a massive and devastating loss in the opportunity to work at all. From 1959-1978, he had directed 33 movies in a wide range of styles. From 1979-1991, he worked almost exclusively in horror and ultra-violent thrillers (17 movies, 50 in total). He died in 1995 from complications of diabetes after not working for the last four years of his life.
A Cat in the Brain (1990)
His penultimate work, A Cat in The Brain is a fascinating, at times confounding, testament to leave behind. Fulci plays a horror film director named Dr. Lucio Fulci who begins to be haunted by the disturbing, violent images he’s committing to film. After opening credits featuring a cat puppet devouring brains, we meet Fulci as he calls “cut” on what had initially seemed to be a “real scene” of bloody dismemberment, thus initiating the film’s fungible relation between cinema and reality. He then takes himself to lunch at a nearby restaurant, only to find that seeing meat causes him to flash on the gory, cannibalistic scenes he’s just finished filming.
This has been happening to him a lot – uncontrollable images, rooted in his own work but not exclusive to it, appearing uninvited, driving him mad. He can’t have a moment of peace without brutal violence impinging on his imagination, interfering with his ability to work, to eat, to maintain any normal human interactions. Unsurprisingly, he seeks professional assistance in the form of a psychiatrist who lives around the corner. Unfortunately (and this is a spoiler, but it happens very early in the film), the therapist, Professor Egon Schwarz, sees this as an opportunity to carry out some mayhem himself, and subsequently hypnotizes Fulci to think himself possibly responsible for a series of murders that Schwarz is undertaking. Really, Lucio should get his money back.
And so it goes: Fulci is attacked by his own dark thoughts, but is also witness to his therapist killing a bunch of people, thinking he might be guilty of these crimes (if they are, in fact, happening at all and not just his own fevered, hallucinatory imaginings). But by the end, the real killer is found out and Fulci leaves with a beautiful woman on his boat, “Perversion” for a much needed holiday (better for the mind than a therapist and it won’t frame you for multiple murders). Or he kills her and cuts her up for bait. Nope – that’s just one more film being shot – off they go on vacation.
This is such an interesting almost final film – at once self-reflective, impishly playful, and as over-the-top sensationalistic as anything else he’d done. One detail of note is that it was almost entirely constructed in post, repurposing gory scenes from a number of unreleased recent projects. Just about the only new scenes filmed are those focusing on Fulci himself. With the help of his daughter, Camilla (as I understand from Fulci for Fake), he managed to salvage a string of recent disappointments and craft a bizarre, gorily personal work of quasi-autobiography.
But for all that it is so very personal, it is also deeply ambivalent. On the surface, it suggests a man who is disturbed by the work that he’s doing, preyed upon by the horrific images he’s in the business of producing. He wants them to leave him alone, to be able to enjoy a moment of “normal life,” but is being driven mad by the “cat in his brain,” scratching at his spirit, gnawing at his mind, driving him to obsession and unwilling to let him go. And yet, the tone is generally blackly comic throughout. Though filled with endless sequences of bloodletting (probably more than any other film he produced – because it is so explicitly about them), this feels less like a horror movie. I mean, it’s not really funny, per se, but the feeling is much more that of a light comedy, a lark. I just don’t feel he intends us to take all of it at face value, but is rather sending up the notion that his artistic predilections are anything to be at all disturbed by. The film feels playful, though the content is brutal and generally played straight – this is irony, not satire. And yet, you can’t help but wonder if it does reveal something true.
I don’t think this stands as a masterpiece of the genre, but it is really worth watching (and can sometimes be quite fun) for the sake of contextualizing him and his work. Plus, while he almost always gave himself a tiny cameo in his films, this was the only time he really “acted,” and he acquits himself quite well.
In Summation
So that’s Lucio Fulci. It’s been an interesting three weeks of really getting into him and there is so much more to explore in the future. There are a few other early 80s horrors which, while not as acclaimed as those I’ve covered, sound like they could be worth checking out (I hear The Black Cat is good). Some time, I’d also like to dig into his later, apparently less successful works (maybe Aenigma or The Devil’s Honey). Someday, I may even take in an old western or musical, just to scratch that itch of curiosity (Four of the Apocalypse sounds cool). I can’t say I’ve always considered him a favorite director exactly, but this focused time of consideration has really left an impression. I think it took me time to come around to embracing his particular flavor of dreamy, messy, sleazy, weirdly-transcendent splatter-art. But it really is something special, and when you are open to it, utterly effective.
I had read that he described the “Gates of Hell” trilogy as “total films” but misinterpreted what he’d meant. I had imagined an Artaudian (see Antonin Artaud and the “theatre of cruelty”) intention, assaulting the viewer with every available tool, using surreal non-reality as one of many devices that might crack open a receptive mind: a horror film as “a victim burned at the stake, signaling through the flames.” But the phrase was touched on in Fulci for Fake and apparently, he meant rather a kind of total freedom. The films are free to be film, not story exactly, but its own artistic medium (something Artaud would have approved of as well). After years of working as a craftsperson, honing his filmmaking prowess as an adroit gun-for-hire, he finally allowed himself to pursue “Art.” However, his particular brand of art would probably be seen as trash by many and I think that is an element of what makes it so very lovable. And not everybody has to love everything.
His is an oeuvre all his own, and I think the world is a richer place to have had him in it.