Fulci - Flinching with Delight

Late Period Fulci

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Glen — No Comments ↓

Looking back at my recent output, I can’t help but notice a bit of a lack of horror on this here horror blog. I’ve had a number of works that are great but let’s say horror adjacent – a psychological crime thriller with uncanny horror vibes, a Japanese art piece full of existential dread, and an Italian neorealistic film dealing with the terrors of a traditional, superstitious small town. But each write up contained some sentence like, “while this might not be horror as traditionally understood, I think it warrants inclusion here because…” And I’m not putting those down – I loved all of those movies, but I think it’s time to dig into something grotty, something disturbing, something Fulci.

(A quick aside – I just re-read my previous posts on Fulci films, of which there have been four or five, and at least three of them begin with something like, “You know, I’ve been covering a lot of artsy stuff lately, but nothing really HORRIFIC, so let’s talk Fulci!” I guess old Lucio has made a very specific impression on me.)

Lucio Fulci is easily one of my favorite horror directors, though he did work across many genres. It’s hard to square this with his later reputation as the godfather of gore, but in his early career, he produced no small share of sex comedies and westerns. But when it comes to horror, he delivered pure nightmares. Often lacking in what some might call “logic.” Rarely budgeted above the B-level. Occasionally working contentiously with his cast, but creating works of resonant atmosphere and image and dread that operate on the brain just like you want, eliciting that delicious shudder of an encounter with that which cannot be understood/endured/overcome/defined. And so, I’ve written about his movies a bunch here (10 of them to date, plus one documentary about him), but it’s been a while since I saw something new of his.

I do enjoy how Fulci gave himself cameos in most of his movies. Here he is as a friendly souvenir seller in *The Devil’s Honey*.

So that’s the goal today – three Fulci’s that I haven’t seen yet. These will all be from his late period towards the end of his life when he was experiencing severely declining health, which clearly took a toll on his artistic output. I don’t think these will be his best films. There may be real weaknesses on display, but given my deep respect for his catalogue, I am sure that they will be rewarding to explore. Also (and here comes the hypocrisy following my first paragraph in this post), they may not all be strictly horror, but I believe they will all help to illuminate the themes and tendencies of the truly significant work he did produce in the genre.

I hope I like them, but that’s not entirely the point, so much as to see what there is to find and seek to understand how they shed light on his output as a whole. So even if I don’t love one, I still plan to at least write something about it.

And so, without further ado, let’s get into The Devil’s Honey (1986), Demonia (1990), and Door to Silence (1991). And then as a bonus, I’ll touch on the written by Fulci, produced after Fulci’s death by Argento, and directed by neither of them, The Wax Mask (1996) as a fun coda. There will be spoilers for all.

Demonia (1990)

So I’d like to start out of order, basically to get this one out of the way. This is, sadly, the weakest Fulci film I’ve seen to date, and is probably a really good illustration of where his later career went and how tragically he suffered, spending his final years in what must have felt like artistic exile. Honestly, it is sad to engage with this artifact of his decline, but it is what happened. In short, as I’m sure I touched on when discussing a documentary about his life and work, as well as another film from the same year, the superior, darkly comic meta-exercise, Cat in the Brain (1990), Fulci’s final period of creative output had two long shadows looming over it: ill health and lack of money. In 1984, he first got sick, though he did recover and have another couple more good years, but by the end of the decade, he was fighting chronic Cirrhosis, Diabetes, and Hepatitis. He was constantly fatigued and it was inordinately difficult for him to complete a movie (though he still worked fairly prolifically). Furthermore, he was having great trouble securing financing. Partly, this was because producers didn’t trust that he was still a safe investment in his weakened state, but largely this was to do with unfortunate trends in the Italian film industry.

Since the 50s, Italy had been a powerhouse of genre cinema, flooding the market with affordably produced flicks that made up for low to mid-range budgets with a surfeit of style and panache: westerns, cop thrillers, gialli, and of course, horror. As I have read, homegrown viewers really subsidized these movies as there were only 2 TV stations and people would go to the cinema a couple times a week for entertainment. Then, with the introduction of commercial TV stations in the 80s, the bottom dropped out of the domestic genre market. There was still money for prestige pieces with higher budgets. But a lot of the money was being siphoned into cheaper TV production, which demanded safer content than a director like Fulci was known for. Low cost direct to video work could still get made, but budgets were greatly reduced. Adjusted for inflation, Fulci was sometimes working with budgets 1/20^th the size of what he’d had ten years earlier (and, you know, he hadn’t exactly been making Ben Hur back then), moving from mid-range projects that could expect to be shown in cinemas domestically and internationally, to truly micro-budget features (produced by companies that were in the active process of going bankrupt) which might be lucky to show up on video in Japan.

This meant a drop in money to pay for materials, film, special effects and actors, of course, but I think what took the biggest hit on Fulci was that he could no longer afford some of his closest collaborators, whom he had worked with for years, who got his sensibilities, and who could deliver on his vision. Thus, his later work just doesn’t look/sound/feel right.

Which brings us to Demonia. It is not exactly a bad movie, like some fun trashy Z-grade “so bad it’s good” curio. Rather, it is simply flat. The beats of the story are there, but it feels empty, without depth, without surprises, listless, without joy (not a word you would generally associate with his movies, but still). Maybe in a different era, Fulci could have made something of it. But it just doesn’t do very much and doesn’t feel like it’s his. I think even when I’ve watched some of his stuff that was made on the low end of the budget scale, there has always been a sense of intentionality, and that is lacking here.

In short, a group of Canadian archeologists in a small town in Sicily set up camp near an old convent that the locals shun. One archeologist, Liza, feels particularly drawn to it though and she discovers, hidden in the basement, a secret chamber where long ago a group of nuns had been crucified. Apparently, they were “Satanic,” carrying out all manner of wicked rituals, like their so-called “orgies” (which in the one scene we’re shown consisted of two couples having sex on either side of a large room – you know your film is in trouble when you can’t scrounge any more for the orgy budget), and the good townspeople had stormed the convent to put a stop to their shenanigans (which, to be fair, beyond lame, underattended orgies, also included baby sacrifice).

Anyway, spectral nuns start picking people off (I enjoyed one scene where a headless ghost nun shoots a guy with a harpoon gun – just your typical medieval Satanist), and there’s a bit of a procedural as the cops try to get a handle on what’s going on. By the end, Liza’s been possessed by the evil sisters and wanders around burbling yellow goo out of her mouth for some reason before the current townspeople show up and burn everything, including poor Liza, down.

Again, it’s fine. It isn’t a disaster, but it has no verve, no seeming reason to be. That quality only surfaces once or twice in brief, wild moments of typically Fulci-esque gore. Notably, there’s a scene were an exposition dumping old cat lady is devoured by her cats (her only crime being sharing the exposition she’s in the movie to share – sometimes you just can’t win), some of them pulling out her eyes for an early snack (even at his lowest, Fulci could still enjoy delivering grotty eye trauma – and there is a satisfying pop as at least one of the wet orbs slips free of its socket), and also a pretty fun moment where a guy is, for some reason (it’s pretty sudden and random), stuck in a trap that goes on to tear him in half like a chicken wishbone (it isn’t particularly realistic, but is still pretty gross and pretty cool). As is so often the case, what Fulci’s film lacks in sense or verisimilitude, it makes up for with audacity.

But it is not a good movie, and I think it doesn’t really reflect much on the strengths of Fulci’s career, so much as it gives us a taste of how far he had fallen by this point. It is honestly quite sad to look at from that perspective.

The Door to Silence (1991)

It is easy to read into the timing of a final work, suggesting that the creator had been particularly focused on his mortality at the time. I think of Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker or Tony Todd’s recent turn in the most recent Final Destination flick. We look back at a piece, knowing that the artist was essentially dying at the time of production, and can’t help but interpret a meditation on their upcoming passing. That is surely the case with Fulci’s last completed work, Le Porte del Silenzio. And I am happy to report that while this hardly stands among his very best films, there is something here – some real feeling, an atmosphere, an inescapable dread worthy of his artistry. Fulci didn’t die until about 5 years later, but he never managed to work again after this, and it really feels like the filmmaker knew that his time was limited, felt that he was already living his own death.

And you really don’t have to dig deep to find that reading (in fact, it’s pretty explicitly what the movie is about). The story here follows a man, Melvin (John Savage) trying to drive home, a journey consistently frustrated, sidelined, and delayed. He has one kind or another of car trouble. His wheels spin hopelessly in deep mud. His engine breaks down. He gets stuck behind a hearse carrying a casket for someone also named Melvin, and just can’t overtake it. At one point, he almost has a tryst in a motel room with a mysterious attractive woman who’s been following him, but she explains that it isn’t yet the right time for them to be together and that she will meet him at his destination. He finds himself in a funeral home where every casket contains a Melvin and one is indeed his match. He gets arrested for breaking into the back of the hearse to rip open the casket, later explaining to the judge that he’s not crazy – he was just scared that the casket was carrying his own corpse (nope, not crazy at all, pay a fine and back on the road with you). A tarot card reader tells him he’s been dead for hours, and he keeps driving and driving and driving and driving. Each detour seems to loop him back on his route. He can’t progress – the clock in his car is frozen and he doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. The road seems inescapable and inevitable. Finally, one more time trying to overtake the portentous hearse, he crashes headfirst into an oncoming truck and that’s the end of him. The loop is closed, the cycle finished. The mysterious woman is on the scene and her license plate reads “DEATH” (da da duuuuun!).

I will say it opens very engagingly – the atmosphere of New Orleans, infused with jaunty funeral jazz sets us off on a good start to our journey. And the sense of mystery and doom is heavy and effective. Sadly, as time goes on, it does get to feeling repetitive and like it’s running long, even though it’s a pretty short movie. I guess it’s just so obvious from a pretty early point that he is dead and this is his road to oblivion, and the lack of suspense took a toll on my attention, but I do think the film works. It is a sad piece, a frustrated piece, and it is clearly being made by an artist with a strong feeling to express. The protagonist is already dead – though he doesn’t feel it yet, to the world he is. To his family, his career, his ability to have any effect outside of himself. And all that remains is a loop that feels never ending, but is clearly going in only one direction, and while there are many detours en route, he cannot turn back.

I could imagine that if he’d had a bit of money (which he absolutely did not), Fulci could have done more with this to make more of the experience – the episodes could have been stranger, more varied, in more locations, exploring Melvin’s coming death in other fashions. But even still, especially read in the light of what his life was at the time, I did find it a moving endeavor. It is not a “scary” movie. It features no gore or goo. But I think it is surely horror – the artist staring his own death in the mirror, and sharing with us the indignation, the depressing inevitability, the injustice of it all.

I mean, of course, considering the subject manner of Fulci’s catalogue, death is all over the place, but this is entirely about it. And however it might feel weak technically or underdeveloped narratively, it surely feels personal. To return to a criticism of the previous film, this one is wholly ‘intentional.’ There is a reason for it to be. It was a work the artist was driven to make.

And it barely even got to exist. I believe it was initially only released on VHS in Italy, where producer Joe D’Amato said it “didn’t even sell a single brochure.” It wasn’t until much more recently that is came to dvd and bluray.

Is it a forgotten classic? No. It is a spin on a tried and true formula. If you’ve read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” or have seen Carnival of Souls, you know where we’re going. But the degree to which it feels important to its creator, an artist who really did significant work in his lifetime and died in poverty and despair, makes it feel important, something worth seeing if you’ve taken an interest in his oeuvre. I watched it on Youtube.

The Devil’s Honey (1986)

So, now that we’ve delved into the ignominious end of the artist’s otherwise noteworthy career, let’s rewind a few years to before everything fell apart, to a work that many consider Fulci’s last good movie (and that others belittle for its saxophone aided cunnilingus scene). Let’s dig into a weird, weird, weird softcore erotic drama with some solid horror mood and ideas, The Devil’s Honey. As I understand, though it wasn’t released until 1986, it had been filmed back in 1984, right around the time that Fulci got sick the first time. I don’t know if he completed shooting before falling ill, but if not, he clearly recovered after that first bout enough to operate at full strength when making this picture – it’s kinda great.

Kinda great and really weird – to a fascinating degree. This is in no way explicitly a horror movie (though erotic thriller could surely be argued), but I’d bet that it has just as many over the top, reason defying “what the hell am I looking at” moments as anything in City of the Living Dead or House by the Cemetery. There are sequences that just begin as absurd to the point of laughability, but which progress through that apparent zaniness to reach compelling extremities of both sexuality and psychological torment. All of this contributes to a horror vibe that makes the film feel at home in Fulci’s catalogue.

And it must be said, I think this is Fulci at the top of his craft. This film just looks and sounds so damn good – vibes on top of vibes – and it is so clearly controlled – we see what he wants us to see, whatever his intention behind that showing may be. We’ll get into it soon (and in some depth – so if you haven’t seen it, I really recommend seeking it out – it’s available out there, but you may need to do a free trial to see it – although if you’re sensitive to sexual violence, perhaps you should take a pass), but I find it striking the extent to which I feel this was made to be an uncomfortable watch – all of the relationships are at least toxic if not downright abusive and the notion of consent doesn’t even pop in for a quick coffee – and yet, the film is exceedingly watchable, magnetic even. So many character actions are honestly ugly and everyone is at least kind of terrible, but I was just totally enamored with it from start to finish, and then went back and watched it again. It is seductively captivating, even as it disturbs.

One final note – I watched it in Italian with English subtitles. As I understand, the text of the English dubbing is totally different and, from what I read, much worse, flattening the emotion and the rich ambivalence of much of the film. I haven’t watched the English dub to compare, but I will be referring to the Italian version (including using the character names from that version – they’re different in English).

Cecilia discovering the presence of a third participant in their public sex.

Essentially, we follow two characters whose paths will eventually intertwine – Cecilia and Dr. Simpson. Cecilia is in a passionate, tumultuous, often abusive and toxic, but always intoxicating and deeply, deeply sexual relationship with the perpetually sweaty saxophonist, Gaetano (on rewatch, he’s not actually always sweating – but it feels that way). We’ll come back to them soon as their dynamic is really the heart of the story – the film belongs to Cecilia. On the other side, Dr. Simpson is a seemingly world class surgeon in a cold, loveless marriage – but don’t feel sorry for him. The impression is that his wife yearns for his affection, she’s desperate for it, but he can’t summon the slightest iota of desire for her, though he expends no shortage of lust on the prostitutes he regularly employs, with whom he can let his freak flag fly, such as in the one scene where we see him drooling like a maniac over the application of nail polish to the crotch of some pantyhose. Years of this emotional and physical neglect has made his wife understandably cold.

However, Cecilia and Gaetano are anything but cold. They burn constantly. And simmer. And melt. Everything hot. The opening scene, the most iconic in the film, finds them in the recording studio along with Gaetano’s producer, Nicky, and a few hangers on, as he’s laying down a sultry jazz track. For the entirety of the recording, their eyes are locked (Fulci and his eyes), and the whole sequence plays out as pure sex – lustful, teasing, desperate, hungry. Finally, it’s time for a break and though none of the staff have yet left for coffee, Cecilia is already licking Gaetano’s face and her breast is in his hand, so overwhelmingly do their bodies crave each other. Then, the moment the others are out the door, Gaetano rips aside her panties and shoves his saxophone between her legs, playing low rumbly tones as he makes cheeky bedroom eyes at her, leaving her crying and shaking as everyone else comes back from their break to record some more. In the beginning, it just feels ridiculous – hilarious – it is the infamous sax-sex scene that the movie is best known for, and it is funny, but damned if it isn’t also sexy as all get out, their desire being so palpable, the sex being so “true,” no matter how silly.

It should also be noted that she says ‘no’ to this multiple times and he ignores her. The film is full of similar scenes – she gets off each time and she does want him, even loves him, but he never respects a boundary, she is never allowed any agency (as long as he’s alive), and many scenes that on one level are hot and mutually satisfying, from another perspective, are easily read as assault or rape.

Simpson smearing nail polish on a sex worker’s face. That’s gonna be a pain to clean up.

The film progresses for a bit, alternating between the hot and cold of the two relationships until Gaetano falls off his motorcycle because he’s riding in circles around Cecilia being a dick, hits his head, and a few hours later ends up under the knife of Dr. Simpson. The problem is that earlier that evening, Simpson’s wife had finally had enough of the jerk and declared that she wanted a divorce. Thus distracted, he botches the job, and fails to save Gaetano, who dies on his table.

Honestly, on first viewing, I was shocked. Thus far, the Gaetano-Cecilia story had felt so primary, and I didn’t even understand why we were following the doctor at all. I was really startled when a third of the way into the flick, this main character died. It is as sudden and jarring in anything in a horror offering, but perhaps more so because this had not yet felt like a horror movie per se. When a mysterious hand appears behind someone in House by the Cemetery and rips their skull open, it startles and grosses out, but it doesn’t feel as shocking as this sudden loss of character.

Anyway, Cecilia completely flips out and starts stalking Dr. Simpson, demanding to know “Why did you let him die?” And finally, her grief is so powerful that it drives her across town in the rain, into the back of his car where she kidnaps him at gunpoint, makes him drive her to the house she and Gaetano had shared by the seaside, ties him up, and proceeds to torture him for days. But as this torment goes on, he starts to get off on it, becoming obsessed with this mysterious, often naked woman, who walks him on a leash through the waves until he almost drowns, feeds him leftover dogfood, and whacks him in the face with an axe before unzipping her jeans for him to smear his blood all over her belly as he kisses her in sexual fervor. Have I mentioned that it’s a weird movie?

But it really is all about her feelings towards Gaetano. Throughout the final act, we slip in and out of the present with the now subservient doctor and memories of the dominant, cruel, passionate Gaetano. Cecilia seems to promise every day that this is the day she’ll kill the doctor, but she never does. She wants to. She wants to ride that anger, that vengeance, to be satisfied by the violence, but it feels like she knows she wouldn’t be, as she processes her grief, her loss, and what must be her mixed feelings about Gaetano. The one time she does drown him, she immediately fights to bring him back.

Again, every scene between Cecilia and Gaetano is in equal measure hot as hell and deeply ugly and disturbing. How many times does she say “no” to his advances, to his demands, to his absurd bullshit? But also, how much does she crave him and get off on these interactions, though they hurt her or scare her or humiliate her? Even after his death, she watches old home movies where a teasing love scene becomes a rape, and she sobs not at the memory of his violence, but for his loss, rubbing his old sweater between her legs to retain something of his scent. She had and has every reason to hate this guy – he was awful – but she didn’t hate him. Beyond all reason, she loved him. And that is what the movie is about – this overwhelming, uncontrollable, utterly self-destructive desire, “love,” the “devil’s honey,” at once luring you to it and laying waste to you in every way. We see the same thing in how Simpson becomes obsessed and enamored of his torturer in the second half. It is honestly really, really dark.

And at the same time, so watchable, so alluring as a film. It does that thing I love in horror of making cinematic pleasure out of the most unpleasant experiences. There’s the weird pinch that only horror can give. But, while I really responded to it, this all leads to questions of what this film is – what it does. Is it misogynistic in its lascivious portrayal of the suffering woman addicted to a bad guy, or at least the way that bad guy gets her off? Is it an apologia for abusive relationships where a “man is a man,” taking control and satisfying the woman against her own will? Maybe. I honestly don’t know.

But my impression is that even if the film could be read in that way, Fulci was not really interested in psychology (he sure seemed to abhor the very notion of logos), and he didn’t make films with a “message.” Rather, he made films that dove into the deep end of unfathomable horrors. And I feel that even though this is not a work of supernatural horror or a slasher or anything like that, it is a strikingly similar work. It subsumes itself in an unhealthy obsession, in impulses of the self, of the body, of the mind, in pursuit of a satisfaction which could excuse away the worst behavior. And thus, so much of the material of the film is that obsession, that attraction, that desire. And it is compelling, provocative, erotic. The film arouses, but the darkness is always there, nothing is ever “nice” – there is no tenderness, no warmth, only heat.

Horror often involves an encounter with something not only bad, dangerous, or scary, but unknown and unknowable, and I feel that Fulci’s approach to these base human impulses posits the workings of the mind, the impulses of the flesh as similarly unknowable, similarly cruel in their demands that their hunger be met, regardless of the cost. This is an erotic drama with some thriller elements – it is not “horror,” but it rhymes.

By the end, Cecilia has one more memory of Gaetano which seems to be the final straw, allowing her to finally leave him behind and the film ends with her making love to Simpson as the waves crash behind them. In the memory, she and Gaetano had been in a cinema in Venice along with his producer Nicky. Cecilia is making out with Gaetano when she is aghast to see Nicky going down on him. We never see what happens next – it’s the end of the memory, but I don’t imagine it was friendly and I think that explains why there was such tension between her and Nicky in the opening scene. I don’t know if we’re meant to be shocked by the bisexuality, but I’d felt we’d seen glimpses of attraction and jealousy in that first recording session, so this didn’t seem out of left field. Anyway, I suppose the memory of it on some level undermined her idealization of Gaetano’s desire – it was never exclusive to her. He never needed her like she did him. He just needed. He was just perpetually horny and she was there and into him. Finally, she can accept the adoration of her captive, her victim, whom she has no particular love for. An odd intimacy has grown between her and Simpson – notably, at some point, they both stopped wearing clothes, and it doesn’t feel like it was done to tease him, but they have just passed a level of formality with each other. Perhaps we see Simpson developing love/obsession for his torturer as a stand in for what had developed between Cecilia and Gaetano. A viscous cycle continues.

In the end, this is quite a film, and quite a peculiar one. It is sufficiently sexually explicit as to be sold as softcore porn, but though it frequently titillates, I don’t feel its primary intention is to get the viewer off. Rather, it really is trying to unsettle. And it does. It is dark and bleak and horny and feverish. The performances are top notch, and it is gorgeous in every technical aspect. Probably not for everyone, but I think a good example of Fulci’s artistry right before everything went south for him. I’m glad to have finally seen it.

Wax Mask (1997)

So this last feature today is not actually a Fulci film, but it bears mentioning, has an interesting history, a strong connection to Fulci, and is actually a heck of a lot more fun than I had remotely expected it to be. Also, given that the impetus for this current Fulci-thon was to get into something indubitably “horror” and then the most significant work was an “erotic drama,” I am happy to say that this is nothing but a horror movie.

As we’ve gone over in this post, the final period of Fulci’s life was sadly not a fertile time creatively, and he reportedly felt cast aside, abandoned, a great maestro who had made some of the best horror ever (among many other films) dying alone, disrespected, forgotten. Now, hopping back in time a bit, as they had both been big names in Italian horror, in the early 80s there had been a kind of rivalry between Fulci and Dario Argento. But as Fulci, once so prolific, had not managed any work since The Door to Silence in 1991, in 1994, Argento approached him with the idea of collaborating on a film together. Argento had been one of the few survivors (if not the only survivor) of the previously discussed death of Italian genre cinema, benefitting from his significant international fame which made it possible for him to go on funding his films with foreign money. I can imagine him looking at his once rival and feeling a pang of ‘coulda been me,’ and really wanting to help Fulci with this project. I don’t think they’d previously been close, but I believe the offer came from an emotional place.

They settled on a remake of “House of Wax,” taking elements from both the 1933 film and the 1953 Vincent Price vehicle. Fulci wrote a script and then … in March of 1996, alone in the Rome apartment he’d had to move into, having lost his house, Lucio Fulci died in a hyperglycemic diabetic coma.

Argento paid for his funeral and then proceeded to carry on producing the film they’d set out to make together. He hired one of Fulci’s daughters as an assistant art director, and ended up giving a first time feature directing gig to Sergio Stivaletti, who had previously worked primarily as a special effects artist, creating some of Argento’s most iconic effects in recent years (I’ve read that the needles under the eyes in Opera was his invention). The result is a film that honestly, doesn’t feel a whole hell of a lot like either Argento or Fulci, but if you squint, you can see Argento’s influence, and if you close your eyes and dream, you can imagine what it might have been if carried to fruition by Fulci at the height of his powers. But that sounds like I’m down on the picture, and I was really happily surprised how much I really liked it. It is colorful and creative and sleazy in a glossy 90s fashion, with no shortage of gleefully excessive gore and nudity. It suffers somewhat from 90s era visual effects (some pretty rough computer aided material there), but Stivaletti sure knew his practical effects, and there’s no shortage of impressive and really novel stuff on offer.

In a decently scary cold open, we witness the aftermath of a family being brutally murdered in 1900 Paris by a killer with what looks to be a robotic hand – all but one little girl who the inspector finds hiding under the bed. Some years later, having relocated to Rome, Sonia, the little girl, now a young woman, finds herself a job as a costumer at a soon to open, so good it’s scary Wax Museum, run by the enigmatic Boris Volkoff. Volkoff’s fearsome tableaus have a disturbing degree of verisimilitude, and I don’t think it should count as a spoiler that (given what this is a remake of) people are of course being hunted down and transformed into gruesome living dead statues of torture and torment. One adjustment here is that unlike previous incarnations, these are not preserved corpses, encased in wax, but rather artificially sustained living bodies, trapped in a deathlike state, suffused with a blue gooey waxy substance. Once disconnected from the solution being pumped through their veins, they seem aware of their horrific circumstances before they finally die. Solid. Things take a dark turn when Sonia sees a new scene unveiled, that of the death of her parents, featuring details never released to the press. Hmmm. Interesting, no?

I won’t get into the permutations of the plot too much. I mean, one could generally guess where it’s going, but still, there are some twists and reveals and this is actually one that I think most horror fans would enjoy seeking out, so why not go in without too much information? It’s available out there. I watched it on Tubi.

This is not the most amazing horror movie you’re ever going to see, but it is crisp and cleanly directed, with strong energy and an evident delight in its own bloody mayhem. It is a very colorful movie (and unlike many an Argento imitator, I’d say it works and looks pretty cool) and that is one of the places where people may cite Argento’s influence (although, I think the color thing is thrown around far too often when describing Argento’s style – I mean, it works if you’ve only seen Suspiria). However, I think that you can see a bit of Argento in some of the camerawork, and some tracking shots particularly. Stivaletti had worked on many films with him and had seen how he set up shots, and I can imagine him learning a great deal under that kind of tutelage.

It is, let’s say, surprising, when it briefly becomes The Terminator though.

But this post is all about Fulci, so where is he in all this? Hard to be found honestly. Whereas Fulci’s horror output was dreamlike, doom laden, advancing, sometimes quite slowly with the weight of creeping death, carrying images and moments that could shock the mind into submission with their extremity, and sometimes their absurdity, this is a quickly paced, very modern feeling, slick 90s flick, though it is set at the turn of the century. I understand Fulci’s script was much revised before shooting began, so even that doesn’t really communicate much of his proclivities.

However, I think you could imagine the potential of this scenario in his hands. In many ways it is unlike the films he’s best known for, but I think there are thematic elements he could have sunk his teeth into. Simply the image of the death in life of the wax figures – there is something really gross and disturbing in that. The aesthetization of death, in this museum where victims become art, is fertile ground. And there is a kind of detective procedural element here, which he had often dealt with before, so I think he would have known how to pay lip service to the business of “solving the crime” without that significantly impinging on the atmosphere of shudder inducing dread. I don’t imagine it would have been his best film, but I can imagine that it could have at least felt like “his” work. What could have been.

But again, this one is fun, worth checking out just as a cool 90s horror movie (an era that is often discounted for its dearth of good horror), and for Fulci completionists, an intriguing exercise in watching one film and imagining how it might have been completely different in other hands.

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And so that is a bit of Fulci for now, bringing the films of his that I’ve written about to perhaps fourteen, certainly more than any other director. And the great thing is, I’ll probably never run out. I mean, I don’t think any of his remaining horror flicks (that I haven’t seen) are reported to be “good” and the many “good” films of his that I haven’t seen aren’t reported to be horror. But one of these days, I may run down some of the other late-80s low points, or perhaps more interesting, I may get into some of his earlier thrillers in the mid-late 60s. I’ve read that one of them is said to be the root of later erotic thrillers such as Basic Instinct. Also, the westerns are supposed to be noteworthy. Could be worth exploring, but not sure if it should all get written about on a “horror blog” – we’ll see.

But I think that’s the end of the road for now, happily not because I’m driving, full speed, into an oncoming truck (but, I tell you, some days it may feel like it). See you next time.

Horror Diary Recap

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Glen — No Comments ↓

I had a good run for a few weeks there, on a roll and banging out blog posts. And then, as it often does, life happened (travel, work, art, Covid, etc.), and now more than a month has slipped through my fingers when they clearly should have been typing away about horror. So, not to overthink it, I just want to very briefly run through some horror stuff I’ve been digging into during that time – nothing particularly deep, but just sharing a few things I’ve enjoyed. Perhaps some of these will warrant more attention in the future, but for now, I just want to jot down some first impressions.

So, here we go…

His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood

Ok – I’ve found a new author to get into. This is a very small collection of short stories published under the name Poppy Z. Bright (who, since transitioning, now goes by William Joseph Martin). I mean no disrespect by using the old name, but I believe their horror fiction was all published under the Bright name, and it’s one that I’ve long heard bandied about, but had yet to read. Wow! Their work kinda gave me Clive Barker vibes, an author whom I hold in great esteem. In this tiny volume, I only had four short stories, but I loved them all – a bit of splatterpunk, a bit of southern gothic, oodles of sex and belief and need and obsession and bodies and art.

Two young lovers on a boundary pushing death trip rob from the wrong grave with fatally seductive results. A possessive ghost pulls the only young woman who can see him to join him in death, a tale both romantic and abusive. A zombie outbreak in Calcutta does little to change the flow of life in the city, but brings the story’s protagonist into an encounter with the holy. Two young musicians travel to New York City for a gig and find more than they can handle, but have solace in music and each other, and this new, overwhelming city. I can’t underline how driving and captivating the prose was and how much the thematics spoke to me. I’ve got to check out more of Martin’s work, published under the Bright name. I’m open to suggestions.

The Black Cat (1981)

I’m not quite sure what box to put this film into, ostensibly based on the Edgar Allan Poe story (but only sharing a title). This has long been on my watchlist – I love Lucio Fulci and it’s been ages since I saw something of his for the first time. I’ve seen this one listed either as top-of-middle tier Fulci or as a disappointingly perfunctory exercise that he did as a favor to the producer, but his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe both are true. The first third of the film, maybe more, I kind of loved. It doesn’t feel so much like a product of the man behind The Beyond or City of the Living Dead, but it does feel a bit like it was made by the mind behind The Psychic, a significant movie in its own right. Early on, I was really into the atmosphere and the absolute confidence of the largely visual storytelling. The music by Pino Donoggio is great – at turns pastoral, like something off of a b-side of The Wicker Man soundtrack, and playful or eerie and tense – really gorgeous work. Patrick Magee (whom I mainly know from A Clockwork Orange) really pops as the sweaty psychic in an unhealthy, abusive relationship with the titular black feline. There is solid atmosphere – all foggy and spooky, and enjoyable sequences of a cat killing (or more precisely, causing the deaths of) a whole bunch of people – and it’s all in the edit – cutting between close ups of the cat or its chosen victim, back to the cat’s eyes (ever watching, waiting, hunting) – I expect the actors were rarely actually in the room with the murderous kitty, but the kill scenes really track.

But somehow, after the midway point, I just had trouble staying focused. Was that the film’s fault, or was that a me problem? I don’t know, but for all that I appreciated so much of what was going on, I just found myself less and less into it.

Anyway, if you dig Fulci, I think it is at least worth checking out: there are endless, foggy abandoned streets; cat scratches draw pints of blood; Magee exerts his psychic domination on others as the sweat pours down his face and his eyes bug out of his head; the practical effects are obvious (there is at least one unmistakable mannequin), but the obviousness really doesn’t matter – the total effect is striking and effective; the dead talk, and scream; and there are more close ups of eyes than you can shake a stick at (Fulci gonna Fulci…). Also, it is just so well crafted. I think people often associate Fulci with extreme gore, and in his goriest work, he threw logic out the window, making pure nightmare flicks, but that doesn’t describe his whole oeuvre. He could be a real craftsman, and I think this film is an example of him in a high craft, though possibly low inspiration, mode.

But one content warning – everything may well have been on the up and up, but watching an Italian production from this era, I’m just always nervous about how the cat or cats were treated during the filming. If that’s the sort of thing you’re going to be distractingly worried about throughout the film, maybe give this one a miss.

So in the end, I’m quite glad to have finally seen this, but I don’t know that I’m going to make a habit of it.

The Metamodern Slasher Film (2025)

So, one of my very first posts here was about this exciting online conference I’d had the pleasure of attending (a lovely side effect of the pandemic was how many things opened up and became accessible when they went online), the “Slasher Studies Summer Camp,” back in 2021, and one of the stand out presentations at that conference was the keynote speech by Dr. Steve Jones on what he’d termed “the metamodern slasher film.” What he was describing felt immediately familiar and it has stayed with me as I’ve watched many recent slasher flicks that do, indeed, seem to share a similar ethos, if not approach. Since then, I’ve followed Jones on social media, so when he announced a pre-order discount for the softcover edition of his full book building on those same ideas, I was eager to snatch it up quick as can be (and happy to get the discount – academic books can be bank breaking).

I must admit, I’m not quite finished with it yet – but it is a consistently enjoyable and intriguing read. I must also admit that I still have difficulty putting my finger on exactly what the “metamodern” entails, but it is basically one interpretation of our current post-postmodern moment, and insofar as we all never fully agreed on one set meaning of “postmodern,” I think it’s fair that I have some difficulty wrapping my head around this proposed sentiment that both grows out of and reacts to what had come before.

Throughout, Jones presents case studies of contemporary slashers (the highest profile example would be Happy Death Day, but his cited filmography is deep), many of which I’ve seen and many of which I haven’t, identifying certain shared elements and/or underlying philosophies. In short, they frequently feature a knowing sub-genre self-awareness, allowing for a great deal of meta-play, but without the ironic distance/genre criticism that postmodernism frequently presented. Jones further identifies a new emotional earnestness in the work, as well as a surprisingly optimistic note – whereas postmodernism may critically suggest that it had all been done before and there was nothing new under the sun – just the same tired old tropes at which to wink, these films show a creative commitment to innovation, aware of tropes, but open to twisting them into something that feels new and fresh and fun. The optimism he reads here, particularly as identified in a bunch of what have been described as cynical “dead teenager” movies, intrigues me, given the extent to which I feel like we live in a scary, pessimistic age, where it is hard to believe that we could possible walk back the harm being done.

Honestly, I’m not always sure about the implied criticism of the postmodern set, Scream (1996) being the dominant example, but I’m curious to follow his ideas to their endpoint. I’m sure it will continue to challenge and enlighten. Also, I am certainly collecting a list of lesser known, very interesting sounding films that I’m now very eager to track down.

Race With the Devil (1975)

First of all – this movie, celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year, is a blast! I feel like we don’t get a lot of horror-action flicks, or when we do, it’s more in the domain of an unseen war between denizens of the night (Nightwatch, Underworld, etc.), featuring horror monsters (vampires, werewolves, demons, etc., but not so much a horror movie of some “normal” person encountering a horrific threat that then takes on action beats (I wonder if it’s about action characters having a certain kind of agency and horror characters more having things happen to them). I think action movies with horror characters are much more common than horror movies with action characters. But this really walks the line – it might not be the scariest movie ever made, but I think it is frequently unsettling and creepy in a way I like horror to be, and then about the last third of the movie is basically a big car chase with assailants attacking our protagonists, trying to climb into their RV or drive them off the road. Cars flip or blow up driving off a bridge or get shot out. It’s exciting the way I like an action movie to be. The cast is great – I really buy the friendship between Peter Fonda and Warren Oats, two buddies who have set off on a long needed vacation in their brand new motorhome, and while the film can be faulted for giving their wives (Loretta Swit and Lara Parker) too little to do, I think they’re both great, really selling the terror and the stress they are buckling under while on the run from Texas backwater cultists. Now, I think it’s an entirely fair criticism to point out that the women disproportionately have to communicate fear and weakness while the menfolk get to heroically fight back, but as a viewer, I think the wives’ reactions are far more likely to resemble my own, and having characters carry that fear is essential to the flick. Also, while they could have had more, they did get small moments to shine, like their great scene doing research on Satanism in the local library, where they end up stealing reference books and running away all giddy. There is a real friendship dynamic there as well, and it was a treat.

In short, these two couples go off on a vacation together, setting off from San Antonio and driving through rural Texas in the direction of Aspen, where they plan to go skiing. Their first night out, having struck camp in a wild spot not far from the road, they witness a group of Satanists across the river as they first dance naked around a fire (oooh, titillating) and then stab a girl with a ceremonial dagger (uh, concerning). Then the black cloaked cultists notice they have an audience and chase the couples as they drive away. Much of the rest of the film features the couples trying to either get the authorities to do something about the murder they witnessed, or just trying to escape to the nearest big city (Amarillo – not even that big) as it seems that every rural resident of the Texas panhandle is somehow in on it. Wherever they go, people watch them strangely, phones mysteriously don’t work, or road accidents seem to have been orchestrated to force them into a trap. Every gas station attendant, every overfriendly, personal space invading neighbor at the campground, every police officer they encounter seems equally likely to be a secret Satanist out to silence them, sabotage their beautiful new motorhome, or kill their dog and fill their camper with rattlesnakes. Travelling around these rural regions, it all takes on a kind of folk horror vibe. Everyone out here in the sticks is part of one big, weird, religious conspiracy – the whole world seems like a slowly tightening noose around the necks of the two couples, until it all explodes (literally even) in the big car chase/fight at the end, not to mention a solid horror downer of a final twist.

This is one of my favorite kinds of horror in that I don’t feel like the filmmakers were trying to “say” anything particularly, so much as to just make a scary, exciting movie; but I feel like something is clearly expressed about the time and the place – the American south (perhaps extendable to non-urban America in general) in the mid 70s. This came only one year after Texas Chainsaw Massacre and while it is nowhere near as harsh or as artful, it has a lot of similarities – in both cases an urban group leaves the city, somewhere in Texas, and finds that everyone out there is a danger. Interestingly, with its focus on a group of young people, Texas Chainsaw shows them, easily identified with the counterculture moment, being hounded by a malevolent, embittered poor rural, group, all of an older generation – the heartland has poison in its heart and it’s not a safe place for anyone who could be part of the future.

In Race with the Devil the sheriff who seems in league with the cultists (or is just really bad at his job – but seriously, he worships the devil) keeps talking about those dang hippies, about the corruptive element of youth, but it’s all a cover for his own, for his group’s own corruption. And rather than attacking a bunch of hippies, he and all the other cultists are coming after four people who, from my modern, non-southern, non-Texan perspective, seem not all that unlike them. They are both working class/middle class/middle aged couples. The guys run an automotive garage and are into motorbike racing. Their big aspiration is to get out of the city, avoid crowds and basically be left alone in nature. But their seeming cultural similarities are no protection – they are no less targets. I feel like the film is just trying to be scary and paranoia filled, and the particular Satanist angle is just a convenient fill-in-the-blank horror threat, but there is a cultural impression in how all of these ‘normal people,’ people not that dissimilar to our protagonists (who are more urban, but hardly what I’d call “big city”), people who might otherwise come across on film as salt of the earth, good old-fashioned country folk, how they are all in an evil conspiracy, all dangerous. They’re not presented like the Sawyer clan in Texas Chainsaw (who are all clearly rather weird, to say the least) – nope – they’re the blood of the soil (if you want to get all 19^th century nationalistic about it) and they are everywhere; you apparently can’t throw a rock in rural Texas without hitting a Satanist. The real social danger is not counter culture kids with their long hair and loud music – it’s ‘normal’ folk who will hunt down, harass, and destroy anyone or anything they feel threatens their stasis. That could be the obvious outsider. But it will also be you if you get in their way. I’m sorry to say it has contemporary resonance.

But again, while this may serve as an interesting cultural document, the real reason to watch this is that it is simply fun. Come for the paranoid horror-action flick, but stay for a bit of sociology.

Suspiria (2018) and Stacie Ponder on Suspiria

I needed some comfort food the other week and found myself gravitating back to this recent favorite, which I’ve written about before. I watched it over the span of a few days, savoring it a section at a time, regularly pausing to rave to my indulgent wife about how much I adored a given moment or character or historical artistic reference.

It’s interesting. For all that I love this film dearly, I find that I have difficulty offering my own clear reading of it. It is dense with narrative and symbol and character and simply life. While I feel hard pressed to detail what I think it may all add up to, moment by moment, I am constantly enamored with it. Its politics, its subtextual sexiness, its awfulness. Its witches who are all both monstrous and cruel and cool and utterly aspirational. Its view of a collective art making process that is both inspiring and beautiful and abusive and exploitative. Its nexus of magic and dance and bodies and power and political conflict and sadness and pain and grace. Life is complex and so is this, and I love every single minute of it.

So, having taken such joy in this recent re-watch, and wanting to spend a little more time dwelling in its moods and imagery and ideas, I went to re-read a gorgeous bit of writing from a favorite horror blogger. Stacie Ponder of the Final Girl blog went on a deep dive back in October of 2019, writing a post a day on Suspiria for the whole month, doing what I think is really significant and valuable work in picking apart nuances of the film as well as researching its influences and references. I fear any analysis I might provide would be so indebted to her, that I should just link to her entries and say if you even kinda liked this movie, you owe it to yourself to explore her explications. They were a great pleasure to revisit. Also, it gave me a few mornings of something to read with breakfast instead of the news – I like my horror fictional, thank you very much…

The Coffee Table (2022)

I’d heard great things about this Spanish language feature last year and was so happy to have a couple of hours to sit down and devote myself to something new. Having watched it, I have mixed feelings. There is a lot to like, and many elements linger in my mind, but ultimately I was unsatisfied. Still, I’m glad to have experienced it and to be considering it now.

This will be short, but I need some caveats. First, many horror fans may come away from this feeling that it isn’t really a horror movie, and I get it – there’s no monster, no slasher killer, no supernatural element. Also, it is arguably a comedy, though of the blackest vein. But, I will posit that it is all to do with “horror,” writ large, its protagonist being thrust into an encounter with a terrible truth that is beyond all that he can bear. Also, for all that this could be accurately described as a family drama (or possibly an absurdist tragedy), it features imagery, events, and pervasive discomfort that will be hard for anyone but horror fans to stomach.

Secondly, it is nigh impossible to discuss the movie in any meaningful way without significant spoilers, so if you think you might want to check out this intriguing, frequently intense, doom laden, blackly comic, tight little bottle movie about a man reckoning with the worst mistake of his life (namely, that he bought the wrong coffee table), go do so, even if I found the ending oddly unaffecting. I’d say it’s probably still worth your time.

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Ok, so here are some thoughts:

-I appreciate that when ‘the terrible thing’ happens, we don’t see how, and we never really learn how. It remains shocking, unimaginable. Jesús was there, he saw it, and he still doesn’t understand. But really, the ‘how’ is not important. It was an accident. It is terrible. It can never be reversed. If he could actually explain it to his wife, would it make it any less mind shattering?

-I wonder how critical we are meant to be of Jesús. When he first starts to clean, I was puzzled – how could he think he could actually clean this up – does he think Maria somehow isn’t going to notice? But I get it – he just can’t deal – he can’t face the difficult thing. To be fair, I can sympathize in this case – what could be worse? I think many of us would freeze up and do something stupid, undergoing such a horror. But the more I think about it, the more I feel his failure to deal is symptomatic of his whole character. Maria has to force everything in life because he refuses to make his own decisions (building to the point that he lashes out and buys the stupid table out of spite). Now, few of us are heroes, and most coast through life as he does, trying to avoid difficulties, but there is a cowardice at the center of his character that’s hard to like, though it can certainly be sympathized with (and if we’re to be honest, we all probably share). Furthermore, I’d assumed Ruth was lying/imagining things, but now I wonder – did he do something and his response was then just to shut down and deny and avoid? Who knows? I don’t exactly think he did, but the response would match his life pattern.

-How are we meant to receive the ending? The tension that runs through the lion share of the film is so engaging, and yet when revelations finally come, I feel the film pulls back. The soundtrack covers the screams. The camera looks left, looks right, and Maria has already taken decisive action, and Jesús follows. But I didn’t feel much. I didn’t cry. I didn’t laugh (it is frequently a pretty funny movie). It just felt like a bit of a relief that it had finally happened and we were no longer waiting in suspense for something to predictably go from horrible to even worse. I wonder what the filmmaker’s were hoping for. About that ending, I think perhaps the film suffers from predicating its narrative tension on waiting for something to happen that it’s hard to imagine going much of any other way. Sure, it piles on with its timing, and the actual actions taken by its characters, but sooner or later, Maria was bound to learn the truth. And then, well, it would be bad; and then she does; and it is. Ok.

-Finally, coming from theatre, I did enjoy how much this felt like a play – intense action in generally one location in a contained period of time, with a small set of players. Aristotelian unities all over the damn place. Past that, there is an absurdist approach to over the top tragedy that just feels like it often lives in the theatre more than on screen. I wonder how this would be, staged in a small space, intimate, the audience really trapped in the apartment with him, waiting for the inevitable.

So yeah, glad I watched it, kinda wished I loved the ending, but certainly food for thought.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

I have got to spend more time with silent cinema. Every time I do, I always come away so rewarded. Sure, there are elements of performance that can feel dated, eliciting laughter at moments I expect hadn’t been intentional, but it is a joyous laughter. It is great how much we can understand, connect with, feel without words – how little we sometimes need them. And I love how, only reading a few words from time to time, I’m given additional space in my head to think, to consider, react, and process what I’m viewing. And I feel that happens without at all taking me out of it, but there’s just that extra bit of space left to me when everyone shuts up.

I’d seen Phantom before, but was excited to rewatch it as presented by Joe Bob Briggs on the Last Drive In on Shudder. I knew it was the sort of work that he’d be able to share deep history about, and I wasn’t disappointed. If you’re interested, I recommend the episode and I won’t repeat his research here.

But I will say I enjoyed this, celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year, even more the second time around. It is a huge picture, executed at such a massive scale. The sets, the cast of hundreds, the early use of color. And it is just fun and exciting from start to finish. It is a crowd pleaser, with tons of successful comedy, atmosphere up the wazoo, and indelible images and sequences that have become icons of the medium (I mean, the unmasking scene alone). It is thrilling and intriguing and beautiful.

And Lon Cheney’s praises could not be sung enough. I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen so little of his work. Basically, I think I’ve only seen this and The Unknown (1927). In this, he brings such flair to the part. Everyone of course talks about his self-administered makeup, but the performance itself is such an absolute delight. The film does everything it can to turn you against him, making him not only physically repellant, but actually a monstrous person. But Cheney’s performance overpowers any efforts of the script. I can’t imagine how anyone today could watch this and not cheer him at every turn – for his charisma, his vivacity, his playful whimsy, his cleverness. I don’t support his actions (he is rather a controlling, entitled proto-incel), but Cheney embodies him as impish and light and brilliant. And the cognitive dissonance of how I receive him makes the film all the more interesting.

He and, by extension, the film are really something to treasure. This was a treat to re-watch.

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And that catches me up on the last few weeks. I’ve honestly watched much less horror than usual, but almost all of it has been really worthwhile – there wasn’t anything that wasn’t worthy of at least a mention on this here blog. Thanks for following along with me. I hope you stick around.

First Impressions – My Week in Horror

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Glen — No Comments ↓

Sometimes, I make plans that don’t quite work out. I watch something expecting it to connect with other works in a certain way, and it doesn’t. I check out a film or a book I think I’m going to really like and have thoughts about, and it leaves me lukewarm. I choose a film I really did like and find interesting, but when I sit down to actually commit words to the page, I find myself drawing a blank, with little to say really, other than that I’d enjoyed it. And sometimes it’s just so easy to procrastinate – a nice, but also dangerous, thing about having this blog is that watching a horror movie always feels like a productive use of my time – even if I don’t choose to write about it, I’m expanding my knowledge, doing my homework – indulgence easily justified as education.

This has been one of those weeks (more like a week and a half at this point). I watched a ton of stuff (much more than usual), but while I enjoyed most of it, I’m having trouble finding, let’s say, a thesis. So, in lieu of that, maybe I’ll just run down everything I saw, as plenty of it is really worth seeking out.

These were first time watches, and even if something didn’t exactly live up to my hopes or forever change how I look at the world, I’m glad to have seen them all. That said, these will all be rather short reviews and I’ll endeavor to keep them spoiler free.

Murder Rock: Dancing Death (1984)

Coming off a run of some of his most significant pictures, this is the last film Fulci would make before illness forced him to take a break, sapping much of his creative energies (the 2 year break was apparently really hard on him – in the preceding 10 years, he’d made 17 films). I can’t say that it’s his best picture, but it’s far from his worst, and it is a fun, stylish, sleazy little giallo in its own right. More of an 80s dance infused erotic thriller than a horror piece, I think Fulci’s eye is still evident. There is a certain flair, especially in terms of kill scenes and dream sequences, all tied up in a sweaty bundle of flesh and fear. Set at a NYC dance studio where the students are all competing for a career making break, someone is mysteriously picking them off one by one, chloroforming them before driving a long jeweled pin into their heart – all as the lights flash and the music pulses.

In classic giallo fashion, the story is twistingly plotted and I was genuinely engaged in the whodunit throughout, but also typical for gialli, the plot is subservient to just making it all as sexy and cool as possible. At the same time, its gritty 80s New York setting plays counterpoint to its slick Italian panache, resulting in a sordid vibe which is no less enticing. Some elements might be a bit ridiculous (even in the high-80s, did dance students bop into the showers naked save for their leg warmers?), but it’s all part of the charm. Somehow elements that could irritate in a contemporary film, or at the very least, make my eyes roll (such as a particularly leering camera in the dance scenes) come across as oddly lovable, encapsulating an old fashioned, sweetly naïve exploitation cinema aesthetic of sleaze (Is that a thing? I feel like that’s a thing).

That said, for an “erotic thriller,” there’s plentiful nudity, but very little actual sexuality. The film is happy to show skin, but is far more interested in Thanatos than Eros. Nevertheless, the overall tone, the tactile excitement of the filmmaking, is sexy in its own way. The interstitial segments of dialogue and “acting” may strain credulity (a strength of Fulci’s more supernatural fare is that the surreality of the horror elements somehow justify what could otherwise be considered lapses in acting or dialogue), but when it gets cooking, it is thrilling, with a fully satisfying final act reveal.

Siege (1983)

I’m not sure why I finally pulled the trigger on this little Canadian b-movie with an uninspiring poster of people in sweaters holding guns (I guess that’s Canada for you), but I’m so glad I did. The premise is that during a police strike, a gang of militaristic right wingers show up at a gay bar to cause trouble. They’re murderous bastards and, without going into too much detail, only one guy gets away, who then proceeds to hide out in a run down apartment building with some folks who refuse to hand him over. At that point, it becomes a siege movie (hence the name) as the right wing militants try to get in and kill the guy and everyone else fights back to kill them. It’s tense and rough and kinda great.

Also, it is disturbing how much it feels totally about the world we live in now – I mean, the villains are basically proud boys, and there is a final shot that screams ACAB. I feel that there was a trend of scary-crime-in-the-city movies in the 70s and 80s that were very reactionary, and often more than a little racist, but I feel like this is the reverse of that. Maybe the scariest thing is how ‘normal’ the bad guys are – not visually intimidating “gang members” (ala a Death Wish or Police Academy movie), but just “normal” working class middle aged white guys who are sick of how “woke” everything is (in 1981, when it was filmed) and have assault rifles (it is really sadly familiar). Similarly, while the police strike raises the threat as there is no one to call for help, information revealed late in the film suggests that even if the cops were around, they might not be on the right side.

I could see how someone could object to the representation of the one gay character (everyone else is heroically fighting neo-nazis and he’s hiding in, of all things, a closet), but after what went down in the first scene, I get it. For me, it’s reminiscent of Barbara in the original Night of the Living Dead – she gets criticized as a misogynistically weak representation, but in her circumstances, I expect I’d break much like her and not rise to be some kind of hero…I think most people would. Also, on a representational level, I was surprised at how the bar at the beginning is shown. I would expect a movie like this to go for shock value, but Cruising this is not – the “gay bar” is just a normal bar with gay people in it, just trying have a normal enjoyable evening without getting shot.

Anyway, if you are up for enduring the ugly homophobia of the villains in order to have the satisfaction of seeing them all get got, I really recommend it!

The Black Phone (2022)

A hit in cinemas last fall, I was excited to see this show up for rent on a streamer I’ve got access to and I was really looking forward to finally checking it out. Unfortunately, I must say that this dose of throwback supernatural stranger danger didn’t completely do it for me, but I appreciate it being a weird little movie that really found an audience. A nice success story even if I didn’t love it.

In a small town in the late 70s, young boys have been disappearing. No one knows what’s going on, but somehow all the kids are still totally free to wander about on their own. Finally, our main character, Finney, who we see bullied at school and in fear of physical abuse at home, is abducted and thus we get a glimpse of where all the others have gone before, as well as the mysterious “grabber” (Ethan Hawke) who’s taken them. Finney finds himself trapped in a basement, held hostage by this enigmatic, masked killer who seems to toy with him, while on one wall, there is the titular black phone, periodically ringing and connecting him to the voices of the grabber’s past victims, giving advice, but also sometimes seeming to speak in riddles. At the same time, Finney’s younger sister, who has a degree of precognitive ability, is going into her dreams, trying to find and save him. Throughout, there is a pervasive sense of mystery and implications of the supernatural that may or may not pan out.

Based on a story by Joe Hill and directed by Scott Derrickson (Sinister, the first Doctor Strange), this is a movie with some intriguing ideas, which was interesting to track and see how it all came together (and it does come together in a satisfying way, though I’m not convinced it would hold up to scrutiny after the fact). But it just didn’t quite click for me. Maybe part of the problem is that I’d seen a lot of hype about it being “really scary” and while I am really not one to say that a horror movie needs to scare me to succeed, I did go to this one looking for that and didn’t find it. Still, I did enjoy the period and the mean roughness of the world of the kids. And I always appreciate Ethan Hawke’s commitment to keeping a foot in genre – he could have a career exclusively in indie artsy films, so it’s nice to see him make a horror flick every couple of years. Plus, cool mask.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

I came to this one late. I was tired, but not ready for bed, and my wife was working. I just wanted something low commitment and short and silly, so my expectations were low. But this was really a great little movie. I mean, it kinda has everything: It starts with a really intense, well-choreographed and kinetically filmed schoolyard fist fight. It’s got the campy pleasure of absolute earnestness in its dialogue concerning the volatile juvenile delinquency of the main character, Tony (a young Michael Landon, later of Highway to Heaven). It’s got an amazing song and dance scene at the teenagers’ Halloween party at the old “haunted house.” It’s got an absolutely eeevil mad scientist in the form of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Brandon, who wears a mask of rational civility, but while he is purportedly helping Tony “adjust” to social requirements, really he seeks to regress him to a more ‘pure,’ animalistic state to save humanity from the debilitating weaknesses and vices of modern civilization – you know, by making him a werewolf. And it of course has the promised teenage werewolf – his makeup might not be the best (did the designer ever actually see what teeth look like?), but the couple of sequences of stalking and killing are surprisingly effective – intense and shockingly brutal in their after-effects.

A youth-running-wild picture, filtered through a then contemporary obsession with psychology, mixed with a don’t-play-god – dangers of science run amok flick, and finally, bubbling up into a full blown monster movie, could a film be more of the 50s? Seriously, it’s a lot of fun, with high drama, real horror threat, and a solid dose of unintended humor that manages not to undercut the story’s impact. As I understand, it kicked off a whole subgenre of “I-was-a-teenage-_______” movies (AIP released two more the very same year: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula, which flipped the gender of the main character but is reportedly almost exactly the same story, beat for beat) which quickly fell into self-parody, but this first one is a peculiar little classic.

Smile (2022)

Another cinema hit from last year that I’m just now getting around to, this one is easy to put down as a jump scare filled cash grab, playing lip service to the now omnipresent notion of “trauma” while actually being little more than a shallow exercise in startling the audience.

But I thought it was great.

Is it particularly deep in its treatment of how witnessing or experiencing awful things can really mess us up inside, causing us to, in turn, perform actions that hurt others, perpetuating a cycle of psychological damage, of, shall we say, ‘trauma’? No, it is not, but who cares? It’s a solid premise to build a scary movie around, and the idea does invite scenes and contexts that lend emotional heft to the proceedings, while, yes, also making us jump. There are upsetting moments along the way that land emotionally (justice for Moustache the Cat!) and the concept is woven into a narrative that tracks consistently and makes for an intriguing mystery. And at the end of the day, this is a scary movie that is exactly what it says on the tin. I jumped. I was startled. I then laughed, cause it’s fun to get scared. That’s what I came to the movie for and it’s what I got.

The basic idea is that a therapist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), sees a first time patient who is in manic terror of an evilly grinning visage that is hounding her, telling her she’s going to die. She then proceeds to start smiling maniacally herself before slitting her own throat right in front of Rose. Then, as Rose starts seeing similarly disturbing images, she learns that the patient had seen another man kill himself only a few days earlier under similar circumstances, and that this trail of suicide-witness-suicides goes back and back and back. She therefore comes to understand that she has limited time left before the same fate befalls her…

I’ve read criticisms of how it just rehashes earlier films like Ringu/The Ring or It Follows, but that seems weird to me. I think it’s just that as an entry in a smaller sub-genre (the curse movie), some might only connect its story with a couple other similar films, but it is a concept at least as old as the 1911 M.R. James story, ‘Casting the Runes,’ enjoyably filmed as Night of the Demon (1957) (surely, it is a much older idea –that’s just the first version of it that comes to mind). Passing a curse from one person to the next is a narrative conceit that goes back a ways, and it’s solid. The claims of unoriginality could be similarly applied to any subgenre – just another ghost, just another masked killer, just another vampire – but much of the fun of following a genre is iterative – how does it play out this time?

My only criticism is that it does set up one thread that it didn’t return to. While Rose doesn’t kill herself in front of her nephew, in her terror and madness, she does rather traumatize him, and it seemed that the film was going to go somewhere with that, but never got around to returning to him. It was just a bit of a missed opportunity. Anyway, I doubt I’ll feel drawn to revisit this over the years, but it was a good watch that delivered what it promised.

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

I really did a lot of catching up on fall 2022 releases this week. While sold as a horror-comedy, I can’t say that I found this one especially comic, but it was a cool, energetic mix of an old fashioned ‘who’s the killer’ slasher with something modern, a work of social satire in an era obsessed with surfaces and social media fame.

A work of social-discomfort horror, we largely follow Bee (Maria Bakalova, who made a splash in the recent Borat movie) who is accompanying her girlfriend to a hurricane party with a group of her old, wealthy, very-hip friends. It’s immediately uncomfortable. A working class kid from an immigrant family, Bee clearly does not fit in, but past that, these so-called “friends” clearly detest each other and the notion of spending a weekend with them as the storm rages outside is not remotely appealing. Everyone is cool and pretty and rich, but the passive aggression and sniping is thick enough to cut with a knife. Once the storm starts, they play a game of “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (basically identical to “Werewolf” or “Mafia”), wherein one person is secretly assigned the ‘killer’ and everyone has to puzzle out who it is. Immediately the tension of the game brings old grievances to the fore and everyone turns on each other. This is only exacerbated when people actually start dying. And almost everyone dies – it is not a fun party.

Personally, the satirical elements targeting the current “image obsessed, ‘virtue signaling,’ tik tok focused” youth culture didn’t wow me – it’s kind of obvious stuff (also, there’s a late revelation that didn’t exactly surprise, but I don’t know if it was really supposed to or just confirm suspicions with a dark laugh), but regardless, I really liked the film. The core notion of the friends who are not friends thrust into a stressful situation that brings out the worst in everyone is well realized, and the young, vibrant energy of it all is fun. Lots of the early slashers were more in this model of Ten Little Indians mystery than that of the silent masked killer, and this is a nice, contemporary spin on something like April Fool’s Day or Graduation Day.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

On one level, this Spanish-Portuguese co-production from Armando de Ossorio is a creepy, attractively filmed spookfest, working in an atmospheric, slow, nightmarish euro style (which is my jam) – as if combining Romero with Rollin and Franco, but that’s reductive… likening it to work I’d deem superior, but also eliding elements unique to this film, both good and bad.

There were aspects that I’d call great: generally everything about the Blind Dead themselves: Satanic Knights Templar who had been excommunicated and executed, hanged from trees for the birds to peck out their eyes, now haunting an abandoned medieval village that all locals know to steer clear of, ready to rise from their titular tombs, ride horses in spooooky slow motion, and hunt by sound (cause they’re, you know, blind) to devour some pretty young woman who’s made the mistake of wandering by. They have a totally different character from a standard zombie – more akin to the vengeful ghosts in The Fog than most typical shambling corpses – decrepit skeletal figures in rotting robes, moving with intention if not sight, and I rather enjoyed elements like the old train engineer being unwilling to even slow down when travelling through Blind Dead country. It all feels ominously folksy.

There are also aspects that don’t make much sense, but we accept in a movie like this. Why does the first victim we see reanimate in the morgue (these not being infectious ‘zombies,’ but rather cursed ancient knights) to attack the sadistic and seemingly necrophiliac morgue worker and then go after the protagonist’s assistant? Who knows, but it’s cool and scary. What really is the point of the characters spending the night in the abandoned village? It’s not like winning some inheritance depends on surviving the night in a haunted house or something. But if they didn’t do it, the Blind Dead couldn’t attack them; and what would we do then for the whole final act?

Finally, there are some aspects that just don’t seem to go anywhere, which are button pushy, and which at best, feel like missed opportunities. We begin the film with the revelation of a romantic, or at least sexual, history between our protagonist, Betty and her old friend, Virginia. Discomfort about that is what causes Virginia to jump off of the train near the doomed village, thus setting events in motion. We never exactly return to this relationship after Virginia dies, but it is suggested that Betty has been consistent in her sexuality and has never slept with a man. Later there is an implication that, when alive and performing their infernal blood rites, the Blind Dead went after virginal sacrifices. Does this set Betty up as a special target? Nope. Not mentioned again. Then late in the film, Betty is raped by an unsavory character she’d bafflingly chosen to go for a late night walk with to the haunted cemetery. Does this somehow bring us back to the issue of “virginity” in terms of the ghost-knight-zombies? Nope. Doesn’t come up. It feels like these three elements were written to connect somehow, but they never do, and that leaves the relationship between the two women hanging and makes the rape sequence even more unpleasant as it is not connected to anything else in the story – at all. It’s just an ugly thing to be, you know, ugly I guess.

But, it must be said that the subsequent scene of Betty fleeing the carnage and running to the train that never stops in this area, really sings. And the ending is beautifully chilling, probably worth the price of admission. So, it’s a mixed bag.

Though I’d heard of it before, it particularly got on my radar as a podcast I listen to, Gaylords of Darkness, recently did an episode singing the praises of the third installment in this series (four movies in total), and I wanted to start at the beginning. Perhaps out of a sense of completionism, if nothing else, I do plan to watch the other three, and I’ll see what they offer.

The Guest (2014)

Not a horror film per se, Adam Wingard’s (You’re Next) thriller-cum-action movie is dripping with tense horror throwback 80s vibes. Riding on a synthwave groove, I’ve seen it aptly described by a user on Letterboxd as “John Carpenter’s Rambo” – an evocative, synth infused thriller about a soldier who’s returned from war and can’t stop doing what he was trained to do. I’d heard it was cool, but wow. It really is COOL, like – I couldn’t go to sleep last night after watching it cause I was so keyed up.

The Peterson family is still deep in mourning for their soldier son, presumably killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. So when David (Dan Stevens), a young man who says he served with and was a friend of their son, knocks on their door to relay a final message from the battlefield, they end up welcoming him in. Then, ala some kind of 90s family thriller, he proceeds to seduce everyone, one by one, while some secretive menace lurks beneath his cold, piercing blue eyes. But while he is “seductive,” it isn’t generally sexual – though the whole movie has a really sexy atmosphere – David’s seduction is more personal than that. He sits and drinks with the father who confides about his insecurities; he beats the hell out of the jock bullies who make high school so hard for the younger son and encourages him to stand up for himself; with the mother, he shares warm reminiscences and helps out around the house – hanging laundry to dry, picking the kids up from school. And suddenly, things seem to be improving for everyone. For example, the father’s boss mysteriously dies, earning him a promotion. Hmmm – terrible, but also a spot of luck…

The only one who isn’t pulled in is the daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), whose drug dealer boyfriend gets picked up by the cops after an anonymous tip. Duly suspicious, she calls an army helpline to get info on David, setting in motion the film’s more action oriented second half.

Again, this is not a horror movie, but David is horrific. His human mask can be so warm, so personable, but there are moments where we glimpse what Dr. Loomis would have called “the Devil’s eyes” – cold and empty like a shark’s. But even though we’re privy to those icy, threatening moments, he still seduces us simply by virtue of being really damn cool. There can be such a pleasure in a capable, efficient villain who does what needs doing unhampered by remorse, who when asked if he has the money to buy illicit goods, can simply smile and explain that he won’t be paying for them because he’s just going to kill everybody present. And then he does.

The action is tight. The vibe is killer. There’s tension up the wazzoo. And while again, it’s not horror, it is clearly made by one who loves the genre. The climax happens at a school gym decorated for the Halloween dance, the score really does bring to mind Carpenter, and there is even an Easter egg for Halloween III: Season of the Witch that made me laugh out loud on sighting it. What a blast! Now I need to revisit You’re Next.

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And there we have it – I’m late getting this post up, but in the last week and a half I did watch 8 movies for the first time that are at least horror adjacent and most of them were pretty great – so I am now that much more learned and experienced, right? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I just justified letting myself watch too much TV. Anyway, now it’s time to choose something for next week. Gotta keep that wall wet…

Fulci Pt. III – Fulci for Fake and A Cat in the Brain

Posted on November 28, 2022 by Glen — No Comments ↓

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).

The input of his daughter, Camilla adds a lot of personal, emotional detail.

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.

Plus, steak tartar REALLY shouldn’t just be left out unrefrigerated, on display.

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.