Tag Archives: Fulci

Fulci Pt. II – The Gates of Hell “Trilogy”

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Last week I began a dive into the output of Lucio Fulci, prolific Italian genre filmmaker famous within horror circles as a purveyor of extraordinarily gory, creepy, atmospheric, and sometimes not-quite-coherent horror films. I approached his work in search of some heavy “horror” and was surprised to find among his earlier films a very different tone. Sure, there were blood-soaked or nightmarish moments, but these were more thrillers with moments of graphic violence, and sometimes they could even be lyrical, emotional, visually stylish, or even classy in ways I wouldn’t have expected of him. But that is the point of such an exercise – to learn what I didn’t know. Still, I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface.

That said, this week, I’d like to take a look at three of his most acclaimed horror films, all of which I’d previously seen, and all of which embody the grisly, oneiric, often putrescent aesthetic with which he’s most associated: The City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House by the Cemetery. Taken together, they are often termed “The Gates of Hell trilogy,” though they are all actually discrete, standalone films with no continuation of story from one to the next, and some actors returning in different roles (at least Catriona MacColl is in all three). While there is no narrative thread between them, other than a weakened boundary between worlds, more than anything else, they share a mysterious, ominous, Lovecraftian vibe and a unique approach to horror cinema. Whereas The Psychic only a few years earlier had been a tightly wound, perfectly constructed supernatural puzzle box, each element fitting into place just so, following his success with Zombi 2, Fulci dove head first into a nightmarishness cut loose from the strictures of narrative, resulting in some of his most acclaimed, most disturbing, and most niche work. It’s an interesting progression. So, let’s get to it, shall we? (This time, given how decentralized narrative is, I won’t be issuing spoiler warnings. If you think you might like to watch these unspoilt, go do so now. They’re available on many platforms.)

The City of the Living Dead (1980)

Catriona MacColl almost turned down her part as she felt the script was just “a series of special effects without a story.” She wasn’t entirely wrong, but I think that if one is willing to go along for the ride, it can be a ghastly good time. This is not my favorite entry in the trilogy, but I think it stands as both a wild, atmospheric midnight movie and a clear transitional experiment as Fulci really tried committing to the horror first and foremost. What story there is feels quite insubstantial, but the series of nightmare images, the horrors upon horrors upon horrors, can be mind-blowingly effective. It’s the kind of movie that might not always frighten so much as disgust, but it’s also trying to crack your mind open, just as its undead figures like to one-handedly tear open skulls, squeezing out the gooey brains within (apparently undeath does wonders for your grip).

If you want classic horror atmosphere, it’s got howling wind, fog, and old rickety houses. If you want something gross, it’s got head drillings, disembowelments, and all the viscera you can stomach (tee hee). If you want crazy, why-is-this-happening moments, it’s got bleeding eyes, storms of maggots, unexplained resurrections, surprise blow up sex dolls, goopy cross impalements, exsanguinating wallpaper, and so, so much more. If you want a compelling story, you should remember one you read some other time because that’s in short supply, but if you want unrivalled, creative awfulness, this movie is for you.

In short, a psychic, Mary Woodhouse (MacColl), at a séance, has a vision of a priest in an old misty cemetery hanging himself, and she goes into a fit, somehow understanding that he has just fulfilled an ancient, 4000 year old prophecy and opened the gates of Hell. The only way this can be reversed is for his corpse to be found and destroyed before All Saints’ Day (a few days hence). Unfortunately, the shock of it all is too much for her and she drops dead. Fortunately, her grave diggers are pretty lazy and leave her coffin in the ground with only a spattering of dirt on top, citing “union hours” such that when she suddenly comes back to life in her coffin (which is never explained) and starts desperately clawing at the interior, shredding her fingers in the process, intrepid reporter, Peter Bell (Christopher George), hears her screams and rather than, you know, opening the coffin by its latch, rescues her by slamming a pick axe into the lid multiple times, almost destroying her face in the process.

It’s intense and scary – her initial terror at coming to in such circumstances, her desperate, self-harming attempts to free herself, and the axe blade coming so close to her head as she is “rescued” by this hard drinking newsman. Anyway, she convinces him of the need to go to Dunwich (a clear nod to Lovecraft, whose work was a clear inspiration for the feeling of all three of these films, though none of them are adaptations of any of his stories), home of the dead priest, and thus, they set off to save the world.

Meanwhile, in Dunwich, odd things start happening. Rotting toddler corpses appear out of nowhere, startling teenage sex offenders. A crack opens up in the wall of the local dive bar, the fresh crevasse possibly leading to otherworldly terrors. A teenage girl is attacked by a mysterious hand shoving rotting, wormy goo into her face, prompting a heart attack. The denizens of the local funeral home start disappearing and turning up in people’s kitchens, I’ve already mentioned the maggot storm, yes maggot storm, and of course, there is the most famous oh-dear-god-why moment of the film (if you can’t take heavy gore, you might skip the next paragraph). Story wise, they eventually close the hell gate…or do they? Duhn, duhn Duuuuhn!!!

Ok, so the centerpiece of the movie: two teenagers are making out in the front seat of a car someplace creepy. The girl stops, having heard something, so the boy (Michele Soavi, director of Stagefright, among many others!) turns on the headlights and for a split second, they see the dead priest in front of them, hanging from a noose, his eyes boring into hers. Then he’s gone. Then he appears outside another window and stares her down until his dark magics start to work on her and her eyes start bleeding – first just a trickle, but it becomes a torrent; then her mouth begins to foam and she starts vomiting out her own guts. This continues for quite some time until, I don’t know, a liver or something comes out. I remember the first time I ever watched this, my jaw on the floor. “What is happening? Why is it happening? Ugh! Ew! Wow! How are they doing this? This is incredible. When will it stop? Why won’t it stop?” This time, I could clearly see when this is no longer a real human head, but a bloody, sheep intestine regurgitating dummy, but on first viewing, I was so shocked by the audaciousness of this crazy, awful, disgusting thing that I didn’t even clock the replacement. It is repulsive, and also just so weirdly amazing (and oh, that poor, poor actress – the bleeding eyes alone must have been so uncomfortable).

There are moments in the movie that don’t work – some acting is leaden, the dubbing is typically bad, and there are things that just do not make much sense. Also, Fulci follows some of his artistic impulses to their logical conclusions, which while being inevitable signs of an auteur, doesn’t always result in the most effective choices. For example, he always had a thing about close-ups of eyes – but here there are whole scenes of dialogue where we only see the speakers’ peepers. But, hey – good for him for following his joy. However, the stuff that does work is breathtaking: the pervasive doom of it all, the unexplained, and probably unexplainable horrible occurrences, the fun play with goopy zombie creatures, surprise skeletons, and EC comics inspired lighting – it all results in a non-cerebral, non-narrative play of horror-ness. And while this engenders a certain surreality, I think this first outing in pure horror is just a taste of what was soon to come.

The Beyond (1981)

Having flexed certain cinematic muscles in the last film, here Fulci’s less narrative, more poetic, and still very, very, very gory approach to horror really comes to fruition. Heads are impaled on iron nails, distressing things are done to eyeballs, bodies are dissolved by lye and acid (not at the same time), faces are destroyed by little hairy creepy crawlies, the dead rise, a child’s head explodes, and there are more close ups of eyes than you can shake a bloody railway spike at – but all of this grue serves an end beyond simple spookhouse shocks and disgust – the gestalt effect is bleakly poetic: a mad dream in which everything at first appears menacing but more or less understandable, but by the end of which, reality comes unmoored and you find yourself hopelessly, eternally adrift. It is an odd, chilling little picture and it has plenty of charming, lovably idiosyncratic, though not always successful, elements, but taken as a whole, it is a real masterpiece of the genre.

Liza Merrill (MacColl returning) inherits a run-down New Orleans hotel where 60 years earlier, a sorcerer had been lynched, tortured to death, and walled up in the basement for practicing black magic. Attempting to fix up the place and make it financially viable, Liza encounters problem after problem. One worker falls from a scaffold, startled by a creepy image in a window. The basement is flooded and the plumber called in to check it out is soon found dead, his eyes squished, floating next to a decrepit, much older corpse. The housekeeper’s head ends up impaled on a spike. What a money pit! 

But desperate for cashflow, Liza’s not going to be deterred, plus, as she says, she’s “lived her whole life in New York and if there’s one thing I’ve learned not to believe in, it’s ghosts!” (for any fans of Community, all I can hear is Britta saying “and I lived in New York City!”) So she keeps plodding ahead, surprisingly unbothered by both the weird goings on and the crusty-white-eyed blind woman (who might not actually exist) who tells her that the hotel stands on a gate of Hell and that it’s in danger of opening. She befriends a grumpy local doctor, John McCabe (David Warbeck), whose apparent belief in science is stronger than his ability to reckon with the supernatural weirdness directly in front of him, and together they fall down a rather hellish rabbit hole.

My tone may be glib as, for all that I love this movie, it is full of odd, weird, nonsensical moments. The acting is stiff (and I’m being kinda charitable). The dialogue strains one’s ability to suspend disbelief (such as when a county clerk (Fulci himself in a cameo) explains that he has to leave his office for a two hour lunch because after weeks on the picket line, the union won this concession – in America in 1981? Not bloody likely – it’s just a hilarious giveaway that this was written by a European – still they do understand something about America – the doctor keeps a loaded revolver in his desk, like you do…). The dubbing is worse than usual and though it was mostly filmed in Louisiana, there’s still some great set dressing signage, such as the notice outside the morgue: “Do Not Entry!” Still, all of these elements that may be deemed faults just make me love it more. That and they also add some levity to an otherwise overwhelmingly desolate, dread filled nightmare of a film.

One of the things I love is how I can’t track the moment when things change. When is the gate to Hell opened? When do Liza and John pass its threshold? When did everything completely stop cohering? It’s never obvious, and while this lack of narrative clarity may be deemed a weakness, I think it’s central to the film’s success. At the beginning of the film, there is a hot, sticky, fetid atmosphere of doom, but the story feels more or less straightforward (weird, gross, and badly dubbed, but straightforward). As far as halfway through the story, I felt like events more or less logically followed, but by the end, everything had come loose. Characters may exist, but also may not. We see an item someplace and then it is gone. Nothing makes sense anymore, but the transition from very weird but essentially understandable, to total dream logic is so smooth as to not notice it happening. Furthermore, this is accompanied by a sojourn into dream geography.

Early in the film, Liza finds an old landscape in the hotel which we had seen the tortured warlock painting before he was killed. It shows a barren grey land, scattered with bodies of the dead. Attacked by an undead employee, Liza and John leave the hotel for his hospital, finding the streets of New Orleans now mysteriously empty. So too is the hospital, except for its dead, which have all started to shamble about. This prompts a somewhat ridiculous action sequence wherein the doctor just cannot pick up on the fact that every time he shoots a dead person in the chest, nothing happens, but if he shoots them in the head, they fall down (also, his revolver seems to hold at least 9 rounds – is that a thing?). Stubbornly, he just keeps aiming for body shots until finally, they escape down a stairwell only to emerge in the basement of Liza’s spooky hotel. After passing through an opening in a wall, they find themselves in the desolate landscape of the previously discovered painting with no sign of the former cellar, no means of egress. Looking at this endless, inhuman expanse, their eyes go white and they are frozen in existential horror.

All three films of the “Gates of Hell” trilogy are often labelled “Lovecraftian,” but this has to be one of the best expressions of Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror I’ve seen committed to film. An often fair criticism of old H.P. (beyond the unfortunate racism and xenophobia) is that his stories were rarely character driven, but rather, characters found themselves delving deeper and deeper into the bowels of some otherworldly madness, mere witnesses to the horrors within, doomed to be destroyed by that which they uncovered. That is somewhat the case here, but somehow the above described passage from typical spooky reality into full-blown nightmare makes it work, and the film is really chilling at the end – the horror lands. Reality has unraveled so seamlessly that characters’ (often bad) decisions feel more or less natural and you go along with them. And the place they get to at the end is so ethereally awful, with no warmth, hope, or humanity. It is not the Hell of a Christian mythos, but rather a cosmically unforgiving no-place – a state of lifeless, listless hopelessness more than a metaphysical location.

And along the way, the horror beats are just at the top of the form. There aren’t many jump scares, but one at least really got me. The gore is so very over the top and squirm inducing – the sort of stuff that makes you laugh for how strongly you’re reacting to it, such as the scene when an architect falls from a ladder in the above mentioned clerk’s office and an army of tarantulas come out of nowhere, for no clear reason, and proceed to Eat. His. Damn. Face. Gah! For minutes of full on, gross out, fleshy, bloody, crawly, bitey, “dear god, why is this even happening and I’m pretty sure tarantulas don’t work this way, but still, ewww, ick, ugh!” horror fun. Sometimes the special effects are not totally believable and you can spot the moment when there is no longer a real human face (or a real arachnid for that matter), but a bloody prop, but it really doesn’t matter – the extremity of it all is so over-the-top that the very concept of what is happening (not to mention the rivers of the red stuff) just makes my brain scream. It is delightful in its way.

It also must be said that this is a beautiful film: the steamy setting, the mysterious quality of being lost in a fog, the play of light on beads of sweat forming on a man’s brow as he scrambles to survive. There are often comparisons made between Argento and Fulci, especially as they both took a turn for supernatural work around the same time (Argento’s Inferno has some definite similarities to this week’s films). But whereas Argento took an aestheticized approach to occult horror in his “Three Mothers Trilogy,” Fulci’s work, and particularly The Beyond, is no less artful, for all that it is clearly less aesthetic (if that makes any sense – it works in my mind). The framing of the shots, the edits, the lighting, the totally effective gut-wrenching sequences of bodily destruction – all of it is so intentionally and masterfully executed, and absolutely unique.

The House by the Cemetery (1981)

It’s a bit strange to consider this third entry a part of a “trilogy” with the other two as it lacks any gate to Hell and its tone is decidedly less grand, less apocalyptic. Still, as a more intimate “family moves into a spooky house and spooky things happen” movie, it is still bizarre and wild, with characteristically strange (one might even say ‘crazy’) character beats, atmosphere thick as really melancholy butter, very bloody practical effects (though perhaps less over-the top than the other two) and a surreal, dreamy quality that feels akin to that of the first two films. It also might be the strangest of the three, which can make it the most fun or a bit of a slog depending on how you take your weird.

There is a story, but having fully settled into his personal style of bizarre phantasmagoria, Fulci doesn’t seem particularly invested in us really understanding it. Paul, some kind of scholar, relocates his family from NYC to a small New England town to continue the research of a colleague who recently went mad, murdered his mistress, and hanged himself. Along with his reluctant wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl back again – maybe it’s her presence that makes these three a trilogy) and their young, gratingly dubbed son, Bob, Paul settles into this creepy house where we’ve already seen a young couple (one of whom is played by Daniela Dora who we recently saw bleeding from the eyes and regurgitating her gastrointestinal tract in The City of the Living Dead after similarly complaining to her boyfriend about his creepy choice of make-out locations) brutally murdered and dragged into the basement (she can’t catch a break).

Of course, this is a bad place to bring your family and it ends poorly for everyone. A mysterious ghost girl keeps telling Bob to stay away from the house, but he’s got no say in the matter and sooner or later, everyone falls prey to the dark force below, the enjoyably named “Doctor Freudstein,” a mad scientist, now giant, worm and slime filled, murderous mound of flesh, who had conducted his evil experiments here many years ago and has been prolonging his life by harvesting the body parts of any who make the mistake of darkening his door.

When we discover the doctor in the end, it is an odd turn, but the film is full of such very strange moments that it doesn’t feel at all out of place. That eerie, menacing, utterly weird quality runs through the whole film. From moment to moment, it’s effective and gloomily unsettling, but it can also feel ridiculous – more so than the first two films this week, I think this really depends on the viewer’s mood and openness to going on this either envelopingly spooky, or absurdly insane ride.

Early on, when they’re still in New York, Bob (a, let’s say, 4 year old boy) has a large framed photograph of an old farmhouse on his wall. Only he can see the ghost girl open the curtains in the photo as she warns him not to go in the house. His mother seems slightly irritated that her son is a bit crazy. Later, of course it turns out to be the house they’re going to – why would it have been on a small child’s bedroom wall in the first place?

One of the more evocative scenes features the ghost girl standing in front of a shop window where she is shocked to see the head fall off a mannequin as its neck burbles up a fountain of blood. When it happens, we don’t know for sure she’s a ghost, but she already feels somewhat unreal and the whole sequence feels puzzlingly hallucinatory. Later in the film, Bob’s seemingly sinister babysitter, Ann (Ania Pieroni, very recognizable from Argento’s Inferno and Tenebrae), who bears some resemblance to the un-headed mannequin, has been sharing odd, menacing looks with others throughout the film (especially Paul – there is a scene that features a volley of close-ups between their respective eyes – and at least one shot of Lucy’s eyes, noticing, as no one speaks but something is happening), and has tried breaking into the forbidden murder basement, finds herself trapped down there and gets her head graphically sawed off. First of all, it’s peculiar that the ghost girl has such a premonition of the death of this side character and not a member of the family she’s trying to warn away (I mean, everybody dies), but it seems stranger to me that this little ghost girl is going window shopping in the first place.

Everyone in the town thinks they’ve seen Paul before, that he had recently visited with his daughter. He denies this and it is never resolved. Had he been here with Ann perhaps? Was it some kind of doppelganger? Was he somehow fated to come to this place? Whatever it is, there is a cryptic feeling of bad portent that hangs over the town and somehow settles on Paul and his family, and he does fall into a kind of obsession, uncovering the truth of Dr. Freudstein. Also, and wholly unrelatedly, he has an epic fight with a fake bat that clamps onto his hand and won’t let go no matter how much he stabs it (seriously, this bit went on for about 25 minutes).

Sometimes characters pick up on the bad vibes and are duly creeped out, but sometimes, they are so blasé about truly disturbing things that it makes you wonder if they see what you have seen, if anything is real. This can add to both the lyrical, looming unreality and the what-is-going-on potential laughability of it all. A favorite moment for me takes place the morning after we’ve seen an estate agent visit the house when no one was home only to get repeatedly stabbed with a fireplace poker and then dragged into the basement, leaving a long streak of blood across the floor. So now it’s the morning and we see creepy babysitter Ann in the kitchen, shot from above, cleaning up what is obviously a huge puddle of blood outside the cellar door, with a look that communicates, “I should probably clean up before someone starts asking questions.” Then Lucy walks in and we shift camera perspective so we see the Ann’s face in the foreground, with Lucy behind her (which means we no longer see the blood). From the previous set up, we know what Lucy should be seeing and it makes sense when she asks, clearly put off by Ann’s dire scowl, what the babysitter is doing. Ann pauses and just says, “I made coffee.” Satisfied, Lucy walks out of frame and a beat later, she’s carrying a tray with coffee service into the bedroom and telling her husband how strange she finds this girl. She never responds to the giant pool of blood. She never mentions the giant pool of blood. Did she actually see the giant pool of blood. Did I?

You can take this as a hilarious mistake, as bad acting, as nonsense, but I feel like giving the benefit of the doubt and calling it intentional. I think we are being wrong-footed at every turn and not in service of some kind of convoluted plot twists as might have been true in an early giallo thriller, but rather in service of a non-rational state that the horror seeks to inculcate. This runs through the film, culminating in a final moment where it seems that Bob alone has escaped Freudstein’s attacks, only to realize that he is now a ghost child himself, walking down the lane with the girl and her mother, now part of the Freudstein family (maybe he was always a part of the family – I don’t know). It is a somber, haunting ending to a delightfully specific film.  

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So those are the “Gates of Hell” films. I’ve watched a lot of horror movies and I swear, there’s really nothing else like them. And while some threads can be found between them and the earlier works discussed last week, they are also so unlike where Lucio began his journey into darker fare. That said, they won’t be for everyone. Some won’t be able to stomach the gore and some won’t have patience for the slow, dreamy non-linearity. But if you have any appetite for such things, especially in such a combination (delivering the most insane, bloody terror along with something poetic and occasionally elegiac), these are just masterpieces: ridiculous, disgusting masterpieces.

Fulci in the 70s: A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Don’t Torture a Duckling, and the Psychic

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The last month or so, I like to think that here on ye old blog, we’ve gone in some interesting and different directions. I went into some small detail on the Halloween performance I was recently involved in which, while not exactly “horror,” certainly played with horror elements. I dug into my own personal history with the genre, trying to reconstruct the stepping stones that led me here. I took a look at a little seen Romero gem with occult overtones. And before that, I finally got to tick one more film off my (admittedly pretty short) list of Polish Horror movies. But something all of these posts share is that none of them really tackled a bona fide “Horror Movie” with a capital HOR. Something to make you shiver with fear or retch with disgust, something to crack the brain open with the unbearable weight of its sheer awfulness. And so, I think it’s a good time to examine the work of a director who really did his very best to do exactly those things; let’s spend a bit of time with Lucio Fulci.

That said, my exposure to his work has been somewhat limited. I absolutely love the grotty, doom infused, shark fighting, tropical holiday of Zombi 2 (1979) (which I wrote about here). I appreciate the sleazy, lurid, violent charms of The New York Ripper (1982) (which I’ve touched on briefly before). And what horror fan could resist the atmosphere, the grotesquerie, the nightmare logic, and the ‘oh-dear-god-how-is-he-doing-that?!?’ gore of his Lovecraftian Gates of Hell Trilogy: The City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981)? But those five movies, all of which have made a deep, lasting impression on me, only represent less than a quarter of his horror movies (to be fair, they are also counted among his best by many fans – and I’ve heard pretty bad things about what some consider his worst). Still, I’d like to use this week to expand my knowledge of this idiosyncratic Italian who made some of the most effective, difficult, and really creepy films of the genre.

Working chronologically, I’m going to focus on his earlier works from the 70s, three films that I’ve long meant to see. As far as I can tell, they all come recommended, but I must admit I’m going in somewhat blind. And so, without further ado, let’s get into…

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)

After that introduction, it seems ironic to start by saying that this early thriller is not exactly a horror flick. Rather, Fulci really embraces the slick, stylish, bold film making of the giallo and this film bears more resemblance to Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (especially with the spooky dream sequences) or The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (both also from 1971) than to Fulci’s supernatural horror work in the 80s. It’s worth noting that over the course of his career, he worked in many genres; about half his films were horror, but he also made more than 30 westerns, sci-fi movies, musicals, erotic thrillers, and sex comedies. Still, this one is a vastly enjoyable, captivating piece; I think you can find seeds here of the kinds of films he would later create; and while it is not a horror film exactly, it does contain some startling or unsettling moments. Also, it’s got a great score by Ennio Morricone.

Very briefly, the film follows Carol, a rich but repressed upper class woman who is haunted by disturbing, sexual dreams of her wild, free-loving neighbor, Julia. It’s unclear whether she is offended by the other woman’s libertine ways or jealous of them, but she is certainly agitated by Julia and the wild parties she often throws next door. Finally, in one of her dreams, as they make love, Carol stabs Julia repeatedly in the breast. Of course, it’s soon revealed that the dreamt of neighbor has actually been murdered in just such a fashion and it’s off to the races to ferret out who the actual killer was. In its plotting, this is very similar to other gialli I’ve seen – there are twists on top of twists on top of twists and by the end of the movie, it’s easy to get lost in all of the betrayals and revelations. But I really don’t think you come to a movie like this for the story.  This is an audacious, stylish piece, and with its constant blurring of the line between dream and waking life, it seems right in Fulci’s surreal, unsettling wheelhouse.

Much time is spent in the beginning with Carol’s dreams, dwelling alternatingly in the erotic and a sense of dread or terror: she pushes her way through a crowded train, running from or toward something, the other riders sometimes simple commuters and sometimes naked in a white room, partaking of an orgy; Julia’s bed is a blotch of red in an inky abyss; two naked hippies with white, pupil-less eyes watch and laugh from the balcony; a giant swan chases her across a field; her dead and rotting family track her progress. But even after the dreams cease, Carol still inhabits a hallucinogenic space, and it’s not always clear what is happening or why. The camera offers surprising views, shooting from odd angles and frequently playing with focus, forced perspective, and framing. The editing can be similarly intense, in one moment rapidly cutting back and forth in an almost strobe-like effect between Carol trying to escape a room and a door on the other side being kicked in.

Everything is infused with unreality. Is she actually being chased in waking life by a figure from one of her dreams?  Did she commit a murder and not remember it? Why on earth is there a lab in the peaceful mental facility where she awaits trial in which they are experimenting on dogs like something out of Return of the Living Dead Part III, their torsos cut open but their visible hearts still pumping? (apparently, Fulci was arrested on charges of animal cruelty and his special effects artist had to bring the dog puppets into court to demonstrate how this had been filmed.) Real horrors of the waking world can thus be more horrific than her dreams. And they go just as unexplained.

Don’t worry – they’re puppets!

While the mod stylishness is certainly foregrounded, as it often was in other gialli, and the plotting is kind of standard for this kind of movie, the sometimes nightmarish dreamy quality of the proceedings, accompanied by some gory or just bafflingly strange moments, really points to the interest in horror that Fulci would later pursue. The balance of surreality and tactility, the abstract, showy film making (including a De Palma-esque split screen sequence), and the totally visceral fleshiness all contribute to an uncanny viewing experience such that I was both pulled into the twists and turns of the story and periodically a bit unsettled. It’s a really engaging example of the giallo thriller and I think it’s fascinating to view in the context of Fulci’s larger ouvre.

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)

No ducks were tortured – just a Donald duck doll.

This is referred to as a giallo, but while it does follow the typical pattern of murder investigation and red herrings, it feels really quite different. Set in a dusty, remote Italian village, this purported thriller-horror-mystery initially seems to have more in common with Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) than with anything Argento, Bava, or Martino were doing at the time, that is if Amarcord had been full of child murder and witch abuse. The filmmaking is still striking in its intensity, its sharp angles, its creation of a mood, but long gone is any stylishness of setting, costume, or character. We start the film following three young boys as they mischievously get into whatever trouble they can in this small Italian town under the view of a modern highway, the temptations of the modern world out there, but out of reach. One by one, these boys, and then a few others, all end up dead: strangled, smothered, and drowned.

A massive police case gets underway; the press descend on the village; and most significantly for the story, the population of this quaint little town all turn on a few outsiders who are, one after another, blamed for these deaths: the town simpleton, a witch who lives on the outskirts, an old hermit. Interestingly, all of the child murders take place off screen, but the violence done by the townspeople is genuinely horrific, and I feel like that is rather the point. Much of the film feels less like horror than a dramatic crime story about a series of killings tearing a town apart, but one scene stands out, cementing the film in the genre with what I understand is Fulci’s first foray into explicit gore.

Also, Fulci really likes close ups of eyes.

Perhaps this is a good point for a spoiler warning – if you think you might want to watch the movie, go do that now – it’s streaming free on Tubi.

Magiara (Florinda Bolkan, Carol in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), a witch who lives on the edge of the community has been seen throughout the first half of the movie engaged in some kind of black magic with an infant’s bones, wax figures representing the three boys who are killed first, and voodoo-esque pins. After the police suspect she may have something to do with this, they chase her down with dogs, and question her. No interrogation is needed as she readily confesses to killing the boys with witchcraft in revenge for them disturbing her child’s grave. Convinced of her actual innocence (magic not being real, of course), the police release her, only for her to be immediately attacked in the cemetery by men from the village. They brutally beat her with sticks and chains, tearing her skin, rending her flesh. The makeup effects are deeply affecting – for all that Fulci’s films would go on to be favorites of gorehounds, there is nothing fun here. The severity of the violence done on behalf of the village to Magiara is hard to watch, ugly, and depressing. After they leave her for dead, she crawls to the side of the highway, and cars speed past as she collapses on the side of the road. If she isn’t dealt cruelty, she is met with indifference.

And while the film started lightly with the playful troublemaking of the three boys, it becomes clear that this is not a good place and these are not good people. In fact, one of the protagonists of the movie, Patrizia, is a drug addict and seems to be a pedophile, having been introduced nude and teasing/tempting one of the boys. Later she offers to pay another boy (soon to be a victim) with a kiss, and we also see her aggressively dragging a young, developmentally disabled girl, screaming across the town square so she can buy her a new doll. Much of this may exist just to make a red herring of this otherwise attractive young woman, but really, she seems potentially dangerous.

In the end (again – this is a film that really can be spoiled), it turns out that the killer all along was Don Avallone, the kindly, young, handsome village priest who has shown real care for the boys in his parish. While this does culminate in a deliriously crazy clifftop priest fight as Avallone does his level best to drop his final victim (his young sister) to her death, and when he finally goes over the edge, there is cringe inducing fun to be had in the way his face hits every possible sharp rock on the way down, the end of the film also lands with a surprising depth of feeling. This also distinguished it for me from much of the giallo pack.

A personal criticism of some gialli is that the plots can be so convoluted that at a certain point, I sometimes lose interest in following their permutations and rather just go along for the cool ride. It’s rare that the final revelation really touches me – these movies are all about the journey, not the destination. However, Don Avallone’s madness was pitiable and thematically consistent with what had been shown throughout the movie. He had such a whammy of “SIN” put on him by his religion, and the society surrounding him is obviously so mired in sordid, petty, meanness. The only way he felt he could care for his flock was to murder them while they were still “innocent” (and from what we saw of the boys, they weren’t even that).

When his motivations are revealed, it is sadly chilling, and the film ends with much more weight than I’d expected. It still doesn’t feel exactly like a “horror movie,” so much as a heartfelt, horrific, momentarily gory, atmospheric murder drama, but I think it is worth viewing for genre fans open to such things, and I’m enjoying my continued tracking of Fulci’s trajectory.

The Psychic (1977)

So, funny fact: I set out on this project, intending to really get into some “legitimate horror,” but in my ignorance, it seems that I chose three of Fulci’s thrillers from before he started making horror films proper (one book I checked last night after watching this third film lists Zombi as his first). Though all of them feature horrific elements, and one can find roots of his later work in them, none are entirely, unqualified “horror films.” Still, all of these are significant, impressive pieces of work and I’m really glad to have finally done this very satisfying homework. Case in point, The Psychic (also released as Seven Notes in Black or Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes – a very giallo title) still retains many elements of his early thriller phase (which began in 1969 with Perversion Story, an apparent forerunner of Basic Instinct/Fatal Attraction-esque erotic thrillers), but for the first time introduces a supernatural element, and along with it, edges towards the doom-laden mood he was soon to capture two years later with Zombi (between them, he directed his final Spaghetti Western, Silver Saddle). 

And I have to say, I loved it. The Psychic is a gorgeous, somewhat gothic, and even surprisingly classy supernatural horror-thriller (“classy” being a term I don’t often associate with Fulci, though I’ve long respected his artistry). There is a thick, nigh-viscous atmosphere of inescapable fate, the feeling of the screws tightening, of a trap slowly closing around the protagonist over the course of the whole film, and there are a couple of just gleefully intense sequences of terror along the way, often underscored by the absolutely simple, haunting, unsettling theme that Fabio Frizzi contributed (and Tarantino later repurposed in Kill Bill – which, for my money, may be the greatest horror theme I’ve yet heard). As is often the case with Fulci, there is a pervasive dream-like quality to this tale of a woman whose psychic flashes haunt her with visions of murder and calamity. We’re not necessarily slipping in and out of a dream state as in some films, but the way her flashes of psychic insight impinge on her daily existence does contribute to a destabilization of confidence in the reality of the senses.

And at this point, I must say that if you think you might like to try this one out, go do it now (if you’ve got a US library card, it’s on Kanopy – otherwise you can watch it with ads on Popcornflix). There is really no good way to discuss this movie without touching on the ending. It was sadly spoiled for me and though I still enjoyed it, it would have been nice not to have had the (probably obvious, but still chilling) turn of events given away in advance (though also, to be fair, one poster I saw absolutely spoiled the ending – geez…).

Ok, so for those choosing not to heed my advice, a brief synopsis: Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) has been shaken by psychic visions her whole life, since, as a child, she witnessed a vision of her mother committing suicide a thousand miles away. To help her process her visions, she now retains the services of a parapsychologist (played by Marc Porel, the priest in Don’t Torture a Duckling). Having recently married a dashing Italian gentleman, she’s rocked by a vision of an elderly woman with a gushing head wound, a magazine, a red room, a broken mirror, a yellow cigarette in a blue ash tray, and being walled up by bricks like something out of a Poe story (apparently Fulci was quite a fan). She visits a palazzo owned by her husband, now gone to seed and recognizes a room from her vision, leading her to take a sledgehammer to one wall and uncover the skeleton hidden within. As her husband is arrested under investigation of murder, she starts piecing together the elements of her vision to uncover the true killer. But, as becomes clear over the course of the film, she had not actually seen a vision of the past, but rather, her own future, her own murder.

I appreciated how this realization doesn’t drop as a final scene twist. Rather, it’s more of a water torture situation. There is one small piece of evidence after another that points her in the right direction and that leads her to her final understanding, all functioning as a vicious puzzle box which she is compelled to open, only to find herself, in the end, closed within. At a certain point, it feels as if she understands what she’s hurtling towards but has no power to stop it, and O’Neill’s performance is pitch perfect – balancing a tragic drive to uncover the truth and the sense that her sanity is hanging by a bit of twine and each new revelation cuts another thread. She continues to try to “solve the murder,” pushing away the awareness that she is actually inviting her own.

I think in this way, for all that it still carries the typical giallo trappings of a murder mystery, a series of plot twists, and heavy doses of style, I think it is fair to count this one an actual horror. What is more “horror” than the dawning, terrible realization of an inescapable, awful truth? Additionally, the supernatural motif adds a certain flavor: a dread that is more than mere psychology, a delicious suspense that pierces like a needle. Much of the film may operate as an almost stately mood piece, but when it kicks into high gear, it sings.

The high point of this may be a late sequence when, chased by the man she thinks is the killer, Virginia hides in a church under renovation. Echoing a similar moment in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, while hidden on the scaffolding, the alarm in her watch starts to sound a tinkling version of Frizzi’s theme and the man sees her. A hunt ensues up ladders and across precarious planks as the full theme blares. It is a gloriously tense episode and it is reflected in the final, eerie, unresolved moments of the film, once the masonry work has been completed and Virginia’s fate has run its course. 

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And so, those are three early Fulci thrillers. It’s been a pleasure to learn a bit about his earlier work and all three were clearly proficient and effective films in their own right beyond the fact that they each imply something of where he would later go. It is interesting to see a progression from the showy style of the first film, in which the camera rarely deigns to shoot anything straight on, to the confident, masterfully constructed third film, which is much less ostentatious, and yet no less stylish or effective. It’s been great to expand my understanding of an appreciated director whose work I’d only scratched the surface of (though I don’t think I’m going to take a deep dive into his non-horror/thriller work – but who knows, maybe How We Robbed the Bank of Italy or his adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang are worth checking out). But, since I’m still itching for some crawling, goopy, mind-cracking horrors, I think I’ll stick with old Lucio for another week, so watch this space for a heavy dose of messy doom next time.

A Tropical Feast

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So lately, I’ve covered some pretty classy fare: 19th century historical dramas that are somewhat horror adjacent, works of personal depth and serious scholarship, mildly theoretical discussions of films that seek to challenge the audience’s complacency in viewing horror content. But it’s been a while since I really just dug into a work that is clearly and unabashedly Horror with a capital H.  Something that makes up for what it lacks in class with eyeball trauma and shark fights. It’s not so plot heavy (I mean, technically, there is one), but there will be spoilers if you want to avoid that sort of thing.  Also, it may get a bit gooey.  We’re heading into zombie country.

Zombi 2 (1979)

Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, aka Zombi 2 (the original Italian title, where it was marketed as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, which in turn had been released as Zombi ), aka Zombie Flesh Eaters, aka Nightmare Island, and many more, is really an exceptional, gory exploitation flick with no pretensions of artistry or polemic, but truly delivering everything it sets out to. It is a simple, plot-light B-movie that is scary when it should be and filled with a great sense of mounting dread, while pulling out all the stops when it comes to some absolutely cringe inducing gore set pieces. It features a couple of really impressive how-did-they-film-that moments; its score, from frequent Fulci collaborator, Fabio Frizzi strikes the balance of creepy and groovy that you want from a late 70s Italian horror movie; and even the camera’s leering gaze when it comes to some particularly gratuitous nudity (do women really go scuba diving in nothing but a string thong – don’t the tank straps chafe?) is somehow charming (if no less exploitative). This movie has no illusions of being high art – it knows exactly what it wants to be, and it achieves it spectacularly.

As I said, the plot is bare bones: a boat drifts into New York Harbor with no visible crew. Some police investigate, meet a large, moldering, peckish fellow who bites one of them before being shot into the water, and bring the boat in to dock. Peter, a newspaper reporter, and Anne, the daughter of the boat’s owner (who had mysteriously disappeared months earlier), begin an investigation that brings them to the Caribbean where they enlist a young couple on vacation to take them to Matul island where doctor Menard has been studying an illness that seems to be reanimating the dead. Zombies attack. The cast is picked off one by one, until all are dead but Peter and Anne, who escape on a boat and plan to return to New York with a bitten friend for the good of science. However, they soon turn on the radio and discover that New York is already overrun with zombies (presumably originating with the bitten police officer). Their friend growls below deck, now a zombie. All is doomed.  The final shot is of the Brooklyn bridge overrun with the undead (I said there’d be spoilers).

Like I said, not much plot, but it gets the job done.

I was sure I’d seen this before, but I think that may just be due to a number of iconic images and scenes, much reproduced across horror journalism and fandom. Happily though, when I finally sat down to watch it, I was met with something fresh and suspenseful, totally new to me, delightfully awful, and giddyingly bleak.

Any viewer more familiar with Romero’s ouvre may expect some degree of social commentary from a zombie narrative and I feel that is all but lacking here. I mean, being set on a Caribbean island, there are inescapable elements of race and colonialism, but while the film has some awareness of the obvious social and power dynamics, it isn’t particularly interested in exploring them, other than to suggest a kind of smug arrogance on the part of Doctor Menard. And even there, he isn’t made out to be some kind of monster, the true villain of the film, but rather just a stubborn figure of “western education” unwilling to accept that the locals, with their folk beliefs, might understand what he does not.  There is a fun interchange between him and his local assistant, Lucas, who describes how the locals believe that voodoo is somehow involved – either in bringing the dead back to life or in trying to forestall this plague. After Dr. Menard calls these beliefs “nonsense” and “a stupid superstition” (though by this point, he has seen his share of the dead rise), Lucas responds with withering irony, “Yes, you are right doctor. You know many more things than Lucas.”

But really, this is not the point of this film. This film cares only about effect. It wants to make you cringe. It wants to titillate. It wants to get under your skin and make it crawl. And it frequently does all of these in the space of one short sequence. One stand out scene features Dr. Menard’s wife, Paola, left alone after an argument in which she had begged to leave the island. First she has a shower, standing in front of a three sided mirror (because that’s a thing people sometimes do) before she gets the sense that someone is watching her (the shower is also right in front of a large window because that’s how buildings are usually designed). The audience sees a decomposing hand fall on the window but she is unaware. Shortly thereafter, she is screaming and running into another room where, after having difficulty closing the door, largely due to the rotting zombie fingers that she eventually manages to sever, she is grabbed by the hair and pulled forward such that her eyeball is slowly and graphically pierced by a large shard of the now splintered door. The whole scene is lecherous and tense, agonizing and really, really gross. As it should be. And while it is obvious when the film cuts to an artificial face and eye, it is no less effective in making even a seasoned horror fan flinch at its intensity – at least I did.

The most famous scene in the film apparently wasn’t even intended by Fulci but was added by a producer and filmed by a second unit director, and it’s so good that they did. I speak of course of the seminal Zombie vs Shark showdown. On the way to the island, Susan (of the vacationing couple) goes scuba diving.  She sees a pretty big tiger shark and hides among some sea flora. Suddenly an arm bursts out of the shadows and grabs her. There is a zombie down here (for some reason), and it is, as one might expect, hungry. After shoving some seaweed in its face (which is surprisingly effective), she escapes. The zombie tries to pursue but then the shark returns. Thus begins an epic struggle between the two creatures, each trying to devour the other. The zombie takes a bite out of the shark, but the shark bites off the zombie’s arm and swims off (and hey, since it was bitten, I guess it should become a zombie too?). In an era well before digital effects, this is an amazing feat of filmmaking. Apparently, the zombie was the shark’s trainer who had given it a big meal and a sedative before filming. He had to swim down (without a tank) so that they could film for 30 seconds or so at a time before ascending again for air. Thus, the whole sequence was shot. It’s amazing no one died.

And these are just a couple of exemplary samples. The whole film really works just as well. Beyond the great scoring, the sound design is so potent, often disquietingly ominous when it isn’t revoltingly squelchy with intermittent fly buzz. Also, the film, taking advantage of its tropical location, tends to be pretty gorgeous to look at. The azure waves, the palms blowing in a summer gale, mounds of earth being displaced by bodies as they surface – there is a real sense of location, and a hot, humid, breezy stickiness which helps maintain the putrescent atmosphere. Finally, the approach to the zombies themselves is striking and unique. Staci Ponder, co-host of the Gaylords of Darkness podcast, I think really put her finger on why – they are simply dead. Frequently, their eyes are closed – they don’t track their prey, but move almost without purpose until they have a chance to consume. They don’t even seem to relish in their feasting, but just chew mechanically – not ferociously. And there is something so unsettling and uncomfortable about this view of shuffling, mindless death. The less intentional it is, the more unstoppable it somehow feels – like real death – just an unthinking force of nature.

And what a tremendous ending! I know that it’s supposed to be a bleak sucker punch, but as they heard the news of what had happened to New York, I just wanted to stand up and cheer, and not because I have anything against the Big Apple (I rather love NYC). It was just such a great shock.  The groundwork had been laid.  We had seen the bite and we even saw a twitch of movement under a coroner’s sheet, but that had been more than an hour earlier; in the meantime, the story had moved on, and I at least had completely forgotten. It was just so much fun to actually get surprised. As the undead shambled across the Brooklyn bridge, I was just elated with the grand scope of the twist. The film had been so contained, but in the end, it was positively apocalyptic.

Past that, in its low budget glory, the film has endless B-movie charm. Being an Italian genre film, it has terrible dubbing, the dialogue is sometimes endearingly on the nose (e.g. “What is all this about the dead coming back to life and having to be killed a second time? I mean, what the hell is going on here?”), and there are some editing snafus that it’s hard not to love – there is a late sequence when zombies are attacking the missionary hospital. The living have prepared Molotov cocktails in defense and bottle after bottle is thrown at the advancing horde, exploding on impact. The only thing is that each time a new bottle is thrown, I’m pretty sure we see the same, repeated shot of it landing and bursting into flame. It’s as if right after each explosion, all of the fire goes out, the zombies all take two steps back and we go again. This happens perhaps five times. It’s an economic choice that may not quite work for the action sequence, but pays dividends in comic value.

Sometimes you don’t really feel like thinking so much. Sometimes, you just want a horror film that, you know, horrifies, and in which you have fun getting horrified – and this is such a film. It’s not one for the weak stomached or those who can’t put up with bad dubbing, but if you enjoy being made to squirm in your seat, if you appreciate the obvious joy that goes into really pulling off some disgusting effect, if you can vicariously get a kick out of a director doing everything in his power to get a rise out of you, this just might be a film for you.

Bride of the Blurb

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The New York Ripper (1982)

Well this was a wild ride.  Reviled at release as one of the worst examples of slasher sleaze, it holds up as one of the best examples of nostalgically appreciated slasher sleaze. Lucio Fulci’s New York set slasher/giallo is nonsensical, cruel, ugly, and kinda fun if you’re up for it.

The plot is all over the place and honestly, even a couple days after watching it, I’d be hard pressed to recount it successfully.  But basically there are a couple of threads.  Of course, there is a killer, unsurprisingly targeting women, especially those in the sex industry or otherwise viewed through a sexual lens.  Whenever this killer talks on the phone with the police detective pursuing him, he has a voice like Donald Duck. Ok. Sure. There is the plot of the pursuing detective, being taunted by this avian voiced madman. And there is the story of a woman, in a kinky open relationship with her husband, who’s in the habit of going out into gritty NYC settings for rough sex with strangers, one of whom she becomes convinced is the killer of the headlines.  In the end, I’m pretty sure that was a red herring and everything cycles back to the detective, but the convolutions of the plot have already slipped through the cracks of my mind.

But, in a way, in its glorious, sordid, trashy excess, the film mostly works.  It is not a ‘pretty’ stylish Italian giallo, but there is successful artistry to the kill scenes that the flick most revels in, creating enjoyable tension as it basks in seediness and flesh and blades flashing in the shadows and the groove of its early 80s New York backdrop.

This is certainly not one for everyone, either too pointlessly bloodthirsty and over sexualized or too boring, but if you’re up for that sort of thing, it’s kinda great as well.