Supernatural disgust! No one approaches without revealing to me,
despite himself, the stage of his putrefaction, the livid destiny
which awaits him. Every sensation is sepulchral, every delight a
dirge.
E.M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist.
5 September, Rome: - We saw Zombi 2 – science fiction horror film.
Ghastly, repulsive trash.
Andrei Tarkovsky, from his diary.
In the golden age of Italian film-making, there were three distinct
tiers of directors. At the apex, at least in terms of cultural
prominence, art house giants like Fellini and Antonioni commanded
international respect and considerable artistic freedom. Next, genre
auteurs and specialists like Sergio Leone and Dario Argento carved
out niches in specific popular genres. Critical respect would come
more slowly to these directors, but they enjoyed a kind of prominence
and budgetary license within the Italian film industry. Finally, at
the lowest rung in terms in budgets and critical appreciation, great
journeyman directors like Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi produced
movies, quickly and cheaply, in whatever genre producers happened to
be churning out at the time. Only more recently have these directors
come to be appreciated as auteurs in their own right.
A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Fulci, 1971).
If you don't count Mario Bava in this category, Lucio Fulci was
perhaps the greatest of these journeyman directors. It is a peculiarity of Fulci's legacy that the bulk of his cult notoriety
rests on a sequence of ultra-gory and increasingly surreal horrors
which he directed between 1979 and 1982. The iconography of these
movies – gouged eyeballs, spewing entrails, deliquescent faces –
defines Fulci as an auteur and icon of horror cinema. Yet Fulci had
been making movies for decades in 1979, and only really stumbled into
the horror genre because he was broke, and the success of George
Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) put zombies firmly on
the radar of Italy's magpie-like producers. The artistic peak of
Fulci's career was in the early to mid-70s, when he produced the
historical masterpiece Beatrice Cenci, and three of the
greatest of all the giallos in A Lizard in a Woman's Skin,
Don't Torture a Duckling and The Psychic.
Yet Fulci's output in '79 to '82, if not his highest achievement, is
nevertheless a unhinged treasure trove of cult/midnight movie
madness. The peculiar appeal of these movies has to be understood in
the context of how they were made. Champions of Fulci's gore movies
often present them as highly deliberate, authorial works of
surrealism and pure cinema. This is at least partially true, but it
ignores the difficulty of untangling intention and accident in the
strange aesthetics of movies like The Beyond and House by
the Cemetery.
Inferno (Argento, 1980).
These films were made subject to
breakneck schedules, fluctuating budgets and frequent production
interference. Fulci himself described The Beyond (as
well as Argento's Inferno) as
examples of “absolute film”: “a film of images, which must be
received without any reflection.” Inferno
provided a template for the kind of irrational, almost non-narrative
horror that Fulci would pursue in the 80s, yet it was itself
partially a product of accidental circumstances. Suitably enough for
such a fever dream of a movie, Inferno was
plagued by illnesses. Argento himself was laid up with hepatitis,
and frequently had to direct lying down or via notes from his
hospital bed. Star Irene Miracle had recently recovered from a
fever, and her hair began falling out, prompting Argento to kill her
off early in the film, effectively re-writing the story on the hoof.
While there is no doubt that Argento was more preoccupied by dream
logic and cinematic formalism than narrative clarity to begin with,
Inferno was a picture
that became more abstract and non-linear in the telling. Similarly,
screen-writer Dardano Sacchetti claimed that
The Beyond
acquired it's “non-grammatical” nature by virtue of the depletion
of its budget.
This
is not to detract from Fulci's achievement in these movies, but only
to suggest that it could only have occurred within the constraints of
a particular production milieu. Italian popular cinema had always
been highly derivative of what was happening in the international
market. Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 70s, the Italians developed
versions of US genres – the spaghetti western and the giallo –
which were uniquely Italian enough to constitute original indigenous
inventions. By the 1980s, the great creative energy of the post-war
art-house boom was waning, and the Italian popular film industry
embraced the ethos of rip-off cinema with an increasingly blatant
abandon, creating a near infinite number of low-budget hybrids of Mad
Max, Escape from
New York and The
Warriors. Filtered
through the feverish Italian cinematic imagination, however, these
movies were largely failures as copies, but frequently come to life
as cinematic Frankenstein's monsters, lumbering undead
creatures made up of other movies incongruously stitched together.
Although
only House by the Cemetery and
Manhattan Baby
fully conform to this idea of Italian rip-off cinema,
Fulci's
80s gore period has to be understood properly in the context of this
wonky, off-kilter production milieu. Rather than seeing them as the
work of an artist in full control of his medium, Fulci's 80s horror
is perhaps best envisioned as the work of a great cinematic crafsman
set adrift in a declining film industry, whose imagination
paradoxically rises to an almost fatalistic pitch of morbid
creativity in the hothouse atmosphere of these chaotic and rushed
productions.
Whereas
Bava and Argento had always tended to aestheticize and eroticize horror,
Fulci went straight for the uncensored amygdala of the genre,
becoming a poet of charnal house decay and putrescence. In Fulci's
horror cinema, bodies and buildings are always subject to decay and
dissolution; the extreme vulnerability of the physical frame, exemplified by the eye, is constantly imperilled by abrupt, nightmarish
assault; the frailty and gory plasticity of the corporeal hangs over
these films like a stench. Lacking the opulent colours and architectures of Bava and Argento, beauty appears in Fulci only in
eerie and unnerving forms; in, for example, the sudden appearance of
blind seeress Emily and her guide-dog in the middle of an empty
stretch of road in The Beyond, or
the emergence of Bob from a kind of birth canal into a world of
listless ghosts at the end of The
House by the Cemetery.
To
achieve these effects, Fulci was fortunate in the amount of highly
gifted collaborators which he worked with throughout this period,
most notably the cinematographer Sergio Salvati and composer Fabio
Frizzi. Frizzi's work is particularly crucial in establishing the
aesthetic of these Fulci movies. Typically for Italian horror scores
of the time, Frizzi's prog-influenced cues are alternatively hypnotic
and bombastic, possessing a kind of wild and unapologetic incongruity
which makes the movies oddly mesmerising. His typical zombie theme
begins with a low, sepulchral intro, perfect for the slow rise of the
zombie, but then segues into a bizarrely anthemic and up-beat chorus.
His beautiful main theme for The
Beyond
suggests a slowly unfolding religious epiphany:
Zombi (Zombie Flesh Eaters), 1979.
Though it was sold
in many territories as a sequel to Dawn
of the Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters has
nothing in common with Romero's film, aside from the basic premise of
the ravenous and perambulatory dead. Eschewing the Swiftian
satirical undercurrents of Romero, Fulci sought to return the zombie
to its roots in the voodoo lore and exoticism of Jacques Tourneur's I
Walked with a Zombie. Zombie Flesh Eaters, then,
is a pure pulp film with no subtext, and not a great deal of
subtlety; nevertheless, it is executed with considerable gusto, energy
and skill. If you wanted a pure pizza and beer movie which still has
some claim to artistic merit, this fits the bill perfectly – it's
probably the best non-Romero entry into the modern zombie movie
cycle.
Trashy
and all as it is, Fulci builds the pace slowly, and develops an
over-powering mood of decay and hopelessness. Whereas Romero's
zombies were always comically quotidian, Fulci's are nightmarishly
rancid creations, infested with wriggling worms and mottled with
bloody sores. Viewed today, Zombie
Flesh Eaters
is a masterclass in make-up and practical effects, and feels like a
paean to the glories of pre-CGI cinema. In the climatic sequence,
squibs explode, real flames engulf the set, living and undead bodies
are assaulted with dizzyingly inventive abandon. The dare-devil
ingenuity and remarkable craftsmanship of the practical effects work in
this film is really something to behold.
Zombie
Flesh Eaters has
also gained considerable notoriety for a underwater sequence in which
a zombie fights an
actual shark. It
is, to say the least, a somewhat jaw-dropping scene, whose enjoyment
is leveraged to some degree on the obvious legal and moral issues
raised by filming such a thing. This speaks to my main point about
the accidental qualities of these movies, however; the sequence had
nothing to do with Fulci, who neither wanted it in the film nor
directed it. You can read the full story in this piece on Little
White Lies.
Zombie
Flesh Eaters
stars the Scottish actor Ian McCulloch, who also appears in another
unalloyed joy of Italian rip-off cinema, Luigi Cozzi's
Aliens/Invasion of the Body Snatchers/James Bond mash-up
Contamination.
He gives a pretty good performance, despite a fairly palpable sense
of contempt for the material. I always get a huge laugh out of the
cosmically dishevelled state of of his comb over at the end of the
picture. It feels like a metaphor for the humiliation of his serious
thespian ambitions.
City of the Living Dead (1980).
Fulci
really began to develop his own style of horror movie with City
of the Living Dead. It
is the first in what would later be categorized as the “Gates of
Hell Trilogy.” It is worth noting that these films were not
originally intended as a trilogy, and that the third entry in the
cycle (The
House by the Cemetery)
doesn't actually feature a gateway to hell. (There is a better case
to be made, I think, for Manhattan
Baby as
a thematic follow-up to City
and The
Beyond.) City and
The
Beyond are
difficult films to categorize. They both feature zombies, but
neither can really be described as zombie movies. After completing
Zombi,
Fulci
apparently devoured the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and these movies are
in a sense low-budget Lovecraftian apocalypses. However, whereas
Lovecraft remained a supreme rationalist, even while consigning human
reason to insignificance in a vast indifferent cosmos, Fulci's appropriation of Lovecraft veers in the direction of the irrational.
Whether by accident or design, Fulci arrived at a type of horror
which lacks a conventional centre of gravity, and expresses itself as
a series of increasingly inexplicable and terrifying events,
“things”, in the words of the medium in City
of the Living Dead, “that
will shatter your imagination.” On a narrative level, these
nightmare tableaus are held together by the loose convention of
opening a gateway to hell.
In
the fictional, quasi-Lovecraftian town of Dunwich, a priest (about
whom we learn virtually nothing), commits suicide, thus opening a
gateway to hell (in a manner never actually elucidated). On this
simple premise, Fulci develops a plot which rarely makes a lick of
sense on a literal level, but it doesn't matter. City
moves and flows seamlessly in the sheer, all-enveloping mood conjured
up by Fulci and Salvati's images of eerie, dust-blown streets and putrescent viscera, and their arrangement to Frizzi's mesmerizing
score. Like Phantasm
(1979), the most Italian of American horror pictures, City
is
a dream obsessively haunted by the spectre of mortality, by
mortuaries, corpses and cemeteries. It is a nonsensical Gothic
whose aesthetic falls somewhere between EC Comics and Francis Bacon.
The iconic gore sequences in City
have been amply discussed, but perhaps not enough attention is paid
to the early section in which Mary (Catriona MacColl) wakes up in a
coffin, and is rescued (albeit while being almost axed in the head in
the process) by Christopher George. This set-piece (later homaged by
Tarantino in Kill
Bill)
is a stunning piece of pure cinema worthy of Hitchcock, and a
standout in Fulci's entire filmography.
The Black Cat (1981).
Between the sustained insanities of City and The Beyond,
Fulci took a left-field detour to the cosiness of the British
countryside for this (somewhat) loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptation. An
American photographer (Mimsy Farmer) and Scotland yard detective
(David Warbeck) become involved in a series of murders and mysterious
goings on in a quiet English village, all of which seem to involve a
black cat belonging to the rheumy-eyed local magus (Patrick Magee).
Though beautifully shot (again by Salvati) and stylishly executed, I
think The Black Cat is the weakest in this cycle of films.
Fulci apparently wasn't particularly interested in making it, and this
translates into a feeling of lethargy pervading the project. Lacing
the feverish intensity of his other films of this period, the plot
iself fails to provide much in the way of dramatic impetuous.
Nevertheless, with diminished expectations, The Black Cat is
not without considerable bucolic and soporific charms of its own.
Farmer, somewhat of a cult cinema icon, hasn't much to do with her
character, but remains a striking and watchable presence. Magee is
fantastic fun as the loathsome but hypnotic antagonist, and David
Warbeck exhibits the unfussy charm which made him the most fondly
remembered Fulci lead. The effect of The Black Cat is akin to
watching an old episode of Midsomer Murder or Bergerac
while under the influence of a potent, time-dilating sedative.
The Beyond (1981).
Our
setting moves to the Seven Doors Hotel in Louisiana, where once again
the gate of hell is opened, this time by the crucifixion of
aesthete and warlock Schweick in 1927 – or by
the unweary excavations of Joe the Plumber in the film's contemporary
setting - I'm not exactly sure which. The Beyond is
regarded almost universally as Fulci's horror masterpiece, and while
I've developed a considerable fondness for this crazy picture over
the years, I still feel like it's perhaps too erratic and uneven to
be quite a masterpiece. It is certainly a midnight movie
barnstormer, and a grand compendium of everything that is both
sublime and ridiculous about Italian horror as it was moving into the
decline of its golden period. In terms of the ridiculous, The
Beyond's eccentric goofs are
legendary:
-
The fact that the plumber is called “Joe the Plumber.” In fairness, the comedic value here isn't entirely Fulci's fault, but it
doesn't help that the “Joe the Plumber” sign on his van looks
like it was pasted on immediately before the cameras rolled.
- The
“Do Not Entry” sign on the door of the morgue.
- The English dialogue track. Typically, the Italian dialogue track
is far better acted and more atmospheric, but the English language
track contains probably all of the best unintentionally funny lines
in the entire Italian horror cannon. Most of them belong to Catriona
MacColl's Liza: “I said you had carte blanche, not a blank
cheque.” “I've lived in New York all my life, and if there's one
thing I've learned not to believe in – it's ghosts.”
-
The Death by Flesh-Eating Tarantulas in the Library Sequence. Even
within the demented purview of The
Beyond, Michele
Mirabella's death is utterly random and bizarre, and it's main
function I suspect was to allow Fulci to emulate the similarly random
death by rats (and possessed fast food vendor) scene in Argento's
Inferno. However,
while Fulci's execution of the death by unexpected betrayal of
guide-dog scene is arguably technically better than Argento's in
Suspiria, here the
grand ambition of the spider sequence is not well served by its
execution. Sadly, neither the pipe cleaner-like spiders or the mould
of Mirabella's face are particularly convincing, and the whole thing
resembles a rather alarming contribution to an arts and crafts class
at times. Still, the sound design is spectacular, and the sequence
is nothing if not memorable.
On
the side of sublimity, The Beyond
is another stunning collaboration between Fulci, Salvati and Frizzi.
The Seven Doors Hotel, with its dusty and dilapidated rooms and
cavernous, terrifying basement, is a painterly triumph of production
design and lighting. Cinzia Monreale's Emily is probably the most
iconic minor character in horror film history, and in its best
passages, The Beyond captures
the morbid, decadent and dreamlike poetry which makes Italian horror
so distinctive. If not quite a masterpiece, the discordance between
its portentous metaphysics and campy and careless eccentricities
certainly makes it unique.
The
House by the Cemetery (1981).
It
is apt that House invokes
the Frankenstein myth, since this outing finds Fulci and co. firmly
in Italian rip-off cinema territory. House by the Cemetery
takes elements of The
Shining, Rosemary's
Baby, The Amityville
Horror, The Turning of the Screw, even
a dash of The Evil Dead, throws
them all in a blender, and then dips its fingers in the ensuing
chaotic stew to deliver the chief's kiss.
One issue needs to be addressed
right out of the gate, and that is the performance of child actor
Giovanni
Frezza as Bob Doyle. Frezza was a kind of grotesquely cute child
Klaus Kinski, and his Bob Doyle has frequently been labeled the most
annoying child performance in the history of horror film, or indeed
of film in its entirety. I would like to partially rehabilitate
Frezza here. The primary problem with the performance lies in the
fact that, on the English dub, Frezza is voiced by what appears to be
a high-pitched woman in her forties. Watched in Italian, about 80%
of the annoyance of Bob vanishes, and the film is improved immeasurably overall.
The
House by the Cemetery
is the real sleeper and slow-burner in the Gates Trilogy. I wasn't a
fan originally, but it gets better every time I watch it. The stark,
wintery meloncholy of the New England location is magnificently
evoked by Salvati, and feels like the central character of the film.
Various sub-plots and suggestions are established in the script, and
left completely hanging. While I assume that this is an
unintentional by-product of a rushed production, these structural
definincies only add to the movie's mysterious and dreamlike tone.
The ending is particularly striking. Having exercised a degree of
restraint throughout, Fulci finally unleashes perhaps his most
complete and almost unbearable evocation of nightmare in the
Fruedstein basement. Basements have always maintained a peculiar
significance in all of these movies, going back to Irene Miracle's
dive into the flooded basement in Inferno.
In Jungian psychology, such motifs would represent a descent into,
and confrontation with, the unconscious. Bob finally escapes from
the nightmare of Freudstein's basement by crawling through a narrow
crack in the ceiling, a image which clearly evokes a birth trauma.
In Jungian terms, Bob should now be a full, individuated adult,
having endured the cathartic ordeal of encounter with the unconscious,
and been reborn. However, in the movie, he emerges into a dead world
in which he will be a child for eternity, swallowed up by the
timeless and brooding New England landscape. This refers perhaps to
the gloomy metaphysics screen-writer Dardano Sacchetti had developed
for The Beyond, the
sense of “being born condemned to die....of being born to be
erased.”
Manhattan
Baby (1982).
“I've
lost all critical perspective.”
Dr
Fruedstein, The House by the
Cemetery.
Manhattan Baby marks
the end of the era covered in this essay, essentially the
relationship between Fulci and producer Fabrizio De Angelis which
began with Zombi 2 in
'79. The movie has been disowned by its screen-writer, Fulci
himself, and a great many people who have seen it. I would have to
go against the grain and say it's a wild masterpiece, and possibly my
favourite picture in the sequence. The chasm between what it was
clearly intended to be, and what it actually ends up as, is part of
what makes Manhattan Baby
so fascinating. Once again in crazy quilt rip-off territory, the
intention of Manhattan Baby was
to
embrace the new optical effect/family friendly horror style of
Poltergeist, and
marry it with elements of The
Exorcist, Indiana Jones, and
the Egyptomania of the Bram Stoker novel The
Jewel of the Seven Stars (filmed
brilliantly by Hammer as Blood from
the Mummy's Tomb
in 1971, and blandly as The
Awakening
in 1980 with Charlton Heston.) The conception of the film is so
muddled that nobody really knows why it's actually called Manhattan
Baby, the
most plausible suggestion being an attempt to evoke memories of
Rosemary's Baby.
However
diffuse the concept, the film was clearly intended to be the most commercial endeavour the partnership had produced to date; yet Fulci
winds up directing something far more surreal and non-linear than The
Beyond,
and far more experimental in its compositions and mosaic-like
editing. Virtually every scene is a hypnotic play of facial and eye
close-ups, shifting focus and aural weirdness, yielding a truly
bizarre dreamscape which feels far more like David Lynch and Kenneth
Anger than the Tobe Hooper neutered by Steven Spielberg vibe the
production seemed to have intended. It is in some respect the
culmination of what I have been discussing throughout this essay: a
masterpiece emerging alchemically, and accidentally, from the
brilliance of Fulci and the comic disarray of his production milieu.
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