Summer of Slash: City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell, aka Fear in the City of the Living Dead)

[This is a re-post of something I wrote back in October for the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon I hosted.  Today I am re-posting it because the invaluable and unmatchable horror blog Final Girl has selected this for her May entry for her Final Girl Film Club. And I figured I would use that as an excuse to post it again for my summer horror series.  Enjoy.]

City of the Living Dead is typical 80's Fulci as the plot is one nonsensical moment after another; however, in typical Italian horror fashion (and Fulci was one of the best) these nonsensical moments seem purposeful, they lead to ethereal, displacing scenes that are heavy on atmosphere and style and empty of all logic. That’s okay, though…we know that’s we get with post giallo Fulci – films that exist for the moment.


City of the Living Dead is the first of three in an unofficial trilogy Fulci dubbed “the gates of hell” trilogy (The Beyond follows and the series us wrapped up in The House by the Cemetery) – a trilogy that is more supernatural than it is about zombies walking around and munching on guts (which made Fulci famous with his notorious and gigantic grind house hit Zombi 2); more about atmosphere and making you feel uneasy than it is about things jumping out at you and scaring you. This era is what Fulci is best known for…and he was working at an incredibly high level at the time (1979-1982), churning out one spooky, atmospheric hit after another.

The plot is paper thin and therefore hard to summarize, but let’s give it a go: Father Thomas has hung himself and because of this the dead are descending upon a small New England town. If our heroes don’t get to Father Thomas’ tomb in time (before All Saints Day) then the dead will walk the earth. There’s your plot. When the ending does come you’ll be left scratching your head as it is one of the most bizarre and ambiguous I’ve ever seen…and that’s not a good thing. The ending just seems to come out of nowhere. The acting is as wooden as usual for these types of movies (one of the reasons for this was that English actors rarely got an English treatment of the script, so they either had to decipher it themselves or have someone translate for them), but it's not so bad that it distracts you from the memorable moments of the film.

Of course this film is infamous for more reasons than just its nonsensical plot and being the film that lead-in into what many consider Fulci’s masterpiece (The Beyond). There is of course the issue of the gore. Fulci had reinvented himself with the gut-munching classic Zombi 2 and probably felt that no plot and heaps of gore was what garnered him praise and notoriety, so why stray to far from that? It’s sad considering the film previous to Zombi 2, Murder to the Tune of 7 Black Notes, is his masterpiece; a film that is brilliant to look at and in its execution (and ability to make sense) of its intricate giallo storyline (which always has twists and turns that don’t always make sense). Fulci himself avowed that it was his favorite and most personal film, the one film that he spent the most time on, so of course it was met with no interest at all…go figure.

Back to the gore: there are eyes bleeding, brains being pulled out, the infamous drill scene, and the even more infamous “sheep guts” scene; these scenes of course caught the attention of the BBFC – which any horror fan knows as the group responsible for the well-known “video nasties” list – who thought the film too violent and forced the filmmakers to make sever cuts. The neutered American version entitled The Gates of Hell made its way to video stores across the country, but without a lot of the scenes that made the film so notorious among die hard horror fans. The brain removal scene had been cut altogether, the drill scene had to lose a few angles, and without question the BBFC made Fulci lose almost all of the meat (no pun intended) of the organ regurgitation scene. What was there left to see, then? Well any cut film is a bad film, so even though the film doesn’t really lose any of its style without those scenes, it definitely wasn’t the film Fulci intended to be seen (in fact in the American version – as he did in the butchered versions of The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery – he went by the very banal pseudonym Jerry Madison, a practice that was common for these Italian horror filmmakers).

The other famous moment in the film is when a weird little pervert named Bob who goes around town with a blow up doll is accused of the murders caused by the ghosts/zombies. The town doesn’t like him because of an incident involving a young girl years back; the father in fact still has it out for him. When the father finds Bob hiding out in his garage…well, let’s just say he puts Chuck Bronson to shame with how far he takes vigilante justice. The next scene – just like the spider death, acid to the face, and spike to the eye from The Beyond – takes about five minutes to happen as Fulci cranks up the “tension” (Fulci’s films do require a lot of patience has he doesn’t just jump into the gory scenes…he makes you wait for those big bad gory moments) of cutting back and forth between the kid and the crazed father putting the kids head on a saw horse and sloooooooowly pushing his head towards an industrial drill that he turned on. The death (when the drill finally goes through his head) is one of Fulci’s most memorable and impressive as far as effects go. I have supplied the moment for you in stills...enjoy:



The film is also infamous for some of the antics on the set. Fulci is a known misogynist, a man who had little to no regard for his female actors as he consistently asked them to horrible things for the sake of the film. None more horrible than what he had actress Daniela Doria do in City of the Living Dead. I’ve already made mention of the scene in question where Doria and her boyfriend (played by future Italian filmmaker Michele Soavi) are making out in a van at the town graveyard (what a bad idea!) when the ghost of Father Thomas pops up in front of the van and Doria’s character begins bleeding from the eyes and subsequently vomits up her insides. The story goes (from Fulci himself in an interview) that he had Doria actually swallow sheep entrails and then vomit them up – you can clearly see where it is Doria’s mouth spewing out the nastiness…this is followed by a prosthetic mouth where the rest of the guts are being shot out like a canon.


Yuck. My brother and I have a motto while watching these movies…we usually say something to the extent of “oh, Fulci.” He definitely was a disturbed, crazy old man who had no regard for the psyche of his young actresses.

It had been a while since I had seen this movie, and I have to say that to my surprise it holds up reasonably well. The atmosphere is wonderful as the small town is constantly drenched in fog, and you can tell Fulci is having fun with his set designs and all the spooky goodness his camera is able to capture. Fulci also employed longtime collaborator Fabio Frizzi to write the music, the result is a score that matches the film’s eerie mood (which was common with these Italian horror directors…the music is just as important as something like production design) with every synth beat and bass riff.

Yes, I’ve short changed the plot summary here and focused more on some of the infamous details of the film, but that’s because there’s really nothing to summarize. The film is more of a ghost story with teleporting, zombie like creatures than it is a straight zombie film (which some people try to pass it off as), and Fulci really strains to tie in a 4000 year old book into the story that has something to do with the strange goings on around the town (this is the same book, The Book of Eibon, that shows up in The Beyond); however, most of that is forgotten throughout the film because Fulci’s fantastic gore effects, or his ability to so consistently pull off spooky and unsettling scenes (for instance a scene where a woman, thought to be dead, is buried alive and struggles to get out of the coffin. Tarantino, in what isn’t his first or last homage to Fulci, would reference this in Kill Bill vol. 1) that makes us forget just what the hell it is we’re watching as we witness this small town slowly decaying.

In any other genre, even in normal horror films, all of this talk about nonsensical plots and unnecessarily ambiguous moments would be a knock against any film and its filmmaker, but the odd thing – and one of the reasons for my unabashed love of this subgenre – is that with Italian horror it just doesn’t matter; surrealism trumps all. It’s universally known to fans of the subgenre that you leave logic at the door and simply strap yourself in and drink up the rich atmosphere and amazing cinematography of an early 80’s Fulci film, and even though I remember not liking City of the Living Dead too much when I first saw it, I have to admit that I think it stands as one of the best examples of Fulci’s mastering of surrealist horror and shows the director at the height of his deranged creativity.

Extra Stills:

Final Girl Film Club: Burial Ground (AKA The Nights of Terror)

This is part of the Final Girl Film Club -- this month tackles my favorite subgenre and focuses on one of the weirdest films to ever come out of the Italian zombie movement. Head on over to Final Girl to check out all of the other great entries.

Some connoisseurs of Italian horror really find this film to have profound statements about the class struggle in Italy at the time. They claim that the zombies rising from the dirt and attacking the castle is an ideal metaphor for the bourgeois rising up and attacking the wealthy social class. Okay…not really, but Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground (AKA The Nights of Terror) is one of the most infamous so-bad-it’s-good type horror movies ever to come out of the Italian Zombie subgenre. It's hilarious and horrible, and sure to be one of the most surreal movie-going experiences you’ll ever have.

The story is about some rich swingers who meet up at an old castle/mansion to have a discussion with a professor friend of theirs. Only what they don't know is that the professor stumbled upon “a great secret” that “must be true”. He heads outside and into a crypt to chisel away at some stone when some zombies are like “what’s up? Why did you have to bring us back from the dead?” The viewer is left to think that the poor professor knew these zombies before they were donned with skeleton masks covered in oatmeal and rubber cement, because when the zombies approach him he utters one of the films many hilarious lines: “stand back! I’m your friend.” Best not to barter with the walking dead because his “friends” don’t listen to him and poor Professor (who looks a lot like Alan Moore) supplies his "friends" with some easy dinner, and I mean easy; he just stands there and lets them chomp away, and thus kicks off Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground.

Bianchi was a hack who mostly worked in soft-core porn or the giallo, moving around like most Italian horror directors, to whatever idea made him the most money. Some of his films include: Maniac Killer, Cry of a Prostitute, Strip Nude for your Killer, and The Malicious Whore. So really his only attempt at a zombie movie was with Burial Ground and even then the entire first act of the film is nothing more than Cinemax quality porn.

Once the gettin' busy commences we cut outside to two people making love in the garden. They soon realize something is wrong when a zombie rises up from the ground just as they're getting hot and heavy (oh what a hilarious metaphor!) in scene that is directly taken from Zombi 2. Perhaps that is why in Europe Burial Ground was actually referred to as Zombi 3. The zombies don't even look great as I mentioned before and really it appears that they only took the time with a select few that they showcase throughout the film, all of the extras were just given oatmeal and rubber cement to put on their cheap Halloween masks.

The fight scenes with the zombies and the swingers are some of the most hilarious in an y zombie movie. Our mustache-clad swingers find anything they can use to stave off the zombies (some even look like Christopher Llyod…see above). During one horribly long scene we get a POV of one of the characters holding a pitchfork (Hey, it’s Italian Zombie Doom!) just starring at the zombies while the rip-off Goblin music plays in the background. After a horribly long and awkward fight scene the zombies are finished off by, get this, a planting pot...yeeeeeah. This leads to the ever popular head-as-paper mache-being-destroyed scene that shows maggots escaping from the "brain."

The zombies in Bianchi’s film are up to the task though as they are more than capable of throwing knives and wielding farming tools themselves. In one hilarious scene the chamber maid wisely looks out the window to see what’s going on…and of course as she does this a zombie (who must have had some knife throwing practice at one time in his life) hurls a knife at her hand. Now stuck, the maid has no other option but to sit there as the zombies get a scythe and slooooooowly chop off her head. Pretty awesome. The zombies are also more resourceful than most as in one scene they show signs of great team work as the work together to make a battering ram so that they can knock down the door to the estate.

One of the main reasons why this film is so infamous is because of the creepy little mutant kid Michael. Here is what looks like a middle-aged little person playing a ten year old boy who has a weird obsession with his mother. He's always walking in on her while she's getting her groove back with some slimy looking Italian dude (the best line is "you're getting a rise out of me" all the while zombies are rising from the grave – insert “boing” noise here), and none of his creepiness is helped out by the horrible dubbing job.

The most famous scene of the film – and the one scene that when you explain it to others they say “oh yeah, I’ve seen that movie, I had forgotten what that movie was called” – is when Michael's mother slaps him after he gets himself a handful of his mom's goodies "just like when he was a boy" he says...yuck...but that's not the worst of it: Michael runs away and is bitten by a zombie. We are supposed to forget about creepy little Michael but when two of the survivors and Michael's mom are the only people left and they retreat to a church (with flesh eating monks and all!) there's little Michael emerging from a door (how he got to the church I have no idea) and his mother full of guilt for slapping her boy, and so pleased to see her boy alive, does the most disgusting thing in any movie...she lets her "boy" get some milk just like when he was a baby. Gross. And stupid...because as the other two look disgusted (hey something did gross out Italian swingers, amazing!) it is clear that Michael is a zombie, and sure enough, mommy gets the worlds worst tittie twister as Michael takes a big 'ol bite out of his moms breast. Ouch!

There are some classic Italian horror moments in the film like the pacing of the action, the horrible dubbing, the synth soundtrack, and especially how the zombies die. When the zombies are trying to find their way to the second floor of the mansion one of the swinger dudes who looks like Buzz on "Baywatch" grabs a gun and proceeds to shoot all of the zombies in the head. This leads to the always popular Italian shot of the zombie head with a completely black backdrop, exploding, looking more like a watermelon being hit by a shotgun blast than a head. This "isolated" head shot was popular in a lot of Italian horror films as the directors wanted to get as close to the gruesomeness as possible. The only problem was it makes it even more obvious how stupid and cheap the effects and make-up are.

This is still somewhat of a forgotten zombie film even though it has a cult following (not as big as Zombi 2 of course). This film is a perfect example of how the Italian's began ripping off their own stuff, and showed just what kind of hacks these directors were. Whether it was the giallo film, the cannibal film, or the zombie film, it was guaranteed that you would see all three of those genres on an Italian horror directors resume. The film is good for a lot of laughs as it produces some of the cheapest looking zombies, and ends in ridiculous fashion with a quote from The Profecy (that’s how they spelled it) of the Black Spider. See if you can spot the spelling error in the quote – and somehow that seems entirely appropriate for this film.

The violence is mild and predictable after if you’re familiar with this subgenre, especially the more popular Zombi 2 and The Beyond, but with its campy and hilarious characters and surreal moments Burial Ground is one of the better Italian zombie films. It deserves to be in the canon of Italian zombie movies. In the words of Kenny Banya: "It's gold Jerry...gold!"

Final Girl Film Club: "The Beyond"

Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond is one of the best films of the Italian Horror genre. The film is definitely better than most horror movies, and it is doubly better than most Italian horror movies. The problem some people have with the film is that it makes no sense and has no interest in following any kind of sensible or linear story path. Fulci was not interested in making stories that made sense, and really to his credit, The Beyond, for all of its craziness and inane moments, probably makes the most sense when held up to his other films. Fulci and the Italian's love to stylize things -- really ever since Fellini decided to abandon the neo-realist movement in Italy, all bets were off -- and Fulci takes after filmmakers not just within the horror genre. Look at some of the films of Bertolucci (like The Conformist) which are almost all style over substance; or the surreal, ethereal nature of Fellini’s final films; but Fulci’s style is mostly akin to the supernatural, non-linear stylings of Dario Argento. The Italian's had an eye for imagery and for how something could just pop on the screen; whether it be beautiful shadow play (like The Conformist) or the bright neon and somewhat otherworldly colors seen in Argento’s Suspiria, and Fulci’s The Beyond was no exception.


The "plot" of The Beyond, however, is another thing, and usually with Fulci you have more fun at the expense of the story, rather than actually being chilled or thrilled by it. The Beyond is about a favorite theme of Fulci's, the "gates of hell" being opened up for some reason by some ancient artifact or painting, or because a priest hangs himself (all themes from his films). Time travel also comes into play as do psychics and yes, even when they don't belong: zombies.



This was the first film in Fulci's "gates of hell" trilogy and it's his most accomplished work as a director. I could try to go on and on about how there are themes at work here and Fulci really was trying, but I would just be lying and trying to turn a hack filmmaker into something more than he could possibly be. There are a number of retrospectives by people who think Fulci was a great artist, and there are no doubts that he had the eye of a very astute student who studied the Italian masters. But I just don't think he can be taken too seriously. Now to his credit it was the producers who made him add a hospital full of zombies at the end of The Beyond, not Fulci, so he wasn't completely hack-tastic here. Fulci succeeds in making The Beyond one of those ethereal experiences I always attribute to Argento’s early work. Unfortunately for Fulci, this was about it for him as he would give up any remnants of talent he had for the easy buck, as he would finish his career with awful slasher films like The New York Ripper and Murder Rock. But what about this film, well it is indeed better than any other Fulci film, but if you are looking for a scary story – something that moves beyond the eeriness of the images, then you should probably look elsewhere.




The film opens when a warlock/artist in 1920's Louisiana paints something evil looking which ends up rousing the interests of a lynch mob. They burst into the 7 Doors Hotel (The butchered American version of the film is called The Seven Doors of Death) and find the man in room 36, they pour lots of quicklime (a favorite of the Italian's) on him as Fulci proceeds to film the scene in typical Italian horror film fashion. Meanwhile there is a little girl downstairs reading out of some book of the occult with a made up name. As the quicklime does its thing, the book (gasp) goes up in flames. That's about all of the story I can relate because there really isn't much else to tell. It's all set up for scene after scene of Fulci's most famous gore moments. And they’re good ones.

The best part about Italian horror (and especially Italian zombie) movies is the fact that things take so long to happen, usually with a really weird funky bass line or synth playing over the action. What easily begins as unsettling and somewhat unnerving, turns into a gross out fest that sometimes turns laughable because of how long the camera lingers on something so grotesque (the famous spider scene or the moment where acid burns off a ladies face are two scene’s that come to mind). Often times these loooong moments of gore seem like filler, and other times they work in evoking a sense of otherworldiness that displaces the viewer and unsettles the nerves, but whatever the affect one thing is for certain: it's no wonder Fulci didn't tighten things up through the editing process, the film would only be 50 minutes long.

In the opening scene mentioned above the mob pour quicklime on the artist and for about two minutes you get to listen Fabio Frizi's synth play over the imagery while the calcium oxide does its thing. Skin pops, eyes fall out, and then if that weren't enough, Fulci has to nail the dude up to the wall. It's a pretty brutal scene that gives the viewer a sense of things to come and showcases some of what made Fulci so popular with Zombi 2; here he ups the ante substantially.




(Back to the “plot”) Well sure enough cut to present day and the heroine Liza buys up the hotel where the artist was murdered. During the remodel she notices a bad leak in one of the rooms. She calls Joe the plumber and he goes down to investigate. Well this takes him under the hotel and face to face with the artist...who is now a zombie! It's all academic from there as poor Joe the Plumber dies by means of Fulci's favorite death: injury to eye.

The injury to eye death is seen all through Italian horror and Fulci was the master of it. This shot usually consisted of the cheap scare of something that you think is dead springing to life and grabbing the face of the living. This leads to a POV shot and once again the plodding camera of Fulci lingers on things just long enough so we realize how fake things look and how horrible the violence is going to be. Once we (as Joe) see that the fingers are going straight for the eye socket...out it goes. Once Joe is dead, the picture the artist painted reappears and dun dun dun...the gates of hell have been opened.

Another scene that is brilliantly strange and hilarious is when some guy (you can tell just how defined these characters are, I've seen the film numerous times and don't even remember characters names) who is researching the gates of hell and the weird occurrences around town and the hotel climbs a ladder in the hotel to reach an old book about the hotel’s history. For no reasoning whatsoever lightening strikes and what started out as a normal scene turns into something so bizarre and hilarious I think I'll just let you see it for yourselves:



Click here to watch video


Again, the staples of Fulci's "craftsmanship" are at work here. The scene goes on forever, the spiders make a ridiculous hissing noise, they chomp when they eat this guys flesh as if they were the Simpson's sitting down for dinner, and I love how they could only afford two real tarantulas, the others are obviously fake and are set on the actor all while the obviously real spiders crawl onto him. It's wonderful isn't it? However, to Fulci’s credit, the scene is pretty squirm inducing.

There are other great moments like when the zombie artist (remember him) is hooked up to a machine to indicate its heart rate (that should make it obvious what scene will follow), or how about when a beaker of acid (why is there acid just sitting around in a room of corpses?) tips over and eats away at an entire face for what seems like an eternity (again, Fulci getting every last minute out of his budget) and then that same acid slowly approaching a creepy girl in what looks like jell-o; also in this same scene, how does the girl escape? We don’t know because Fulci just ends the scene with the girl screaming, looking up at all the zombies about to attack her in the morgue. But the girl comes back later in the movie (in what is probably the most famous death in the movie, and perhaps in all of Italian Horror).



Click here to watch video


Or, how about the scene where a blind girl gets eaten alive by her seeing eye dog in an obvious homage to Dario Argento's Suspiria? All of these are wonderfully memorable scenes from what is one of the seminal horror films.

The Beyond is full of wonderful gory death scenes, and that is why it's fondly remembered and so fervently sought out. Every low budget independent zombie (or regular horror) film made today in some way borrows Fulci's philosophy and style of gory filmmaking. Watch when Joe the Plumber’s (I swear the McCain/Palin campaign stole from Fulci) wife is shocked to see her dead husband approach her. There is a spike in the wall right behind her and then watch how long this scene takes to develop. The pay off is great, and you can see this pacing today in gory torture porn like Hostel and Saw. There's also a head being shot off and glass from a window somehow finding its way onto some poor guys face. If Fulci knew anything, he knew that if you had to wait for the big bad gory moment, it made it all the better.


Click here to watch video


Fulci never made anything as good as The Beyond. For all of the crap I am giving it, the film really does look good on DVD, and Fulci was good a creating an eerie atmosphere and some really nice shots (I especially like the shot of the little crazy girl with no pupils on a vast and expansive highway) that created a unique, ethereal (there’s that word again, but it works so well when talking about Italian horror) mood rare to the horror genre. I would liken it to what Wes Craven did with A Nightmare on Elm Street where you never knew what was real and what was fantasy (and actually Fellini’s 8 ½ , too); however, where Nightmare creates an unsettling feeling as you watch, The Beyond fails to reach that kind of unnerving of our emotions. For example, Fulci never really takes the material seriously or really approaches it at all. Secondly, the Italian filmmakers had Fulci's blueprint from Zombi 2 on every set, so screenplays received very little attention, because they knew the blueprint for making enough money that would insure they could finance their next movie -- Italian hack-filmmaker Umberto Lenzi is a perfect example of this "blueprint theory", only working once with both the cannibal (Cannibal Feroux) and zombie genre (Nightmare City); however, both were arguably his two most famous and profitable films -- This blueprint causes the zombie moments of The Beyond (read: the ending of the film) to feel flat and passé . However, the rest of the film is daringly original, unlike most horror films of that era.



Some would prefer to see The Beyond as a really crappy film, but I prefer to view through the lens of ethereal horror that displaces the viewer, and it's wonderfully fun camp, too. I can see why Tarantino loved the movie enough to give it a midnight revival in the late 90's. The film has many charms, looks great, has hilarious dubbing, and some of the iconic gore moments in all of horror cinema. If you're a horror fan, there should be no reason that you haven't seen this film yet.

Fulci would go on to complete his trilogy with his other famous gore fest The House by the Cemetary (City of the Living Dead was the first film of the “gates of hell” trilogy), but neither film is quite as good or memorable as The Beyond, because of the tripe that Fulci was making in the late 80’s and 90’s. What made The Beyond so special was that it was so utterly different from anything being released at the time, and was truly the last great work Fulci’s name would be attached to.

The Beyond should be seen by anyone interested in film. It's amazing how under-appreciated some of the Italian filmmakers are. Even if they create stories that are completely incoherent I don't think that should be held against them, I think it adds to the strangeness of the experience that is an Italian horror film. Plus, if audiences today can praise directors from the likes of Michael Bay to indie darling Michel Gondry for creating films that are nothing but style over substance, then I think these Italian filmmakers like Fulci and Soavi and Argento deserve to be revisited and examined under a less scrutinizing lens.