Question of the Day: What Makes a Good Horror Film?

Wow, I haven't done one of these in a long time. Since I've been thinking about horror films all summer (and will continue to do so) I was thinking about what makes a horror movie great.  So, what is it that makes a horror movie great for you?  Is it the comfortableness of the genre (i.e. the gore, the violence, the gratuitous nudity, teens in peril, etc.) that gives the viewer the kind of nostalgia that a lot of people opine about when they speak of horror films (specifically the slasher films of the 80's)?  Does it need to obey those rules or the tropes of the genre? Should it be sprinkled with humor, or have its tongue in its cheek? Does a good horror movie need atmosphere?  Does it successfully displace you and make you feel uneasy about what's going on?  Does it have to be realistic? For me there are a few examples of what I think make up a great horror movie (keep in mind I'm not saying these are the best horror movies, I'm just using them as examples):

Halloween: We'll start with the slasher film, and the obvious example at that, but it takes one of the primary hindrances for any horror movie (a limited budget) and creates one of the best looking horror films with its minimalistic and haunting score, and impressive use of the widescreen format.  Evil creeps up on you in the peripheries, and not only that, but John Carpenter places a lot of the initial stalking scenes in plain daylight in a seemingly safe suburban neighborhood.  Everything that screams normal and safe is inverted here, and it's all because of Carpenter's reliance on a classic mise-en-scene rather than ratchetiung up his film with false scares and buckets of blood.

The Beyond/City of the Living Dead: These two Italian horror films are the greatest, but they're perfect examples of what I like in a supernatural horror film. Characters come and go without any explanation, there is no sense of time or place, and the set pieces seem constructed out of Lucio Fulci's deranged nightmares.  Buildings are almost always abandoned, towns deserted, and people do inexplicably evil and nasty things thanks to ancient books being unearthed or curses caused by priests hanging themselves.  These two films are perfect examples of what it is to have an ethereal horror experience.  The plot's are nonsensical mishmashes of ideas, and the threads that connect them are razor thin; however, you don't watch Italian horror for its riveting story...it's all about atmosphere, and Fulci's films (I'll throw Argento's Suspiria and Pupi Avati's The House with Laughing Windows in there as well) are dripping with it.

The Descent: Here you have just enough realism (the opening spelunking scenes) that it gives me the willies just thinking about it (I'm claustrophobic); however, you also have a crazy-as-hell monster movie in its second half. Neil Marshall's brilliant horror film is a perfect example of how to do the monster movie right (have fun), while still maintaining an appropriate tone (something he couldn't do in his follow-up Doomsday) throughout the film.  You also have smart, strong female characters inahbiting this film, the "woman in peril" trope isn't as lame as it normally is because these women fight back, especially Juno, and they're give some time to create their charatcers so they don't just become props to be gnawed on by the crawlers.  Sarah, the main character, is given some heartbreaking context, and her past hovers over the entrie length of the film until we're treated to one a heartbreaking and poignant final shot...something you almost never get in a horror movie.  Marshall's film is also super referential, which makes for tons of geekout moments for nerdy horror fans such as myself.


There ya have it.  That's what I think makes a good horror movie: either play it classically the way Carpenter did, play is ethereal and nonsensical where it's all about atmosphere like Fulci did, or play it referential and have fun like Marshall. I'll be interested to hear what you all have to say.  Discuss in the comments. 

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:

Italian Horror Blog-a-thon: Links (Updated 10/31)

[Here's what other people have contributed so far to the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon. Keep 'em coming...you can submit a piece anytime you'd like during the blog-a-thon's run. I will continue to update this on a daily basis so that it will be easy to find who has contributed and where you can find it. Everything will be in this one post organized by date. I will try to keep this updated at the top of the blog. All reviews written by me can be found below this post. Enjoy.]

Updated links after the jump...

Update: I have class from 8:30 until 3:45 today so if you send me a link to your post during that time trust that I'm not ignoring you...I will link to your review when I get home. However, my Oregon Ducks have a huge game against USC today at 5:00 (meaning I won't peel myself away from the television) and then I have a Halloween party at 7:30...sooo again, I promise I will post links when I get back from that. I just want to quickly say (and I'll wax poetic in a longer post) that I have been thrilled with the results of this blog-a-thon. It's been great to meet new lovers of the genre and have old friends contribute. I'll definitely be doing this again next year. Happy Halloween everyone!

Update #2: Check out the newly updated links below! Thanks for these amazing last minute entries, guys.


10/31

Jamie Uhler, one of this blogs nicest followers, has a wonderful post on Torso that is being featured and the equally wonderful Sam Juliano hosted Wonders in the Dark blog. Check it out.

Elgringo, author of the fabulous He Shot Cyrus blog, chimes in with some thoughts on Zombi 2.

And last but certainly not least is Dennis Cozzalio author of the amazing (and influential) blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule pens an exemplary essay on Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, and some of the baggage that comes with a Fulci film.

Reviews are still coming in...I expect a few more updates today so keep checking back. A couple early one's for you, though. Chris Voss of the wonderful Celluloid Moon takes a look at one of my favorite Argetno films, Tenebre.

Also Jandy Stone of Rowthree.com checks in with her first attempts at the genre. I'm thrilled that so many people are introducing themselves to Italian horror because of this blog-a-thon. Jandy has some great thoughts up on Argento's Suspiria and Bava's The Mask of Satan. Check it out.


10/30

With just one day left in the blog-a-thon there are still some entries trickling in. Alec Pridgen (who has a picture of Reb Brown on his blog, so he's alright in my book) of the Mondo Bizarro blog has reviews up for Soavi's The Church and Argento's Phantom of the Opera.

Goregirl chimes in with some great thoughts on the classically named Black Belly of the Tarantula.

Samuel Wilson of the wonderful Mondo 70 blog (one of my favorites) gives his thoughts on the kinda-Italian horror/sleaze picture Delirium.

And finally my brother Troy is back from Italy and was inspired enough to write about the least Italian of Italian horror movies: Welcome to Spring Break by Umberto Lenzi. You have to check this review out...Troy has compiled some great stills and clips from the movie that will surely make you want to run out and get this movie. Plus it has Italian horror staple John Saxon! What more do you need? Get on over there and read about this so-bad-it's-good classic.


10/28

Roderick Heath co-contributor of one of my favorite daily stops, Ferdy on Films, contributes a fantastic review on Argento's brilliant Deep Red. Roderick and I share the same opinion on this particular Argento: it's his best film.

Another one of my favorite blogs is Antagony & Ecstasy, and if you've visited Tim's blog you know how prolific he is; but, what's even more impressive than the amount of work he produces is that there is an obvious care and craft that goes into each essay. Tim offers up his thoughts on what is considered the first (and most influential) horror film, I Vampiri. Check it out.

And finally today previous contributor Evil Dead Junkie has some thoughts on Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much.


10/27

Bob Turnbull of the extremely good Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind blog chimes in with some great capsule reviews.

Samuel Wilson of the fantastically entertaining Mondo 70 blog submits a piece on Pupi Avati's masterful and criminally underrated The House With Laughing Windows...easily one of the best Italian horror movies I've seen.

And thanks to my brother Troy there is a Youtube clip of Willy, the crazy caretaker of the sound stage in the movie Stage Fright. I mentioned in my review last Monday that you didn't want to miss Willy's delivery of the line "right between the eyes", and now it's online thanks to my brother. Check it out...it's pretty funny.

10/23

Neil of Agitation of the Mind makes it a hat trick as he covers the giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris.

Francisco Gonzalez chimes in with reviews for Soavi's Cemetery Man, Fulci's 8 1/2-esque A Cat in the Brain, and the famous Italian version of The Exorcist entitled Beyond the Door.

Jacob Burton of the B Movies Forever blog covers a couple of classics by also throwing his hat in the ring for The Case of the Bloody Iris, and Jacob also has some thoughts on Argento's seminal supernatural horror film Suspiria.


10/22

One of my favorite blogs The Basement of Ghoulish Decadence has a great entry up on Fulci's City of the Living Dead (a popular choice for this blog-a-thon).

And Michael Parent is back with some thoughts on Zombi 2.


10/21

Evil Dead Junkie, author of the wonderfully titled blog Things That Don't Suck, has a great review up for Fulci's gore classic City of the Living Dead.

One of my favorite blogs (maybe because Troll 2 is referenced in their banner) belongs to Tower Farm Reviews...two brothers who review horror movies (naturally Troy and I are trying to copy them with our blog Garbage Day), and back in September the brothers reviewed Lamerto Bava's bizarre horror film entitled Delirium. You have to check out the pics...just crazy.

Hans A. has been a good friend to this blog, and over at his site, Quiet Cool, he takes a look at an Exorcist rip off entitled Cries and Shadows. It wasn't uncommon at all for the Italian horror industry to latch onto whatever was trendy at the time. It's what killed Mario Bava's career. Check out Hans' submission.

Neil over at The Agitation of the Mind is back with another stellar contribution...this time it's for Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. Great stuff, Neil.

And last but not least today is Starmummy, author of the B Movies and Beyond blog...here are two links where you can find all of his wonderful and succinct reviews for Fulci and Argento. Enjoy.


10/20

J.D. of the always enjoyable Radiator Heaven tackles one of my favorite Italian zombie films, Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man.

Neil Fulwood author of The Agitation of the Mind gives Fulci's giallo Don't Torture a Ducking a look.

Erich Kuersten of Acidmeic Film has a wonderful piece on the style and allure we Italian fans love so much in a piece that looks to be a part of series entitled Bad Acid 70's-80's. Make sure to check it out.

Michael Parent of Le Mot du Cinephiliaque offers up his take on Argento's Suspiria.

Will Errickson author of Panic on the 4th of July has a post up on one of the seminal Italian horror films (and the one film that a lot people think was the catalyst for Italian horror becoming a pop culture phenomenon), Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters).

Chris Voss of Celluloid Moon has a write-up on Mario Bava's extremely influential Bay of Blood, which introduced to horror world to one of its favorite tropes: the dead teenager film.

Last but certainly not least is Samuel Wilson, a good friend to this blog, author of the always fascinating Mondo 70 film blog. He covers Lucio Fulci's finale to his Gates of Hell trilogy The House by the Cemetery. Check it out.


That's it for now. Keep the reviews coming, though. If you talked to me via email a few backs back I am still interested in you posting something for this. Just email it to me or leave the link here in the comments and I will make sure to link it up. I will continue to update this post.

Italian Horror Blog-a-thon: The Beyond

[Today I dust off an old review I wrote when I started this blog almost two years ago. There's no denying the cult following Fulci has for his 1979 film Zombi 2, but I think his best post-giallo work is found in this weird little nonsensical number from 1981. Enjoy.]

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 Fulci had a thing for shooting eyes...) and for how something could just pop on the screen (or out of sockets); whether it be beautiful shadow play (like The Conformist) or the bright neon and somewhat otherworldly colors seen in Argento’s Suspiria, Fulci definitely knew how to create an eerie atmosphere on par with Argento, and The Beyond is his supernatural masterpiece.


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 second film in Fulci's "gates of hell" trilogy (which also included City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery), however it was released before the unofficial first film of the series City of the Living Dead. 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 (he didn't want these films to be like his smash hit Zombi 2). 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(which is sad considering how good his career was in the 70’s when he was making interesting gialli). The Beyond is indeed the best of Fulci’s post-giallo career, 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 (the same book used in The City of the Living Dead…so Fulci was trying to have an underlying thread run through this “trilogy”). 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 these loooong moments of gore seem like filler, but sometimes they work in evoking a sense of otherworldiness that displaces the viewer and unsettles the nerves, but whatever the effect 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 (were the McCain/Palin campaign manager’s fans of Fulci?) 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 (especially post-Zombi 2) 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 one of the characters is researching the gates of hell, and the weird occurrences around town and in the hotel. He finds the book he needs (a book about the history of the hotel) at the very top of a bookshelf (thanks to the librarian played by Fulci, in a cameo), and as he climbs the ladder 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 so long that it becomes obvuous that two out of the four spiders have strings attached to them. Not to mention the spiders make a ridiculous hissing noise, and they chomp when they eat this guys flesh as if they were the Simpson's sitting down for dinner. It's always a paradox with Fulci, because the film is pretty squirm inducing, and when he wanted to he could really put the effort in to pull off a great looking gore effect; however, sometimes he just phoned it in as he did with this scene and the obvious fake spiders. Still...it's one of the most memorable (and was one of the most heavily cut) scenes of the film.

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 just so Fulci can have someone blow her face off (in what is probably the most famous death in the movie, and perhaps in all of Italian Horror). 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 to come out of the 80's.



Click here to watch video



The Beyond is full of wonderful gory death scenes, and that is why it's fondly remembered and was so fervently sought out after it appeared on the infamous "video nasties" list. 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 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 he spliced in the visceral moments with the deliberate pacing of his story – the fact that the audience had to wait for the big bad gory moment – it made it all the better..


Click here to watch video


Fulci, after the 70's, 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 Medium 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; 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 the producers had an idea of what would make them money: zombies and gore (which explains the zombies at the end of this movie).

Italian exploitation cinema has always been about making movies that are popular in other countries. It's why Mario Bava and some of the other classic Italian horror filmmakers become obsolete in the 70's, because Italian cinema was all about spy movies and cop movies (not to mention Cannibal films and Mad Max type films that would bleed into the 80's). The filmmakers for The Beyond were no different, they knew the blueprint for making enough money that would insure they could finance their next movie (based on Romero's success in the states with his Dead movies) -- 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 (he also worked in every genre there was, as did Fulci towards the end of his career). This understanding of how Italian exploitation cinema works causes the zombie moments of The Beyond (read: the ending of the film) to feel flat and passé (Fulci's Zombi 2 did in fact gross more than Romero's film, so it only seemed natural that his next film would have zombies in it). However, the rest of the film is daringly original in comparison (and after understanding the circumstances), unlike most horror films of that era.



Some would prefer to see The Beyond as a really crappy, nonsensical film; however, I prefer to view the film through the lens of ethereal, atmospheric 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.

Italian Horror Blog-a-thon: Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes (aka The Psychic)

[Today I take a look at one of Lucio Fulci's most underrated films. I had never given this film a chance, but as I was preparing for this blog-a-thon I knew I wanted to write about at least one pre-Zombi 2 Fulci. As you will see I came away quite impressed. I'm still receiving submissions and will continue to update the links throughout the week. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.]

Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes (known as The Psychic in the states) is pretty restrained for a giallo, and especially restrained for Fulci. This was the one legit movie he tried to make, and it’s probably his best film that adheres to a linear narrative. The clues are clever, the musical watch is especially ingenious, and the story has kind of a hazy, dream-like ambiance to it. It meanders a bit in the middle, but it almost seems like it’s necessary for it to be that way, because the final 30 minutes is an intense nightmare.


The film oozes with the atmosphere of an Edgar Alan Poe story, and even though the film is classified as a Giallo it really owes more to the gothic subgenre associated with early Bava. The story begins with a young girl witnessing her mother throwing herself off a cliff. This brutal suicide naturally scars the young girl, and we’re not quite sure the relevance of the scene until we flash forward 18 years later and we see Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neil) driving through a tunnel when she’s struck by a premonition. In her premonition she sees a blurry magazine cover with a beautiful woman on it, a broken mirror, a yellow cab, a limping man, and other bizarre images that don’t seem to link up.

Virginia enlists the aide of a paranormal doctor to help her decipher these clues. As she continues to have the premonitions she also has to deal with an odd feeling she’s getting in her new husbands house. She’s staying in is former residence and gets a weird feeling about a wall – she goes down into the basement and finds a pickaxe and begins hacking away at the wall. What she discovers is the skeleton of a young woman her husband used to be involved with. The police investigate the murder while Virginia tries to clear her husbands name with the help of the paranormal doctor as they both think that her premonitions will help find the killer and free her husband.

I dare not give away any more of the story. Half the fun of these kind of giallo flicks is the whodunit factor, and this is one of the best films of its ilk. Even though Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes isn’t a giallo in the psycho-sexual killer sense, it shares many of the plot devices and tropes of the subgenre. One of the key ingredients to any giallo film is to have an intricate plot that really only makes sense with a second viewing. Giallo films always have the protagonist trying to decipher clues from their fragmented memory – or in this case – a premonition. Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes seems convoluted as you’re watching it unfold, but a second viewing makes you appreciate the time and care the screenwriters put into making this an intriguing and enthralling detective story. The story is on par with what I think is the greatest giallo film: Deep Red.

The music is top notch, as it is with most Fulci films, adding an eerie otherworldliness to the film. This is something that is not uncommon in Fulci’s films as he usually employs the great Fabio Frizzi to conduct the main themes for his projects, and this is one of his spookiest. Here the theme at first just seems eerie in its subtlety (the title came about because of Fulci hearing the mere seven notes in the song), but as you watch the film you see that it becomes the films most important plot device.

One of Fulci’s flaws, however, is that he relies too heavily on reminding the viewers over and over at the end of the film that the clues that were presented in the premonition are indeed happening at the end of the film. It’s a neat effect at first as Jennifer O’Neil’s premonitions are shown through a blurry, funhouse mirror effect, but by the end of the film we really didn’t need to see it all again – it’s almost as if he wasn’t quite sure his audience was going to remember everything that came before the end. A minor quibble, though.

This film was Fulci’s baby. He spent nearly two years trying to get it made, and another two months overseeing the script meetings (which the screenwriters on one of the DVD extras claims was excruciating because Fulci didn’t write anything, he just told them what was good and what would cost too much money to shoot…or what would be good for a different film he would make), so by the time the film was made Argento had already released Deep Red (in 1975), and Italian audiences had moved away from giallo films and more towards the supernatural or cannibal pictures. The film flopped at the box office and forced Fulci into two years of television work. Of course things would work out for him as the writer of Zombi 2 saw this film and thought that Fulci’s talent was obvious and that he was the man to helm his zombie flick. I think that worked out alright for Fulci.

This is definitely a film that will not necessarily appease the Fulci fans who want the man responsible for the gore-infested zombie quartet of the 80’s. There’s nothing wrong with those films, in fact I think they’re all great (except I have to admit that Zombi 2 is the worst of the bunch…except the scene where the shark fights the zombie underwater....but I digress); however, there’s something criminal about the way Fulci’s early work is so flippantly dismissed. His early films have their fans, though, most notably Quentin Tarantino (who used the theme from this film in his Kill Bill Vol. 1) who said in an interview it was his dream to remake this film, and he considers it to be Fulci’s best. Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes doesn’t have the odd, ethereal charm of The Beyond; the ruthlessness found in his gialli Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture a Duckling; or the gore found in The House by the Cemetery and City of the Living Dead; however, I agree with Tarantino: it’s quite possibly Fulci’s best film.