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The City Of The Living Dead
(1980)
Dir: Lucio Fulci
The couple of Dario Argento films that I’ve seen, combined with this creepfest, have shown me that the Italians know more about spooky than Americans do. In an American zombie film, it’s a sure bet that a bunch of people are going to get eaten, and some zombies are going to have their heads blown to exploded watermelon. It’s fun to watch such a blood buffet, but have you ever seen the ghost of a hanged priest, telekinetically make a woman bleed out of her eyes and then vomit every last one of her organs into her lap? That’s Fulci for you. Just like with Argento’s work, there’s not that shortage of creativity that brick-walls nine out of every ten American horror movies. This movie is whacked pretty far-the-f out. It’s essentially about the aforementioned priest committing suicide in a cemetery and therein opening the gates of hell, all in a town known only as “Dunwich.” The suicide is witnessed, via-séance, by a group pf clairvoyants in New York. The priest gorily turns many of the townsfolk into zombies, and all sorts of indescribable weirdness goes down as a result of this, but what eventually surfaces is that the priest needs to be killed before All Saint’s Day, when apparently, the gates to hell will be propped open for good, and zombies will flood the fruited plains. This movie is not as stylish, or laboriously color-coded, as something like Argento’s, Suspiria, but what it lacks in these areas, it supplants with a sort of sleazy, seventies sheen. Fulci’s obsession with his characters’ eyes, and the countless close-up zoom shots of them that he uses to service this obsession, have the spastic urgency of a ninja movie. Fulci is not afraid to eat up some running time in the name of suspense either. During a buried alive scene, he drags you through moments of anguish, frustration, anxiety, and despair, eventually skirting boredom before finally letting the coffin open. The whole time, the treble-rich soundtrack is ringing in your ears like a frantic ambulance. It effective only in its absurdity, but it’s admirable for all the same reason. The zombies are also a little different in the Italian vision of horror. American zombies want to eat brains, where as the Italian-influenced, living dead seem keen to just rip them out of skulls and squish them. Playful little cusses those Zombinos! Here’s one last thing for your consideration: when an American zombie eats somebody, does he crap that somebody out? Like, do their bowels still function even though they’re dead? And if, say that zombie were to swallow a whole brain without destroying it (I realize that’s unlikely, as zombies are indiscriminant gnawers) and then digest it, would that crapped brain become a zombie? Would it slither around in purgatorial agony because it had no mouth with which to eat human flesh? Kind of Freddy versus Jason, but dude, what if?
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