City of the Living Dead (

1980

)

For much of his career, Lucio Fulci was more of an imitator than an innovator. He directed a series of forgettable sex-comedies and spaghetti westerns before finding his calling in horror films, but even then he was more a copyist than creator. Films like Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) were transparent efforts to cash in on the giallo craze of the early 1970s. When that dried up, Fulci effortlessly transitioned to knocking off Dawn of the Dead (1978) with Zombie (1979). So thorough was the knock off that Fulci even passed this film off a sequel to Romero’s movie! There is nothing remarkable about being a mercenary filmmaker in Italy during the 1970s, still less so when you’re mostly working in horror and exploitation films. This was the golden age of the great Italian rip-off machine where every profitable film in the West was unofficial remade by sleazy Italian hucksters. But Fulci is a somewhat unique case among Italian filmmakers of this age and strata, in that he had genuine passion and creativity in addition to keen mercenary instincts. There is a reason why Fulci is commonly mentioned among the company of such giants as Dario Argento and Mario Bava, instead of being grouped with dwarf like Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattai. Personally, I suspect that Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy, of which today’s film is the first, is mostly responsible for his surprisingly lofty position in the Italian cinematic para-cannon. In 1980, Fulci was fresh from the massive success of Zombie (1979) and had enough clout to make pretty much any movie he wanted. He chose to craft a film that was not only utterly unique, but would go on to influence future filmmakers around the world.

Of course, giving Fulci unfettered creative control came with a downside. The story makes no goddamn sense; so I’m not even gonna bother trying to act like it does. The film begins in Dunwich Massachusetts with a priest hanging himself. Somehow this action opens up a gateway to hell, causing the dead to reanimate, people to go insane, maggots and worms to appear everywhere, and generally leading to a localized breakdown of reality. Such a setting and plot is a masterful stroke for Fulci, a filmmaker with tremendous visual strengths and serious shortcomings when it comes to crafting coherent narratives. The audience is going to accept a lot more nonsense from a film set in/around a gateway to another dimension than they will in a more mundane setting. Even barring that in mind though, there are some real wall-bangers about this setting. For one thing, we’re expected to believe that Dunwich is not on any maps, which is frankly absurd. Now, you can get away with crap like this if you set your movie in the distant past or even a sufficiently remote and exotic locale. It doesn’t work if you’re going for a Lovecraftian New England town. Even more absurd, is the fact that the characters in the film insist that Dunwich is built on the ruins of the Salem of witch-trial fame (a town that still stands). Even more perplexingly, several characters in the film treat the witch-trials as mythic tales rather than well-documented historical events. Maybe this stuff isn’t common knowledge outside of America/New England, but watching this as a Massachusetts native is perplexing to say the least.

Obviously, a portal to hell has caused more than a few civic issues for the town of Dunwich. There are the random killings, carried out by the re-animate/demon-possessed (it’s not clear which) priest. Naturally when these victims are dead, they promptly reanimate into zombies and commence their own murder sprees meaning that the town is going to get progressively more and more dangerous as time goes on. Beyond that though, there is plague of psychic disturbances unleashed on the town, which hits the people on the fringes of mental health the hardest. A twitchy pervert becomes a full-on lunatic incapable of rational thought or even anything more than rudimentary vocalization. Meanwhile the father of one of the girls the pervert is bothering becomes a homicidal maniac who won’t hesitate to kill to protect his little girl.

The opening of the gates of hell hasn’t gone unnoticed in the wider world though. A latter day coven in New York City found out about it when the psychic backlash from the event killed their medium, Mary, in the middle of a séance. Well, at least that what seems to have happened, but maybe the veil of reality is already breaking down because as soon as she’s buried Mary spontaneously reanimates. Fortunately for her, investigative journalist Peter Bell is on hand, and hears her desperate cry for help. Unfortunately, Peter has the intellectual capacity of a brick, and thinks the best way to get Mary out of her predicament is to bash the coffin in with a pickaxe, seemingly targeting the area closest to her face. Granted, it adds a great deal more tension and horror to the scene but Mary is downright lucky not to wind up dead again. Equally inexplicably, the rest of the coven decided that the barely sentient Peter and the recently deceased Mary are the perfect pair to travel to Dunwich and close the gates of hell. Reality is screwed.

Make no mistake this movie is disgusting; at some points, even comically so. Consider the scene where the four main characters are sprayed with maggots for minutes on end. Seriously, its like Fulci saw that one scene in Suspiria (1977) and decided that he had to one-up Argento if not in creepiness then in sheer volume of bugs. This is an exception though, and for the most part the disgusting parts of the film are played straight and used to great effect. One of the first murders in the movie depicts the demon-possessed suicidal priest shoving a handful of worm-ridden mud down a woman’s throat. A ghastly and terrifying image to be sure, but this scene will seem downright tame compared to some of the deaths that come later. The film’s gore reaches its apogee early on when the Lugosi-like stare of the dead priest causes a woman to cry blood and then vomit up her entire digestive tract. Besides that you’ll see plenty of heads split open and brain matter exposed along with a memorable scene of a pervert being killed by a vengeful father for daring to speak to his innocent little girl (who looks about 25, and is halfway through smoking a joint at the time). Yet, The City of the Living Dead is not just some splatter film held aloft by the virtue of its gore effects alone. Fulci has the uncanny ability to craft a deeply disturbing scene with only a small trickle of blood. At one point he shows us a dining room with dinner laid out, on the floor above a murder has taken place and the blood is seeping through the ceiling. Fulci focuses in on a glass of milk, turning slightly pink as drops of blood fall in it. Plenty of filmmakers have master the overt gore effects, and plenty more are masters of the subtly disturbing image. Fulci is one of the few that can pull off both right next to each other without diminishing either one's effect.

This is not to say that City of the Living Dead is beyond reproach, far from it in fact. Aside from the clunkers in plot, character and setting there’s also some pretty serious issues with editing. At numerous times, Fulci will pan the camera across the fog-cover streets of Dunwich, while a creepy synthetic score plays in the background, only to cut away to another scene mid-beat. Jarring doesn’t even begin to describe it. The only advantage to this is the fact that for most of the film we only hear bits and pieces of the main theme, making the moment it’s played in its entirety at the film’s climax all the more impactful. Still, there has to be a more elegant way of implementing this.