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City of the Living Dead
Forget plot, character development, and themes. Remember: We’re watching a film by Lucio Fulci here, which requires us to get into his groove and eschew all of the standard storytelling devices of usual cinema. Fulci deals with nightmarish images of gore and macabre, strung together with the barest traces of story. His movies do not loiter in our minds when they are over, and they do not intend to. He intends, very simply, to provide us with ninety minutes or so of visuals that shock, repulse, horrify, and sicken; when he is done, he sends us on our merry, weary way back into the real world. The experience has left us none the wiser, but we have perhaps confirmed that, yes, getting our brains squeezed out of our scalps by a zombie’s fist would be a pretty bad way to go. Maybe that doesn’t seem like your idea of a good time. The truth is, it doesn’t sound that interesting to me either, at least on paper. Yet there is some sort of basic appeal to the films of Lucio Fulci that keep me coming back to his doors. His outlandishly dark creativity has inexplicably cast me under his spell. I think it is because of his consistent combination of absurd lunacy and genuinely horrific images that somehow tap into a place in our subconscious where intellect and reason no longer dwell. His films are the kinds of stories we live out every night in our dreams, where images run wild and randomly without any narrative or explanation connecting them together. To watch a Fucli film is to have a sort of stream-of-consciousness experience that emphasizes our imagination at its bleakest. There’s an appeal in these films that we’d rather not consider because of their depravity, yet Fulci forces these considerations into the front of our brains, at least as long as his best films play. I don’t think we could handle such contemplations much longer than that, unless we are shameless gore-hounds, but Fulci makes sure we get what we came for. City of the Living Dead (also known in its various releases as The Gates of Hell and Twilight of the Dead) proceeds like the little brother of The Beyond, which is rightfully considered Fulci’s best film. City introduces ideas and images that Fulci would expand upon with the later film—a doorway to hell, a reappearing priestly ghost, decaying zombies with the ability to appear and disappear at will, and a pending apocalypse in which, as a character explains in her best Romero-voice, “The dead will walk the earth.” Its set-up is rather complicated and eventually makes no sense (though it's at least more coherent than The Beyond), but it doesn’t have a reason to—the film is a series of scenes in which four or five characters stumble into one horrific situation after another, and we must accept it on these non-linear terms if we are going to allow it to work for us. There’s an early scene that certainly ranks among the greatest in Fulci’s career: We stand outside an old, rotting house on a windy, dusty day somewhere in New England. The sky is overcast and depressing, making the setting almost beautiful in its surreal desolation. Suddenly, a serious young man walks into the frame, and we linger on a close-up of his creepy, sullen face before Fulci cuts away to reveal that he is standing in a graveyard. We then follow the young man as he wanders into the house, which is a disaster of broken windows, soggy wood, and neglect. The young man briefly surveys the rot and then walks towards the far wall. As he does, something catches his eye—he turns his head, and shudders at the sight of a long-decayed corpse, still covered with worms and maggots. As the man audibly contorts in revulsion, Fulci zooms in on the corpse, emphasizing its disgusting, dripping gore. Now: Why is this man in this house? Where did this corpse come from? What significance does this scene have to the rest of the film? No answers are provided for any of these questions; no explanations are necessary. The real answer is that this boy walked into this house that is surrounded by a dusty graveyard simply so that we could experience revulsion and creepiness in what happens to him. And we do, and then Fulci moves onto the next sequence of events that will provide additional morbid payoffs. There is another sequence later on that would have made Hitchcock envious. That’s quite an assertion, and perhaps it is a hyperbole, but I honestly couldn’t imagine the Master performing this scene any better than Fulci, who pushes it relentlessly on and on in a way that continuously elevates its effect instead of undermining it. The scene in question concerns a woman buried alive, who awakens from a trance to find herself locked in a casket. She begins to claw and scream. Fucli cuts to the cemetery above. It is a warm and sunny day; a man walks quickly by the woman’s grave, and he suddenly pauses and he hears—is it a scream? Coming from somewhere underground? No, it couldn’t be; he shrugs and resumes his brisk to walk, and then he hears the sound again—a muffled scream. He stops, scowls, stares at the woman’s grave. You can see the quiet turmoil on his face—No, this can’t be right, he can’t be actually hearing the sounds of someone buried alive. He turns to leave again; she screams again, he continues to hesitate. The scene continues like this for so long that it should have grown monotonous, yet Fulci maintains its power by keeping the scene primarily above ground, so that we can see the man cautiously double-taking as he deliberates between what he thinks he hears and what might be his imagination. But it gets better. Once the man is absolutely sure about what he is hearing, the scene transitions into a frantic race to dig the woman up before she loses all her oxygen, and it ends with the man punching holes into the coffin with a pickax to provide her with air. The pickax descends, digs into the pine box, and Fulci cuts to the interior of the coffin, showing an extreme close-up the bladed end of pickax barely missing the woman’s eye. The man, oblivious to the dangers of his action, brings the pickax up again, brings it down again, and—I won’t give anything else away; I will only say that Fulci drags this sequence out longer than it has any reason to go, and it remains progressively terrifying the more he milks it. Because this is Fulci, and because Fulci doesn’t give a damn about his characters, we know that the pickax could just as easily gouge her face as it could miss her, so we literally brace ourselves with every swing. We don’t realize until after the sequence is finally over how Fulci has fiercely manipulated us, because we have been too caught up in the scene’s transformation from slow dread to ruthless suspense to care. Etcetera. The film alternates atmospheric creepiness and extreme gore seemingly on Fulci’s whim, and nearly every scene succeeds in what it seeks to accomplish. Fulci has many detractors in my profession—I used to be one of them—but I challenge any of my peers to simply shrug off the complete and utter effectiveness of his many lurid touches. Like the way the corpse of an elderly woman is always seen lying neatly dead, complete with it overdone funeral home makeup, even though we know it has been up and moving all over town. Or the superior set designs of the sequences in the crypt, in which rotting skeletons literally droop off the walls like human spider-webs. Or the priest’s corpse as it dangles from a noose, materializing anywhere a rope could hang, and how his appearance is continuously eerie in the way his dead eyes stare directly into the camera. Fulci is only interested in pushing the envelope of the macabre, and City of the Living Dead pushes as far as possible without ever compromising its unsettling nature. Yes, Fulci occasionally goes too far with his depictions of gore: There is a scene when one man drills through another man’s skull, and it fails to resonate with any suspense: It only seems to exist so that the director can demonstrate a cool effect and cater to the gore-hounds who adored a similar sequence in his earlier opus Zombie. The scene fails, as it did in that previous work, because we know exactly what is going to happen, and it thus doesn’t have the intended, suspenseful effect. We expect cheap gore, and we get it. Fulci should have given us an opposite payoff to generate more tension. Contrasted against to the aforementioned sequence with the pickax, which is terrifying simply because we don’t know what is going to happen to the trapped woman, we see the director’s control slipping for the sake of shock value. But for the most part, the gore scenes are flawless, like when a girl in a parked car begins to regurgitate her insides. This moment is effective because it is unpredictable, and it segues into a surprise attack from the undead that we should have seen coming, except we were too distracted by the grossness of the scene surrounding it. Other instances, like the zombies’ recurring tendencies to squeeze their victims’ heads until their brains pop out, are shocking simply because they hit us with surprise instead of giving us time to prepare for their gory images. I know, I know—this all sounds suspiciously like trash. And maybe it is, but that doesn’t undermine its power or energy. Let me put it another way: Have you ever seen Ron Fricke’s Baraka? City of the Living Dead is kind of like its antithesis. Fricke’s film was pure visual poetry; it contained no dialogue or storyline and was simply an exhaustive series of images from around the world, emphasizing various cultures and locations. Baraka was deeply moving, because it simultaneously revealed how large the world is and, paradoxically, how small it seems when we realize how much we are all united under the spirit of artistry. A meditative film that evokes images of peace and art seems like the last thing you would ever compare to the work of Lucio Fulci, but as I watched City of the Living Dead, I couldn’t help but note distinct similarities in the films’ structures. Fulci is a visual poet as well; City could easily play without any dialogue or story (it basically does anyway), and it would still overpower us with its sickening and disturbing visuals, which exhaustively reveal the more primordial pits of human artistry instead of its more inspiring creations. And the good news is, you are free from these pits as soon as Fulci’s film is over, unlike Baraka, which provides cultural images that stay with you. The feeling of dread that City of the Living Dead provides are contained within its running time, and during that time, we are surely riveted moment after moment with the most disturbing horrors imaginable. When it’s over, we have not experienced enough depth to allow elements of the film to linger, but then, why would we want them to? There something utterly brilliant in the way Fulci can scare the hell out of us and explore the worst corners of our minds without asking for a commitment longer than the film itself. Perhaps it’s something even more important than brilliant—it’s pure cinema. A.K.A. The Gates of Hell, Twilight of the Dead. Cast: A Dania Films production. Written and directed by Lucio Fulci. No M.P.A.A. rating, but contains graphic violence, gore, and frightening sequences. Running time: 93 minutes. Original year of release: 1980. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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