House by the Cemetery

Blah!

As I age, I learn: I am beginning understand the appeal of Lucio Fulci, the Italian schlock director who, in my early days of Film as Art, I dismissed as a low-rent George Romero whose films provided only “pointless images of gore, nudity, and thespians who act with their double-barrel shotguns and explosives.” Those words came from my scathing review of Zombie, and looking back on that essay, I remain convinced that I provide an accurate analysis of the film. But I am now questioning whether such analysis is grounds for immediate dismissal. The bottom line is, Fulci’s films are dimly-plotted and make little coherent sense, and they feature some of the dumbest characters in all of the movies. But (and this isn’t nearly as big a but as I first surmised)… if when we eschew coherency and simply allow Fulci’s immediate, hallucinatory images to leave their haunting, nightmarish effects, we cannot deny the power of his filmmaking skills. Fulci was, frankly, unequaled at what he did.

House by the Cemetery is probably a better film to begin with in your virgin exposure to Fulci than Zombie, because it reveals a filmmaker far more in control of his canvas (Zombie was made as Italy’s answer to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and thus limited Fulci to his studio’s desire for an effective rip-off). It is a haunted house picture borrowing several plot developments from Kubrick’s The Shining, with Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (!) thrown into the mix for good measure, but Fulci sounds different notes that are not comparable to any of these great horror tales. Cemetery stands on its own, and in its best moments, it indeed reaches the surreal, terrifying power of Kubrick’s disturbed vision, through Fulci’s command of his visual skills alone.

Certainly we cannot credit any of Fulci’s cinematic achievements to his storytelling; Cemetery lists three screenwriters for a non-existence plot that doesn’t even qualify as threadbare. His actors are adequate at best, and their characters make as many silly mistakes here as they did in Zombie: At one point, a little boy wanders into a basement and is traumatized when he finds his nanny’s decapitated head; a few scenes later, he ventures into the cellar again, calling to his nanny, “Are you really dead?” We realize that such a scene only exists so that Fulci can shuffle us along to the next terrifying and/or gory sequence as quickly as possible, and if we watch Cemetery expecting coherency, such scenes will make us feel like Fulci is treating us with contempt.

But contempt might very well be the point, and this has to be taken into consideration. It was Patricia MacCormack’s invaluable essay on Fulci over at Senses of Cinema that forced me to reconsider my position on the Italian gore director, who trained under Frederico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini before beginning his own career in the giallo movement, the Spaghetti Western, and, eventually, schlock. MacCormack points out, “These films are about intrinsic quality, texture, consistency. For this reason they affect sense rather than intellect – confusion, disgust, suffering, delight at the pangs of horror are the qualities these films evoke. The screen is not the marker between actual and virtual but, in … the ‘osmotic membrane.’”

In regards to the way House of the Cemetery directly assaults our senses, MacCormack hits the nail on the head. If we can allow ourselves to look beyond the canonical definitions of the cinema as a form of storytelling, and if we instead focus on the way that we are affected by the raw, primitive images of horror and desolation with which Fulci consumes every frame, we begin to see Fulci’s strategy. He is not a storyteller. He is certainly not concerned with themes or morals (which would essentially translate into, “Don’t go in the basement!”). He is a craftsman working within film’s most demonic visual abilities, creating surreal, picaresque images meant to disturb our senses and feed our eyes with unspeakable, dreamlike pictures that seem directly ripped out of our most feverish of nightmares. One wonders if Fulci should have been a painter instead of a filmmaker, capturing stills that provoke his type of revulsion instead of working within the context of an established storytelling format that would seem to play against his strengths. Regardless, he was inescapably a filmmaker capable of delivering macabre images that long stay in the corners of our reluctant minds. If Werner Herzog is right when he says that we must learn to capture and visualize our innermost dreams in order to survive as a species, Lucio Fulci forces us to consider our darkest of dreams—dreams that we would rather leave on our sweaty pillows, as they reveal the chaotic nature that we would rather suppress.

Thus, the images of House by the Cemetery are what I want to focus on, rather than the nonsensical plot, which involves a telekinetic bond between a little boy and a ghostly girl, a father with skeletons in his closet (literally), a mad scientist keeping himself alive in a basement through Frankenstein-inspired experimentation, and, yes, a house by the cemetery.

Let us first consider the house itself, a gothic construction in New England woods. Fulci limits most of the action to the downstairs sections of the house—the living room, the kitchen, the basement, and the thick fog of the ancient cemetery outside. If my memory (and notes) are correct, only the most fleeting passages of the film take place in the upstairs sections of the house; the evil that exists burps up from the dark, walled-up basement as if it is a passageway leading up from hell, and the characters are thus compelled to its dread and spend most of their time hovering over its doorframe.

The house and all of its contents are covered with dust and decay; every movement seems to kick up antique dirt. In one of the most effective scenes, the new owners of the house try to unlock the basement with various, rusted keys. When they finally find the right key, Fulci cuts to the other side of the door, to an extreme close-up of the lock within the basement. The lock kicks up gray grime and rustles reluctantly, as if it realizes the secret that it is holding and fights against the key to release whatever it is holding back. Moments like this nearly make us cough up the dust: The atmosphere is so perfectly realized that we can literally taste this filth in our mouths as it flies towards us, unleashing its evil into the unsuspecting household.

Fulci, of course, is also obsessed with gore and extreme forms of violence. To say that he goes too far with his depictions of decapitations, eye-gouging, and slashed throats would be an understatement, but it is important to note that he is not working on the same level of slasher films like Friday the 13th, or even art-house gore-fests like George Romero’s Dead films. Slasher films approach their gooey violence with almost adolescent glee; we are meant to root for Jason, Freddy, or the satanic killer of our choice as he dispatches horny teenagers through the most extremely inappropriate ways possible. Romero’s films warned us with images of gore that served as important metaphors of American society consuming itself with its own violent nature. Fulci’s violence is neither jovial nor metaphorical; it is meant to fill us with disgust and dread—not because it is realistic, which it is not, but simply because he films it in a way that forces us to see ourselves as its victim. Reflect on the close ups that utilize of the faces and the eyes of the victims, the emphasis of their sweat and, more frequently, their blood as it drips in slow motion from their oozing wounds. Lesser filmmakers of the slasher variety use long shots that reveal the whole gore effect in its full, erm, glory. Fulci intentionally edits and zooms in a way that internalizes the gore and contains it within the frame. Fulci’s depravity neither numbs us nor desensitizes us towards its effect. He forces us to be painfully aware of the violence, to an unnerving degree of up-close intimacy.

Still, more effective are the quiet scenes surrounding the gory moments. I have already mentioned the rusty lock; there is also a chilling sequence in which the hideous villain is fully revealed, and as he walks in slow motion, dragging a corpse by the hair across the floor of the basement, the sound of a crying child echoes around him. Fulci has already frequently used this sound effect earlier in the film, and we are never clear of its origins. We assume it is either the cries of the main characters’ child while he experiences a nightmare, or it could certainly be a ghost. This scene, however, focuses the sound effect on the monster in the basement, and the unnerving combination suggests that it is the beast making these innocent, frightened cries. I’m not sure how to read such a scene, or if Fulci meant to provide anything to read in it at all. It simply is what it is: An image ripped from our deepest, most disturbing nightmares, existing on a plain where words, themes, and storytelling will never suffice.

Looking back on my descriptions of these nightmarish images, I see that I am failing to provide them justice. They all exist beyond words that can only describe without emulating. Fulci provides a great service in a film like House by the Cemetery by very simply revealing why cinema is so essential—because it creates reactions in us that exist beyond our ability to explain how they affect us. The film’s achievement is brilliantly contradictory: I never cared a single moment about the idiotic plot, the characters, the dialogue, and all of those other niches that critics always praise or complain about in typical reviews; what I can tell you is that Lucio Fulci has left me with images that have lingered, that have drilled themselves deep into my consciousness and left me helpless to their hypnotic power.

In his career, in which Fucli directed literally hundreds of low-budget schlock films, he produced three other gore opuses that have become cult classics, all made prior to House by the Cemetery—Zombie (1979), Gates of Hell (1980) and The Beyond (1981). I haven't seen Gates and I cannot speak for it, but I have recently viewed The Beyond, which is considered his masterpiece. I probably agree; like Cemetery, it is a series of broad, horrific brushstrokes, basically a collection of agitated and terrifying images strung together without any narrative connection, only a lingering sense of dread and revulsion that saturates the whole dreamlike wonderland. It eventually goes so far over the top that it dwells in a sort of plain that only Lewis Carroll would want to interpret, and there is something brilliant about the way it embraces its own surrealism without expecting it to make any sense to anyone. The Beyond reveals a director more confident and in control of his technique and vision, but I personally responded to the simplicity of Cemetery more, with its isolated location and quiet, gothic decay. I still reject Zombie, because it seems more concerned with replicating Romero’s images than creating new ones, and it consequently fails to deliver lingering visions of death and only resonates in terms of its gross-out gags. But artists grow.

In the meantime, here is an essay I never thought I’d write, praising a director I had written off long ago. Film critics grow too, and I will now stand in the minority with those who speak in defense of Fulci. Here was a wild, eccentric filmmaker who proved that a film can consistently thrive and linger based exclusively on its images and style, working in spite of its own silly and non-existent narrative structure. It is difficult to know where to classify Fulci: he’s not with Romero, because his violence exists only to proclaim its own existence. He’s not with Lynch, because his hallucinatory images do not provide clues to a bigger, clear picture. He’s not with Buñuel, because he lacks the clever, satirical edge that reveals depths in his dreams. He’s not with Bava, who was certainly always interested in coherent storylines. He is simply Fulci, who captures our greatest nightmares seemingly only to make us aware of them when we are awake. Like the others, great filmmakers all, his technique reminds us of what makes us human, even as he lingers on our depraved brutality. Someone’s got to do it; we don’t have to like it, but we certainly cannot ignore it.

Cast:
Catriona MacColl: Lucy Boyle
Paolo Malco: Dr. Normal Boyle
Giovanni Frezza: Bob Boyle
Giovanni De Nave: Dr. Fruedstein

A Fulvia Film production. Written and directed by Lucio Fulci. No rating, but contains brief nudity and extreme violence/gore. Running time: 86 minutes. Original Italian theatrical release date: August 14, 1981.