City of the Living Dead

Released the year after Zombie Flesh Eaters, Lucio Fulci's horror follow-up, City of the Living Dead, takes a similarly dreamy approach to an apocalyptic break in reality. Unlike the shuffling, demonstrably physical corpses seen in George Romero's films, Fulci's reanimated bodies are apparitions, able to appear and disappear at whim. They haunt rather than attempt to overwhelm the living, appearing to them at inopportune or even nonsensical moments. Hollowed out children taunt their siblings then murder their parents, projecting a jealous, visceral hatred of those not trapped in a restless death. In this way Fulci's film, co-written with Dardano Sacchetti, keeps its horrors at a surprisingly intimate level.

Despite the promise of a metropolitan meltdown, City isn't interested in plotting anything other than a mounting, kaleidoscopic, sense of unease centred around a shrinking gang of interchangeable snoopers. Editor Vincenzo Tomassi, the star of the show, splices sequences that pulse with a violent derangement - the film races through self-contained, bubble horrors that stand on their own, each fluent examples of impending and realised doom. The best of these comes when Catriona MacColl's apparently dead psychic, Mary, awakens in her burial plot. Hearing her screams Peter, Christopher George's journalist, rushes to her rescue. Rather than pry at the coffin lid though, Peter whisks up a pickaxe and begins hammering down on the casket - each blow narrowly missing Mary's aghast, screaming mouth.