The House by the Cemetery

Free association filmmaking from writer-director Lucio Fulci that combines the creepy au pair of The Omen with the housebound, psychic maelstrom of The Shining to little actual effect. These lifts aren't conceptual fragments that fellow screenwriters Dardano Sacchetti and Giorgio Mariuzzo have plotted their story around, they're blaring instruments that are (infrequently) deployed to keep the film's wheels spinning. Ania Pieroni's babysitter may gaze longingly at her employer, Paolo Malco's Dr Norman Boyle, but Fulci's film has neither the time nor the inclination to suggest the beginnings of an affair, even when it becomes clear that a previous tenant of the building they inhabit brutally murdered his own young mistress. Lucasian rhyming couplets be damned then. 

Similarly, when Pieroni's Ann wakes early to robotically smear the blood that has seeped out of the cellar and into the kitchen, it may seem that she is being driven by some unseen, supernatural force to cover their tracks but, if she is, this lingering horror isn't above immediately trapping this governess under the building so she can be mauled by a mummified monster. Set in and around a decaying, Boston mansion, The House by the Cemetery is packed with clashing, contradictory ideas; all of which are being tipped into a steaming, maggoty slop, faster than they can congeal. As with The Beyond, whose original, Italian release was less than six months before this feature, Cemetery's stand-out moment is a truly tremendous animal attack. This sequence, in which a plump bat attaches itself to Norman's hand, is both alarmingly violent and, in terms of the filmmaking techniques used to detail the assault, massively distended. The fanged ambush goes on and on, battering back-and-forth between treacly repulsion and a more comedic kind of over-indulgence.