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. 

Conquest

Shot to express a swirling veil of shimmering data, Lucio Fulci's Conquest presents the sword and sorcery epic as formless and unknowably mystical - a series of brutal exchanges focused around the transient magics of bodily destruction. Fulci and cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa use double-exposures, smoke packed frames, and even shots aimed directly into the sun, to describe a prehistoric realm ruled by a golden witch and her army of doped-up werewolves. Our heroes are Andrea Occhipinti's athletic bowman Ilias, a trespasser from Greek folklore and Jorge Rivero's Mace, a brawny caveman armed with stone nunchaku. 

Each of these champions has been pulled from completely different swashbuckling sub-genres - two mysterious strangers with faint, Godly aspects. Ilias is the kind of blandly handsome, anointed adventurer that Ray Harryhausen films were often built around while Mace, for all his martial arts prowess, is less Conan the Barbarian and more a Cro-Magnon Cain. This marked wanderer is distinct and damned, wilfully separated from the rutting, pre-verbal peoples of this fog-choked land. Ilias and Mace are united in their understanding of, and interest in, technology. Both men wielding weapons massively out of step with their Stone Age surroundings. Mace's karate flail is confusing and compact while Ilias' bow, even before it receives its laser targeted upgrade, is like something from a completely different millennia. 

Mythic milieu established, Fulci's contribution to the language of pulp adventure centres around dismemberment - both casual and ceremonial. The director laces Conquest's heatstroke dreaminess with jolts of sudden, outrageous, bodily trauma. Sabrina Siani's constant nudity aside, Conquest frequently proceeds with the kind of numbed passivity associated with children's films. None of the characters - good or evil - operate with any great depth, each one-dimensional archetypes battering towards a light-show conclusion. Fulci's twist then is that Conquest dwells on, if not revels in, the minutiae of injury. Helpless women are pulled limb from limb, their warm guts spilling out onto their former grottos; allies are not simply dispatched, their heads are either caved in or spirited away, to power black magic rituals. A third-act funeral pyre - that heroic fantasy stand-by - is shot by Fulci to stress the second-by-second consumption of a human body. Fire licks at dribbling skin while plump, oozing, meat is cooked to ash. 

The Beyond

Another waking nightmare from Lucio Fulci, The Beyond traps us in a crumbling Louisiana hotel, riddled with rot. Unbeknownst to the owner, scrappy New Yorker Liza Merrill, the boarding house she has inherited sits on top of a gateway to hell. We witness the membrane between our world and the next being weakened in a sepia pre-credits sequence that portrays the murder of an artist, accused of witchcraft, by a chain-lashing mob. The destruction of this young warlock's body causes reality to dilate, the damage echoing across the decades.

Beyond pointedly doesn't exist in a logical, three-dimensional space; events in the film are knowingly flat, a rolling ordeal confined to cinematographer Sergio Salvati's Techniscope frame. Fulci's film knits together intense micro-incidents and the massive lurches forward required to propel us into the next hideous set-up. In this realm Fulci is all-powerful, able to arrange his props in ways that specifically cater to their slow, methodical, dismantling. As ever, these scourges are expertly constructed by editor Vincenzo Tomassi.

Tomassi employs repetitive, painstaking, movement and Enzo Diliberto's hyperbolic sound effects to suggest and amplify imminent danger. Attention does not depart at the moment of impact either - Beyond lingers, revelling in the revulsion generated by seeing a face pulverised in forensic detail. A sequence in which an unlucky ladder climber is consumed by spiders appals before the arachnids have even had a chance to burrow into the man's skull. The careful approach of the creepy-crawlies, and their lumbering, mechanical co-stars, is accompanied by a slow, deliberate cracking - a percussive note built out of, what sounds like, tiny bones being crushed then suckled upon.

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.

Zombie

Thanks to Italy's extremely casual approach to copyright law, anyone can present their film as a sequel to an established, successful piece (see also Ciro Ippolito's Alien 2: On Earth and Bruno Mattei's Terminator II). Although positioned in the marketplace to follow, and cash in on, Dario Argento's re-edited, pumped-up release of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Lucio Fulci's Zombie (released in the UK as Zombie Flesh Eaters, going on to enjoy all the video nasty infamy that name suggests) disregards insinuations about satellite radiation or Cold War biological warfare to offer a definitive, localised explanation for its returning dead.

Co-written by Elisa Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti, Zombie takes a classical, even superstitious, approach to the genre, presenting an epidemic that stems from pounding tribal drums and Voodoo incantations. On the remote, unlisted island of Matul the recently deceased are coming back to life. Richard Johnson's sweating overworked Dr Menard is trying to keep a lid on things by nursing the afflicted then blowing holes through their heads when they inevitably pass. The timeline isn't especially clear - although Zombie is technically superb the film takes a floating, dreamlike approach to plot - but, if Menard's wife Paola (Olga Karlatos) is to be believed, the Doctor's interfering presence hasn't just catalysed this dreadful situation, it has created it.

In Zombie the land itself is a character. Matul is a barely settled, decaying expanse that responds to Fabio Frizzi's bubbling, rhythmic undercurrent by vomiting up the bodies that have been interred on the island. The zombies themselves are one offs: make up artists Gianetto De Rossi and Gino De Rossi rejecting Romero's bruised, frozen consumers in favour of putrid, misshapen lumps caked in blood and shit. Fulci's film is especially excited about rot. Mummified Conquistadors burp up out of their shallow burial ground, their empty eye holes seething with bloated, blood red worms. It's as if Matul is rejecting humanity altogether or, at the very least, the snooping white settlers who've come to learn her secrets.

Fulci and cinematographer Sergio Salvati pack their frame with broken clutter and wandering animals, suggesting a similar sort of hemmed-in, malarial exhaustion as seen in Lucrecia Martel's 2017 film Zama. Like that Argentine period piece, Zombie posits a white ruling class hopelessly attempting to impose a pathetic sort of will on what amounts to a scattered, invincible indifference. They're not welcome. The land has no use for them. Menard can transpose a wealthy European domestic situation onto the island but the simulation cannot hope to hold. Matul's inhabitants do not want to share their magic. We are told that they have left their homes, disappearing deeper into the jungles on the island before returning for the finale as an undead throng, ready to break a dilapidated mission church apart with their bare hands to vanquish the invaders within. 

Zombie by Jeff Proctor

Mondo! Jeff Proctor's first stab at a Mondo poster highlights a scene of mind-zapping aqua carnage from Lucio Fulci's 1979 George Romero cash-in; variously known as Zombie, Zombi 2, Island of the Living Dead, Zombie Island and Woodoo. The UK release caught the hysterically literal title Zombie Flesh Eaters and ended up haunting the Video Nasties list. Repeated attempts to get the film a BBFC classification in the late 90s were hampered by obscenity laws - it took until 2005 for a full uncut home video version to be released in Britain.

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