31 Days of Gore: City of the Living Dead (1980)

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

I’m a huge fan of Fulci, probably more than Argento. While Lucio Fulci’s quality perhaps dipped towards the end of his career, it didn’t dip nearly as much as Dario Argento’s did (I dare you to sit through Dracula 3D). Nonetheless, Argento was the first to win favor with international film critics. Fulci, on the other hand, has been more or less relegated to the margins of “serious” analysis.

City of the Living Dead, a.k.a. The Gates of Hell, (not to be confused with Umberto Lenzi’s City of the Walking Dead, which will be featured later this month) opens on a priest who’s taking a stroll through an idyllic cemetery. Seconds after the opening credits, he tosses a noose over a branch and hangs himself. Cut to a woman screaming in a candlelit room: she saw the entire thing play out during a seance. The image is so disturbing she has a heart attack and dies. There’s more than one fear-induced heart attack in this movie, by the way.

A news reporter (Christopher George), is investigating the psychic’s mysterious death (slow news day, I suppose). He visits her grave and hears her screaming to get out. It turns out she’s not dead after all, but what’s even more disturbing is wondering how she survived the embalming process. Trying to make sense of Italian horror is the wrong way to watch Italian horror. The films, especially in Fulci’s case, are designed more like dreams than coherent narratives; the plot details aren’t important.

So the reporter does what absolutely no one else would do: he grabs a pickax and begins hacking at the coffin lid indiscriminately, the flimsy surface of which is mere inches from the woman’s face. These characters are completely incompetent, but again: that’s okay. It’s about the mood, the atmosphere, and the style. It’s about bending your suspension of disbelief so that Fulci can squeeze in as many common fears as possible (such as being buried alive) so that the audience gets the best bang for the buck. If that’s not a noble cause, I don’t know what is.

The reporter learns from the woman that the priest’s suicide has opened the gates of hell (just go with it) and if his body isn’t laid to rest, his zombie-creating superpowers (I said just go with it, damn it!) will destroy the world. Did I forget to mention City of the Living Dead is a zombie picture and a ghost story? In fact, it’s Fulci’s first horror film since Zombie (a.k.a Zombi 2). That film famously portrayed a zombie fighting a shark, a scene I still have no idea how they pulled off. While there’s nothing as cool as that here, I may prefer this one as it’s the second best film in Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy.

Fulci crafts a genuinely spooky atmosphere while the lingering shots of terrified faces are rarely done better by anyone else. The film is not coherent enough for the casual moviegoer, but it’s not nonsensical enough to laugh at in a MST3K way, either. It’s a haunting picture with expert cinematography and a gorgeous color palette. Definitely one of Fulci’s best and most entertaining.

At one point, Fulci attempts to top the eye-gouging scene in Zombie. In this film, a spinning drill bit is shoved through a man’s skull. It’s essentially the ol’ arrow-through-the-head gag, but the special effects team somehow makes the tip of the bit spin on the other side of the victim’s head. It’s a really neat take on an old effect. I love stuff like that.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.