City of the Living Dead

1980
Dir. Lucio Fulci

The suicide of a priest in the small town of Dunwich, New England, mysteriously results in the opening of the gates of hell. As fate would have it, it falls upon a reporter, a psychic, a psychiatrist and his patient, to team up and find a way to close the portal before All Saints Day, when the dead will rise and feed upon the living.

A hugely influential and much-admired work of horror cinema, City Of The Living Dead, taken purely as a stand-alone film, is a must-see horror classic and proves one of the most compelling and disturbing entries in Fulci’s undead trilogy. A languid and creepy opening scene sets the tone and mood for the remainder of the film as a priest makes his way slowly through a moody cemetery and takes his own life – his image will haunt the rest of the film, appearing to various people and driving them insane. City of the Living Dead possesses an uneasy, positively queasy atmosphere and the director not only creates a startling and highly nauseating array of provocative imagery to tell his tale, but also employs a striking range of sounds effects; guttural, animalistic and base noises scuttle through the speakers as spooky music by Fabio Frizzi swirls around to upsetting effect.

The film is laced with protracted and drawn-out scenes of squishy violence and bone-cracking brutality. Fulci seems to specialise in churning out extreme and horrific imagery that disgusts, horrifies and repels. The director delights in lingering shots depicting viscera and gore seeping and slopping out of hapless victims as they have their heads crushed or eyes plucked out. The wet, gory effects squirm and slither their way across the screen and Fulci’s camera endlessly zooms in and greedily laps up every grim and glistening detail. The effect of much on display in this film is to cause the viewer to recoil in disgust and repulsion – certain images will sear themselves forever into your mind: the sight of a woman regurgitating her own intestines, a group of people trapped in a rain of maggots, various pools of squiming worms, a man having a drill forced through his head, and the endless array of dripping and decomposing zombies that shuffle and clutch ever forward. Fulci also conjures up eerily beautiful moments such as the many shots of the town at night, lit through a constantly swirling fog.

Logic is banished and in its place is a series of increasingly nightmarish moments that thrust the audience into unknown territory: one simply does not feel safe watching City of the Living Dead – it is unpredictable, unfeeling, pessimistic and cold. Fulci offers us only one certainty: no one is safe. Much akin to Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge, and Dario Argento’s Inferno, City of the Living Dead features a loosely connected group of people stalked and brutally bumped off by supernatural entities. Fulci does manage to generate overwhelming suspense and unease on a number of occasions too, notably in the scene where psychic Mary (Catriona MacColl) awakens from a trance to discover she’s about to be buried alive. Hearing her muffled screams, Peter (Christopher George) begins to hack at the ground, and her coffin just under it, with a pitchfork – narrowly missing her head with each blow. The characters just seem to know what they must do and where they most go to stop the impending apocalypse - psychics and journalists, eh? Their paths all cross eventually and before long, their make-shift Scooby gang are bound for Dunwich to stop the dead returning to eat the living. Cue even more blood-spillage and bone-crackage...

City of the Living Dead is a nightmarish, disturbing and utterly unforgettable film, and must surely rank amongst Fulci’s most provocative work.

City Of The Living Dead (cert. 18) will be released a two-disc DVD (£17.99) and single-disc Blu-ray (£22.99) by Arrow Video on 24th May 2010. Special Features include: newly recorded audio commentary by actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice; audio commentary by actress Catriona MacColl and author Jay Slater; introduction to the film by star Carlo De Mejo; ‘Carlo Of The Living Dead featurette; ‘The Many Lives And Deaths Of Giovanni Lombardo Radice’ featurette; ‘Dame Of The Dead’ featurette; ‘Fulci’s Daughter: Memories Of The Italian Gore Maestro’ featurette; ‘Penning Some Paura’ featurette; ‘Profondo Luigi: A Colleague’s Memories Of Lucio Fulci’ featurette; Catriona MacCall and Giovanni Lombardo Radice Q&A session at the Glasgow Film Theatre; ‘Fulci In The House – The Italian Master Of Splatter’ featurette.

UK exclusive features directed by Calum Waddell and edited and produced by Naomi Holwill with associate producer Nick Frame.