Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: City of the Living Dead

0:04 Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. What kind of creepy Halloween nonsense do we have for you today? Oh, it is a great one. We're going to get into some of that Lucio Fulci madness here with City of the Living Dead from 1980. Maggot Wind comes blowing in. It originally published Halloween of last year. This one's a whole lot of fun, one of our favorites, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

0:31 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:42 Hey, happy Halloween and welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is Rob Lamb.

0:47 And my name is Joe McCormick. And on this special Halloween episode of Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking about Lucio Fulci's supernatural gore dream. City of the Living Dead, released in the year 1980, also known as Fear in the City of the Living Dead. I think the Italian translation of that was the Italian title, and sometimes called The Gates of Hell. Earlier this month, I watched this movie for the second time with a friend of mine, and I realized we had to do this for the show. We had to make another journey into the with this movie for Halloween because this movie arranges its climax around Halloween according to, in the story, the prediction of an ancient prophecy that must be averted before

1:37 the dawn of All Saints Day or else the dead will rise to wrest control of the earth from the living. Now, I mentioned one of the alternate titles of this film is The Gates of Hell, and that title is also used to refer to Fulci's infamously violent, bizarre, beautiful, disgusting spiritual trilogy, The Gates of Hell series, of which today's movie is the first entry. So City of the Living Dead begins The Gates of Hell trilogy in 1980. And then after that, you've got The Beyond and Housed by the Cemetery, both released in 1981. The last of which is a film that we've talked about on Weird House Cinema before called and has a lot in common with City of the Living Dead, though it's called a trilogy.

2:24 There's not really any plot thread connecting them, but they're very much, it's a spiritual trilogy. They have a lot of the same obsessions and sensibilities.

2:36 That's right, yeah. It doesn't matter which order you watch them in. I watched them in, let's see, I watched The Beyond when I was in college, and then at some point after that, I watched House by the Cemetery, and that's That's one of my favorites. I've seen that several times. But I didn't get around to watching City of the Living Dead until this week. You know, sometimes it's good to have some Fulci that you haven't seen yet that you can always enjoy for the first time.

3:05 Save a little for later in the meat locker.

3:07 Yeah, don't be greedy. Don't eat all the Fulci at once. I don't know. I mean, the other obvious argument is, you know, you only live once. Watch all the Fulci you can while you can. But... It is a joy, a film like this, for certain film fans anyway. It is also a notoriously gory picture.

3:29 That's right. So a warning, especially if you haven't seen a Fulci movie before, this one, like many of his other films, is fascinating in a way. It is unintentionally funny in several ways. It has a weird, cranky, artistic integrity to it. There's a reason that Fulci, I think, gets a lot more academic attention and treatment than many other horror and gore film creators. So it has all of that, but it is also absolutely disgusting. I would not recommend watching this movie while eating or if you are sensitive to gore and guts because it doesn't hold back.

4:08 There are a couple of exceptionally nasty scenes. One in particular, I'm thinking of the gut emesis scene that tends to make people say wow out loud when they see it.

4:18 Yeah. And I should also add the caveat here that the gore effects in this film are very well done. So if you're thinking, oh, it's, you know, it's an Italian B movie. I can watch some gore. It's not going to really affect me all that much because it's going to look fake. But these effects are really solid.

4:37 I mean, it's a combination of great, just great practical effects work, great editing, great lighting, you know, maybe using a little bit of actual viscera here and there. as well uh non-human of course uh but uh but yeah it it's gonna be one it's not gonna be one of those cases where you can be like ahaha fake blood and fake guts uh i think the gore in this film hits pretty.

5:00 Hard you can kind of taste it yeah yeah you can smell it a little bit yeah so does this movie fit a subgenre i guess this is technically a zombie film right.

5:11 Yeah, yeah. I think it's accurate to say this is a zombie film. And, you know, honestly, that might have been one of the things that helped me out from watching it because I'd already seen Zombie, and I love Zombie, but I'm not one of those film fans that needs to see every single zombie film. I want to throw some Draculas and Frankensteins in there as well and so forth.

5:33 But it has such a particular flavor of zombie.

5:38 It is.

5:39 kind of a super, it's certainly a supernatural zombie film. So the zombies are, we're not sure exactly what's happening here. Everything has a dreamlike, illogical quality to it. But there's some sort of supernatural event that's happening. It may or may not be tied in with ancient prophecies, but it is also kind of a theological crisis and one weirdly brought on on an individual level. It's also, I think one of the really captivating things for me about this film is that The origin of the threat, the thing that is opening the gates of hell and creating the city of the Livingdale, it almost seems to be not a disturbing entity, but like a disturbing idea. Just the idea of something that is shocking enough that it, you know,

6:27 tears open the shroud that exists between our world and the next, that sort of thing.

6:33 Does this film have a villain element? Like a main bad guy monster? I've seen it several times. I'm not sure if I could answer that. I don't think it really does.

6:43 There is a figure that reappears frequently. And you could make a case that he's sort of like the lead antagonist. But he also seems as much as anything a symbol. Maybe he is kind of a ghost figure. He's certainly ghostly in the way that he is represented at various points in the film. But, you know, it's not like he's the general leading the dead here either.

7:12 It feels more like the characters are fighting back against entropy. The horror in this film is almost a natural process that is irresistible, like rot.

7:22 Yeah.

7:23 Yeah. Something has been unleashed. And if there is there does seem to be a focal point and that focal point is also perhaps the way they might stop it. But it is it's like, yeah, it's like there's a great dam that is rotting and there is a hole that is rotted out in that dam. And there might be a way that our heroes can can stop up that hole for a little bit anyway. But the rest of the dam still kind of feels like it's rotting.

7:48 But again, the picture definitely has that dreamlike illogical quality to it. So things will feel different. you know, highly contradictory at times. And this is not one of those films you need to watch and look for a lot of plot holes because there will be as many plot holes as there are in your dreams. Um, you know, and within the context of your dreams, those aren't necessarily plot holes. So like I was thinking about the guts in this movie, um, uh, you know, as, as, uh, as we were talking about the other day regarding Fulci's work, like Fulci's A lot of filmmakers will show you a lot of gross stuff and linger on some gross stuff, some blood, some gore, monster faces and so forth. And sometimes it can really feel like a flaw in their presentation.

8:32 Like they don't really know how to present things. With Fulci, it's definitely not that. Like Fulci is showing you something. And you might ask yourself, Fulci, why are you showing me this? Why are we spending so much time on this? And Fulci seems to be telling us, no, you must see this. This is important. Yeah.

8:51 I'm not padding the movie out or something. It's like, no, you need to look at this. It's important.

8:56 Yeah. This is something you need to see. And even if we never fully understand why we need to see it, we ultimately believe him. We believe that he is correct. We do need to see this and it means something.

9:08 Yeah.

9:09 We were talking about this off mic the other day about how There is a really singular quality to a Fulci film. And the way this came out is I was actually having a conversation beforehand with my friend Chuck, who I watched this movie with. And we were talking about horror film remakes. You know, a lot of horror movies, whether good or bad, originally eventually get the remake treatment.

9:34 And whether that's a good idea in each individual case, you can almost always at least see how it could work. whether you're remaking a great film or a film that had kind of squandered potential. There's usually something interesting in there you could pick up, you could put your own spin on, you could do it a different way. But I was thinking about how Fulci's movies are not like that.

9:57 It doesn't really feel like somebody else could pick up this premise and do it their own way or put their own spin on it. A Fulci movie, especially the ones in the Gates of Hell trilogy, are just exactly what they are and couldn't be anything else. Could you imagine somebody like, I'm going to try to do a different take on City of the Living Dead. That doesn't even make any sense. these movies are such a unique and singular exercise. And so it doesn't really make sense to like take parts out and change them. And also I think that there's sort of nothing there. That's like the core that has texture built around it. The texture is everything that, that the movie is.

10:39 Yeah.

10:40 Yeah.

10:40 If you were to strip this down to the bones, you would find that the bones are cartilage or, or something even softer, you know, putting your own spin, on a film like City of the Living Dead, it's already all spin. And I mean that in the best way. Again, this is not a film where character matters all that much.

11:00 It's not a film where the plot is this tight skeleton to be adhered to. So yeah, if you strip away what Fulci did with it, you're left with something else entirely. So if you were to remake it, what would you be doing? Would you just be making a beat for beat remake that would be useless would you be creating something so entirely new that it's pointless to even point to this being its key origin.

11:25 Yeah um i mean i guess you could take certain aesthetic inspirations but you couldn't really remake this film i would argue it would be like trying to dream someone else's dream.

11:34 Yeah i think that puts it perfectly well i have more thoughts about the guts in this movie but i'll save them for when we get into some examples of the guts.

11:42 Okay I guess we just got into why it would be hard to give an elevator pitch on this movie. There's not really a core idea. Instead, it is a collection of little obsessions. For some reason, several different people end up in a place called Dunwich where there is much putrefaction.

12:01 Yes. And one of the great things about Dunwich here, Dunwich, of course, this is an allusion to like H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror. Yeah. And On IMDb, for example, they list the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith as inspiration, though this film is not based on anything that either author actually wrote, as far as I know.

12:27 It's just kind of general vibes, I guess, and we get the name Dunwich. But the city of Dunwich in this film, I love the fact that this is actually Savannah, Georgia. This is, again, an Italian film. The interiors are shot in Rome, I believe. But the exteriors for Dunwich itself are Savannah, Georgia. So this is a certified Georgia picture.

12:49 And that's one of the things I ended up really loving about it because some of the locations I've been there, I've seen them and I recognize them. And now I haven't been to Savannah in a number of years, but I kind of want to go back and I want to take the Lucio Fulci tour of Savannah, Georgia now.

13:06 I would love to do that. Yeah, it's clearly throughout southeastern American flora and architecture, and it's supposed to be standing in for Lovecraft's New England.

13:17 Yeah, I was watching some extras on the Blue Underground Blu-ray edition of this picture, and they were talking about how, yeah, they got to Savannah and they love the buildings, you know, they have great character. Savannah's a lovely town. Um, but they also wanted it to be more dismal than it was. I think they were shooting, um, pretty hot weather if I remember correctly, but at any rate, they needed to be more dismal. So they, uh, they wanted to blast a bunch of, uh, like, uh, like sand and, uh, and or like, um, baby powder around to make everything dusty. Uh, but they also couldn't get a hold of actual, um, cinematic wind machines. So they had to get a couple of swamp boats, uh, kind of with the big, uh, uh,

14:00 spinning blades on the back of them, you know? Got a couple of those and I guess brought them in on the backs of trailers and fired those up and used those as wind machines for the exterior scenes in Savannah, Georgia, a.k.a. Dunwich.

14:15 When you said on the backs of trailers, for some reason I thought you were going to say on the backs of alligators, like draft alligator teams.

14:22 That would have been good, too. All right, let's go ahead and listen to a little bit of the trailer audio. This is one of those pictures from a time period in which we had so many great trailers. So I think we'll hear a little bit of the music in this and we'll get some of that grindhouse flair.

14:40 The city of the dead.

14:44 The living dead.

14:46 A cursed city where the gates of hell have been opened. You've got to. You must be close those gates.

14:55 We interrupt this program to bring you a special broadcast. Dunwich police authorities have declared a.

15:01 State of emergency. Effective immediately within Dunwich County.

15:05 All citizens are requested to.

15:07 Return to their homes as quickly as possible.

15:10 In case of necessity. Five, nine, eight, eight, one. All citizens are urged to remain calm.

15:24 Did you see, when you were in this trance, did you see anything besides that tombstone?

15:30 Oh yes.

15:32 I saw a priest.

15:48 Guess what?

15:50 It's All Saints Day.

15:52 A demanding, implacable enemy whose search for blood is never satiated.

16:09 All right. Well, if you would like to go out and watch City of the Living Dead, it's out there. This is one that I don't think there's ever been really a problem or a difficulty in getting a hold of it. you may find it still released under various different titles. Again, I watched it on the blue underground Blu-ray that came out, I believe, several years ago. I rented it from Videodrome here in Atlanta.

16:31 I actually bought the recent 4K disc put out by Cauldron Films, where it looks excellent. The cleanup on it is beautiful. This set is also packed with tons of great-looking extras. I really wish I'd had time to check out before recording this week, but as often happens, ran out of time. But it's got some Really excellent-looking commentaries and interviews, documentary features, and that kind of stuff.

16:55 Cauldron Films was new to me. I had not really paid attention to their releases, but I checked out their website, and it looks like we have a lot of cool releases out already.

17:02 Yeah.

17:11 All right, let's talk about some of the folks involved in this picture. Starting at the top once more, With Lucio Fulci. He lived 1927 through 1996. He was the director. He has a story and screenplay credit. He was one of the producers. And he has a little bit of a cameo in there playing Dr. Joe Thompson.

17:28 Oh, love a Fulci cameo.

17:30 Yeah, though he didn't have the beard, right? Or he didn't have as much of a beard as I was expecting. So it kind of like snuck up on me a little bit.

17:39 I honestly don't remember. I can't picture what he looked like in the movie now.

17:42 Yeah, I guess that's a good thing about a director cameo. It would not stop him from taking on the starring role as a version of himself, however, in 1990's A Cat in the Brain.

17:54 Never seen that one, but I am familiar with the idea.

17:58 It's very much on my list, but it's... That's one of the Fulci's I'm saving for myself. As we've been referring to, this is our third Fulci film for Weird House Cinema. We have discussed House by the Cemetery, and we've also discussed his fantasy film Conquest, which is one of my favorite Fulci's easily.

18:17 Yeah, Jorge Rivera as a leather diaper barbarian, just exquisite.

18:22 With nunchucks made from bones going up against werewolves and ghouls and an evil sexy witch. It has literally everything.

18:33 That one is magnificent.

18:35 Yeah. So Fulci is, of course, a horror legend today and a titan of Italian B-cinema. But all this really kicked into high gear after 1979's Zombie came out. This was a very prolific period of his career that produced some of his best-remembered films. But he had been directing full-length films for 20 years at that point, including such horror films as 1971's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin and 1972's Don't Torture a Duckling.

19:02 I think these are both considered JALO or JALO-adjacent films. Lizard in a Woman's Skin, definitely.

19:07 Yeah. He'd also done a Jalo film in 69 titled One on Top of the Other. Uh, but, uh, yeah, he directed a number of different genre films before the 1980s. Uh, he did Westerns, he did spy thrillers, he did comedies, um, and more. So he was a very capable director, could tackle various genres, but really excelled and found success with these phantasmagorical, um, Gore and violence-laden horror films. Like, it just seems like he really found his thing here. And again, that's what we remember him for the most.

19:42 Horror films that are exercises in spectacle, that almost seem to be comprised of individualism. paintings and images and and scenarios or scenes famously in zombie or sometimes known as zombie too because I think because the original title zombie was the title used in Italian for Dawn of the Dead and I.

20:09 Believe that's right. But you think too much about it and it's just like every film just needs to be called zombie and assigned it a number. And then it's just a simpler system for everybody.

20:18 A random number.

20:18 Yeah.

20:19 Not necessarily in order. But for example, in zombie, it's famous, whether you've seen the movie or not, whether you remember much about it, if you have seen it, almost everybody knows what you're talking about.

20:31 Well, not everybody. I don't know.

20:32 Everybody with a certain kind of movie diet knows what you're talking about when you say the movie where a zombie fights a shark.

20:39 Yes. Yes. And I think there's a there's like a topless snorkeler in that scene as well.

20:46 Maybe.

20:46 Yeah.

20:47 So, yeah, his films are full of such moments where you might not remember the whole thing. And certainly there's a good chance you don't remember the plot, but you will remember these just startling images.

20:58 All right.

20:59 We also have Dardano Saccetti, born 1944. He has the other screenplay and story credit here. Italian screenwriter who worked with the likes of Lomberto Bava, Lucio Fulci, Enzo G. Castarelli, and Dario Argento. His first credit was Argento's The Cat o' Nine Tails. He worked with Fulci a lot, including some of his most well-known films, including Zombie, House by the Cemetery, The Beyond, New York Ripper, Manhattan Baby, and so forth.

21:27 He worked on Bava's Monster Shark and Demons, and he was on Castarelli's 1990 The Bronx Warriors, so an important name in Italian B-cinema. All right, let's get into the cast of actors here. Playing characters who, you know, I've seen, I've read people say that the characters in this film are essentially ciphers. You don't need to really think too long and hard about who they are and why they're doing what they're doing.

21:57 It's not entirely wrong. They're almost like pieces being used in the little diorama play.

22:03 Yeah. but still top billing and in many ways are our main protagonists though i feel like the film kind of abandons them later on we have christopher george playing peter bell a journalist or specifically a rough around the edges uh almost noir as cigar smoking reporter i don't know he's not really noir but you know he's very much that kind of like bad guy cut corners uh probably womanizing report.

22:33 Yeah.

22:33 He's a wily street smart rascal.

22:36 Yeah.

22:36 Yeah.

22:38 It is.

22:38 We were talking about this earlier in the week. It is an unintentionally hilarious performance.

22:42 Oh my God. It's so often whenever he had a line, whatever it was, I ended up laughing. Yeah.

22:48 There's a line later on in the picture where he's traveling with Mary to Dunwich to, you know, to get to the bottom of things. And she's brought up the importance of all saints day and all in first of all, he, he mentions all saints day and talks about it as if it is something that women just made up and he's just completely dismissive of it. Like you'd never heard of it before. And then he, he says something about chasing your galloping cadavers. It's just, oh man, it's so, it's so rich. It's so wonderful. Yeah. Uh, so cheesy, but, um, still, uh, if to give Christopher George credit, you know, this was a solid, um, actor of the sixties and seventies, especially, um, He'd been nominated for a Golden Globe for his work

23:30 on the 67 TV show The Rat Patrol. Other major credits include 1966's El Dorado and 1970's Chisholm. He's one of those actors who is clearly more at home in a Western or a cop drama. But he also acted in his share of horror and genre films, including 76's Grizzly, 77's Day of the Animals, 81's Graduation Day, and Enter the Ninja. And in 1982, he was in Pieces and Mortuary.

23:56 Have you seen Pieces?

23:58 Yes, it's been a while. That's from a director we've discussed on the show before.

24:02 Yeah, Juan Piquero Simon.

24:04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we may come back to Pieces, or if not Pieces, we might do his film Slugs. Both of those have a, I'm not going to say a special place in my heart, but I have definite memories of them.

24:17 Yeah, Pieces isn't the most pleasant, but it has things about it that are pretty interesting.

24:23 It's nutty. It is nutty.

24:24 It's trying to be a version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but set in an urban setting, like on a college campus.

24:32 Yeah.

24:34 Yeah, it's a lot. So Christopher George here rather famously did not get along with the director, Lucio Fulci, though to be sure, Fulci had a very strong reputation as being just difficult to work with if you were an actor. Harsh on his actors. If we're being generous here, he's, he's, you would not say that he was an actor's director. Um, and, uh, I don't know, there are various ways to cut that apart. Um, you know, you might say that he didn't respect his actors or maybe he didn't understand the craft of acting as much, or maybe he really did sort of see them as a necessary evil for telling his stories. Uh, so you can easily imagine how, you know, how an actor who just, uh, you know, like Christopher George comes

25:20 onto a project like this and ends up clashing, numerous times with Fulci over various things. Like one of the things they apparently clashed on over was whether his character, Peter, would smoke inside a church. And Fulci was like, absolutely not. And George was like, no, this is America. My character would smoke in a church. And it was apparently a big blow up over that.

25:45 Interesting. I can feel that kind of tension between them just with Christopher George's on-screen demeanor. But Yeah, thinking about Fulci having a lot of conflicts with actors, this is maybe reading too much into things because I'm not an expert on Fulci's psychology or biography, but what little I know about him, I almost get the sense that he would wish there to be a kind of psychic photography where he could just put his imagination directly onto film and thus dealing with actors like other people and personalities getting in between your ability to realize exactly what you want in the film, like could be frustrating.

26:30 Yeah. Yeah. Like I've heard accounts where people talk about, you know, other people involved in the project about how he would get there and he'd know exactly how he wanted to frame a shot. Uh, he'd know exactly what he wanted to get. So it was like, there were so many aspects of the filmmaking process where he had much more control over what he was getting. And maybe with actors, um, you know, if he got on set and suddenly the actor said, Hey, I've got some ideas for my character. Fulci was just not the sort of director to welcome that sort of thing. Like that's just one more, again, one more roadblock to him realizing the vision in his head. Yeah.

27:04 But I mean, in some ways you could just think that film is not a great medium for an artist of that kind. A film is inherently collaborative.

27:12 Yeah.

27:13 So it, you know, it's, if you have that kind of artistic personality, it's like going to be hard to work in film. You're always going to be having this issue.

27:21 Yeah. I mean, of course that's one of the, the, the collaborative aspect of it. That's one of the things that often makes behind the scenes stories interesting, not just the clashes, but the compromises, uh, or the cases where the actor that's bringing the ideas, there are a lot of bad ideas they're bringing. And then how does the director sort of navigate that and, and sort of, uh, even manipulate their way into getting the best possible performance.

27:47 On the other hand, I am aware that Fulci had a reputation for having certain actors that he liked to work with again and again. Wasn't Catriona McCall in multiple of his Gates of Hell movies?

28:00 Yeah, she's in all three. Okay, yeah. Yeah, so she plays Mary Woodhouse in this, born 1954, British-born ballet dancer turned actor. Yeah, and she's in City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and House by the Cemetery. And she's often been referred to as one of Fulci's favorites. She's said in interviews that it was perhaps because she really did recognize the serious aspects of his films and leaned hard into the emotional depths of those scenes. Maybe she got Fulci's work on a level that other actors didn't. Maybe some actors thought they were above doing a horror film and so forth. or they were green and they didn't know what they were doing. And Fulci maybe probably didn't have as much time for that sort of thing. But

28:43 she's also pointed out that like, Hey, I might've been one of his favorites, but he still blasted me with a maggot filled vacuum cleaner for this movie. So, so being Fulci's favorite doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have an easy time on the set.

28:59 But it still like, I can see why she's great for these projects because she, uh, she's very good in this movie in the sense that any actor can be good in this movie, uh, because she is not like, she's not approaching it ironically. She's not like going for laughs. She's taking the role seriously. And she's also not half-assing it.

29:21 She's like all in.

29:22 Yeah.

29:23 Yeah. And I, I, I think that was the reason, one of the reasons that, that full, she really liked her. Uh, and she's great in, All right, we have some other humans here. We also have the character Jerry, played by Carlo Di Mezzo, lived 1945 through 2015, an Italian actor born into show business, musician father, actress mother, whose breakthrough role was the role of a male prostitute in Pasolini's Teorema from 1968. That was a film that starred Terrence Stamp.

29:55 He worked for Zod.

29:56 Yeah, yeah. This was back when Terrence Stamp was, he had a number of very, there are a few Terrence Stamp films on my list of possible Weird House selections for the future. He did some very interesting European films. But anyway, Carlo here worked with Fulci on three different movies. So Fulci apparently didn't hate him. There was this, 81's House by the Cemetery, and also 82's Manhattan Baby. And in general, this guy has a pretty nice footprint in Italian B-cinema. His other credits include 72's The Dead Are Alive, like that title, 75's The Net, and the 1980 alien knockoff Contamination.

30:35 Ah, I mainly know of that one because a sample from the audio of that film, I believe I'm thinking of the right movie, is used in a track from the uh from a recent album by the band blood incantation are you do you know what i'm talking i feel like i sent this to you it's like a metal album that has some tangerine dream in it.

30:57 Yes yes i like that release quite a bit i've listened to that a few times and i've actually watched part of contamination i it's one of those i need to come back to okay wasn't the film's fault it was my fault i just didn't finish it but i think.

31:10 I have a memory of uh letterboxd reviews for that film, many of which were along the lines of the best part was when people exploded.

31:18 Yes. Yeah, it was a little slow. But, you know, I didn't watch the whole thing and I do hate it when I don't. Usually I hate it when I don't finish a movie. There are exceptions. Oh, Carlo DiMaggio was also in a 1970 anti-drug movie called Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion. I glanced at this. Looks like you can watch this online. It at least looks like one of these anti-drug movies that is also very psychedelic. It's filmmaking style. So it raises some questions.

31:52 It's probably made by people taking a lot of drugs.

31:55 I think some people have given that exact review of it. Anyway, I like Carlo in this. He's sort of our third-tier protagonist, third-tier lead character. But I also get the impression that Fulci liked this guy much more than he liked Christopher George and was probably at one point like, actually, George, you're done. I'm killing your character off. We're going with this guy. He gets the girl. He gets to be in the final scene. Yeah.

32:26 So there are sort of four main characters of the movie. I would say it's these three we've just mentioned. And then also Sandra played by Janet Agron. Would you agree? Yeah.

32:34 Yeah, yeah. Sandra is also important. And we've mentioned Janet Agren before on the show. She was born in 1949 and she was in Hands of Steel from 1986 from Sergio Martino, the post-apocalyptic cyborg action film. She was a Swedish model turned actor who appeared in 1985's Red Sonja and a number of other genre films, including 88's Ratman.

32:59 I had completely forgotten about this, but you reminded me, digging up our old notes from Hands of Steel, that Janet Agron was the actress who did that absolutely bizarre Italian disco song called Teddy Bear.

33:14 Yes.

33:14 I wonder if we can get a little sample of that.

33:18 My little teddy bear. Give me, give me teddy, teddy, my teddy bear.

33:24 Give me, give me teddy, teddy, my teddy bear.

33:27 Gimme, gimme, teddy, teddy, my teddy bear. I kind of feel like this song could do things to you that that happened to the characters in Gates of Hell. You know, you're listening to this enough and eventually there is full on like intestinal amnesis.

33:42 Yeah, it might be the sort of troubling idea that awakens something like this for sure.

33:48 Yeah, that way lies madness.

33:50 Let's see. Oh, another fun, fun connection here. We have a character in this film called Bob. This is no relation, I assume, to the Bob in House by the Cemetery who is a small child.

34:02 I had the same question. I don't think that makes any sense.

34:06 No.

34:07 No, just happens to be two different Bobs.

34:09 Yeah. But this Bob is like an older, I guess he's a sex criminal. There's a lot of dirt talking about Bob, and I'm not sure how much of it we're supposed to believe, how much of it is true. is, is like is accurate and how much of it is just, Hey, we hate the local weirdo. Yeah.

34:27 He, so he's presented as a creep and he sometimes looks creepy. I'm trying to remember, maybe this will come up in the plot section. I don't remember now. Does he actually like hurt anybody in the movie? I don't know.

34:40 I think they just talk about it and where any looks creepy at times. So again, this is, this is not one of those films where, where you can really feel like you're supposed to feel one way or another.

34:51 Um, I guess I can't tell if he's actually dangerous or if he is being persecuted. And the movie maybe doesn't fully resolve that.

34:59 Right.

34:59 And the film doesn't give us enough ammo to really lean one way or another.

35:04 Yeah.

35:05 But he is played by Giovanni Radici, who lived 1954 through 2023. We previously talked about him in our episode on Cannibal Apocalypse, which was partially filmed in Decatur, Georgia. So another Italian Georgia zombie movie.

35:21 Hometown favorite.

35:22 Yeah. I want to see all Italian zombie films that were made in at least partially in Georgia. Now I feel like I have, I have a responsibility to do so.

35:30 But so this was the same year as cannibal apocalypse.

35:34 Yeah.

35:34 Yeah.

35:35 1980. Yeah.

35:35 So he was, he was getting around working Italian actor working in Georgia that year.

35:40 Yeah. Yeah.

35:42 Yeah.

35:42 Radici was indeed an Italian actor, played a lot of sleazebags and monsters. Uh, his credits include Fulci city of the living dead, of course, uh, Joe D'Amato's Cannibal Love alongside George Eastman, Michael Suave's The Church from 1989, and Umberto Lindsay's Cannibal Ferox, a film that proudly boasted that it was banned in 31 countries. Okay.

36:04 I didn't verify the story for myself, but I believe my friend and I were talking about this and he was saying, is there some kind of story where Fulci was mad at this guy because he was too handsome for the role he was supposed to play? He's like, you are too good looking. I will make you hideous.

36:20 Yeah.

36:21 Yeah. I read that he was or I heard in one of the extras that he was supposed to be a hunchback. This character was. And instead of having a hunch, he just supposedly walks a little stiffly in some scenes. But otherwise, yeah, he doesn't look like like a like a Paul Nash character or anything. So I can see where, OK, this whole idea that like the locals are saying, oh, that's Bob. He's he's responsible for all these crimes. That would almost make more sense if we were going with this sort of stereotypical hunchback outsider sort of a thing.

36:51 But instead, he just looks like a slightly coked up young Robert De Niro, which is like maybe that's a reason to blame the local crimes on him. But but maybe it's just happenstance.

37:03 I mean, he's like really in the film. They make him up to look really pale with circles under his eyes and greasy hair.

37:11 But everybody in this film looks like that at one point. Yeah.

37:14 Everybody except Christopher George, who's always suave and dashed.

37:18 That's right, yeah. He's always leathered and ready for action. All right, let's move on to a few other supporting characters. We have Fabrizio Jovine playing Father Thomas. Age unknown on this actor, but I think he's still out there, still active. This is the character we were alluding to earlier that may or may not be our chief antagonist. He is...

37:44 a priest who has committed suicide in a graveyard and in doing so has at least helped open the gates of hell.

37:53 That has, that has something to do with the opening of the gates of hell.

37:57 Yeah. It creates like the legal loophole through which the gates may open. We don't know. We'll get into this later, but he has a recurring role. He's almost, I kind of thought of him in terms of the character we would get many years later. of the chief Cenobite from Hellraiser. He kind of pops up like that, but sometimes more as, again, as a symbol as opposed to a character. Like sometimes he'll just pop in on his noose.

38:23 Yeah, exactly. He's not, well, much like the lead Cenobite, he just stands there to like look at you and talk while the horrors are unfolding. And he might not talk. He might just literally hang from a noose. The Cenobite does talk. The priest does not talk.

38:39 Yeah.

38:39 He just looks at you with those eyes. So this actor, definitely a memorable presence, despite the lack of lines. His other credits, though, include Fulci's The Psychic from 79 and 1980's The Day Christ Died, in which he plays Philip. All right, another actor we have, Daniela Doria, age-unknown horror actress who appeared as a victim in House by the Cemetery.

39:04 She's also in Fulci's The Black Cat from 82 and The New York Ripper from 82. She has a big scene in this film, a big special effects scene, one we have already alluded to and we'll come back to in a bit. It involves guts. We mentioned Michael Suave, who would go on to direct Cemetery Man and The Church and so forth. He popped up in Absurd, which we talked about last year. Oh, yeah.

39:32 He was in that as an actor?

39:34 Yeah, he was in it as an actor and also motorcycle provider. Oh, that's right. I don't think he was able to bring his motorcycle on the flight to Atlanta and then bring it on, I guess, the bus to Savannah or however they did it. But he has a minor character here as a victim. And he does get his brain opened up.

39:55 Is he also the mask guy in Demons?

39:58 He is.

39:58 I think that's right.

39:59 Yeah.

40:00 In fact, that is, I think, still his IMDb photo is him from that movie with that metal mask. I think he had a motorcycle in that one. That one was definitely bring your motorcycle to work. Swapping.

40:13 Now this movie has a grave digger scene to rival Shakespeare. I would argue.

40:20 Yeah. It's such a, such a terrible and trashy scene, but I had to look these guys up and I was not disappointed. There's, there's two guys. There's a blonde guy and another guy. The blonde grave digger is played by cannibal Holocaust actor, Perry per cannon and the other by seventies adult film actor, Michael Gaunt. Um, And they're discussing pornography briefly whilst digging the grave.

40:42 They're just like shoveling in a cemetery and being like, hey, have you heard about sex?

40:49 Yeah, it's terrible. This is one of those scenes where I really, I don't know if this was meant to be funny or meant to be funny in the way that it is funny.

40:59 Sometimes hard to tell.

41:01 All right, a number of folks were involved in the special effects, but I do want to call out, this is another installment from Gino De Rossi, who lived 1942 through 2021. He played a key role in bringing to life some of the more memorable effects in this film, which, looking at some of the extras on the blue underground disc for this movie, and they're quite impressive. He was talking about getting there, and he had the task of figuring out how to bring these ideas together That Fulci and the screenwriter brought to the table, you know, and there would be things like we need a window to explode and then the glass shards to embed themselves in a wall. And then the wall needs to bleed. And and,

41:44 you know, that's a great looking effect. It's an amazing looking effect, you know, and it's but it's so perfectly executed. You don't necessarily stop and think about that one. And think about, oh, what all went into it? It's like a week's worth of planning went into it and just some amazing details. So this guy was a true master.

42:03 We previously talked about him in our episode on Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. And he worked with everyone from Joe D'Amato to David Lynch. He was involved in bringing the Guild Navigator to life.

42:15 I'm sure in this film, the most common question he would get asked is, what's the deal with the Grubnado? Like, where is the maggot storm? How did that work?

42:24 And that's amazing, too. But that one is like a little more straightforward. It's like, well, you have a high powered vacuum cleaner. You put it on reverse and then you bring in all the maggots in the world. And that's how it comes together. You know, not all the effects in this movie are sort of like that blatant there.

42:43 Like I say, there's a there's some excellent use of like mixing prosthetic and live action and then cutting it just right so that everything feels believable. But yeah, the effects in this film are really good. And another great thing about this movie is, of course.

43:00 Its music.

43:01 It's a score by Fabio Frizi, born 1951. This is, as far as I'm concerned, Italo horror disco at its absolute finest.

43:10 Really great. I love the score to this movie. And it's varied, you know, a lot of different tones. There are parts of it. So, yes, it has the disco elements, some with like the Almost the Thing-style thudding bass, that sort of ominous driving pulse. So I see disco elements. I see more of electronic synth score elements. And then there are parts that almost feel like occult folk rock.

43:39 There are parts where it sounds like a pentangle song. And I think that, what's her name? Jackie Shee is about to come in singing.

43:46 Yeah. Yeah, the score is highly effective, but it's also, it's funky, it's brooding, it's surreal and dreamlike. You know, some of you out there, your squares might be saying, oh, disco's dead, right? No, no, no. Disco is undead, and it's coming through your precious guts in this movie. That's good.

44:05 By the way, did I just say, I think I accidentally called her Jackie Shee, Jackie McShee of Pentangle, the singer in Pentangle.

44:12 This is the British folk band, right? Yeah, yeah.

44:14 With that comparison, I'm thinking particularly of The parts in the soundtrack here where like the acoustic guitar, the dissonant acoustic guitar riff comes.

44:26 In.

44:26 And you can just imagine she's about to come in with the witchy vocals like on the moonlit night. But yeah.

44:33 OK. Yeah, I definitely see what you're saying there. Yeah.

44:35 Yeah.

44:36 And then we do get some just weird. I don't know how much of this is the score or just the sound design, but we get some like weird sort of like a zombie moans thrown at times as well.

44:46 A lot of soundscapes, yeah.

44:47 Yeah, some great soundscapes. And, you know, given that Fabio Frizzi worked on several Fulci movies, so he worked on The Beyond, Zombie, The Psychic, A Cat in the Brain, Manhattan Baby, a couple of his westerns, and then one of his action films, I think there's a strong case to be made that Frizzi's sound here is just a key part of the overall Fulci vibe, you know?

45:09 Yeah, yeah, I agree. Much in the same way that I think even though the scores in John Carpenter movies do get a lot of attention. I think people still underestimate how much the feeling they associate with the John Carpenter movie is about the music that like the music is almost like half of the effect of a John Carpenter film. Yeah.

45:32 It's just such an important part of the flavor. Absolutely. So this is one, for example, I've been listening to parts of the score for years. Uh, it's, it often pops up in mixes, uh, that I listened to. So, uh, yeah, it, it, It really it really has a life outside of this movie. But it is also clearly an essential part of this movie.

45:51 Yeah. OK, are you ready to talk about the plot?

46:03 Let's talk about the plot of The Living Dead.

46:05 To the extent there is a plot. I think the way I want to approach it this time, we'll see how it goes. is to narrate the beginning, maybe the first third, in some detail, and then kind of summarize the rest, and then we can zoom in on some particular scenes within that summary. So the film opens with a heart-stopping scream in the dark, and then the credits play over panning footage of an eerie location. It is a hazy, deserted cemetery, clearly in the southern United States.

46:37 You can see Spanish moss hanging from the trees in the distance. though I think, again, the story is supposed to be somewhere in New England. The music here is something we will hear several times in the film. At this point, it is a slow, dreadful march with a languid beat accented on the snare drum, dark chords, and a loopy flanger effect kind of zipping up and down throughout the song. And at first, the cemetery appears to be completely empty. There's nothing here but headstones and mist.

47:06 But eventually, we see the figure of a man, far off in the distance, step out from behind one of the larger grave markers. He is dressed in black, and he strolls slowly toward the camera. We cut to a close-up, and now we can see the man is a priest in a black clerical shirt with a white tab collar, and he looks morose with red raw skin on the undersides of his eyes. And then text on screen tells us this is Dunwich. Obviously, again, a nod to Lovecraft.

47:37 I think the Dunwich is all lowercase. Interesting choice on the the typeface there. Then the music playing underneath gets a new layer. We add in a thin noodling electric guitar for a more psychedelic rock layer on top of what we're already hearing. And the camera zooms on a particular gravestone, which reads, and this is verbatim, the soul that pines for eternity shall outspan death. You dweller of the twilight void come Dunwich. Yeah.

48:09 This is one that this will reappear at different points in the picture. And, um, I'm still trying to figure out what it means.

48:16 I mean, I, I like the phrasing, especially the second sentence you dweller of the twilight void come done, which it feels like it's missing a preposition somewhere or I I'm not sure.

48:27 But, uh, yeah, that's what it says.

48:29 Uh, and, uh, then the priest wanders past this gravestone, looks up at a branch in one of the trees overhead. And then we cut to, now text tells us we're in New York City. We drop in on a seance. There are several people gathered around a table in a dimly lit room, surrounded by black shrouds and flickering candles.

48:51 The people spread their hands flat on the tabletop, and a woman from the group appears to be having an encounter with a spirit. This woman has a pale face with lank, almost wet-looking long hair framing it, I think she's supposed to give the impression of someone carrying a great mental burden, suffering inside. This is Catriona McCall playing Mary Woodhouse. When we first see her, her eyes are peeled wide open and she's trembling madly. in terror and awe.

49:21 And she whispers, I see, I see. And then next to her at the table, a medium is speaking. And the medium says, the contact is entered. The contact, the contact. And then we see Mary's vision somewhere else in daylight, surrounded by treetops. A hemp noose is thrown over the branch of an Oak tree. And then the priest we saw from the prologue comes into frame, he slips the noose over his head and then drops. Uh, and this is when we start to get that, that pretty, uh, sick dissonant acoustic guitar riff. The thing I was saying sounds like pentangle or something like that.

49:57 Yeah.

49:58 It's great. Uh, so in the vision, the priest has hanged himself in the church yard and then the camera pans down to the grounds of the cemetery, grassy and littered with dead leaves. And from the plot, in front of an old tombstone, the earth begins to swell and then fold away. And up from the soil rises a dead body, dark, rotten, and expressionless, coming back from its rest in a mockery of life.

50:26 And we don't know exactly why or how this is occurring. This is one of the great sort of cryptic dreamlike aspects of this movie is that Is it just this disturbing idea itself has opened up the gates of hell? Is it some sort of theological legal loophole that allows the gates of hell to open? We don't know, and we'll never know. We can never fully understand these supernatural mysteries.

50:52 So then Mary, in the room in New York, begins to channel a message, or at least describe something. She's gasping, and she shouts,' The dead! I see the dead! The city of the dead!' and foam drips from her mouth. She looks frenzied, and then she lets out a shriek, falls away from the table, and collapses on the floor.

51:12 And then lying there on the floor, she's writhing in agony, and a bizarre soundscape unfolds. It sounds to me like a combination of wind howling, a baby crying, birds chirping, and wild animals grunting and making other noises. While she's having this attack, We see more visions. The camera pans over the Dunwich Cemetery at night now and comes to rest again on that headstone with the message we saw earlier.

51:39 You dweller of the twilight void come Dunwich. And suddenly we cut to later. Mary's body lies on a couch, apparently dead. She's frozen, eyes open, staring at the ceiling, not breathing. And there's a guy here holding two fingers to her throat and he says, I'm afraid Mary's dead.

51:59 Yeah.

52:01 The medium from the seance then screams, no, and begins to sob. And we see the body taken away in an ambulance. And then immediately, next thing, police are on the scene. They're investigating. And the detective here is so funny. He's just so exaggeratedly suspicious of everyone, pacing the room in a trench coat, spitting venom at all of the traumatized spiritualists. I transcribed his line here. He says, all right, maybe I've got no imagination, but your story is a little tough to swallow. And then he goes up to one random guy in the room. We don't know who this guy is or like why he's there, but he just goes up to this random guy and gets in his face and says, James McLuhan busted twice for peddling

52:47 and possession. And you expect me to believe that Mary Woodhouse died out of sheer fright while you were having a seance? The guy says, mm-hmm. okay, fellas, you help us. We'll help you. What were you on? Coke grass. Where's the stash down the toilet?

53:08 Yeah. Yeah. This, this, uh, detective knows that clearly hippies is the answer. That's what happened here. Hippies were doing drugs and that's all there is to it.

53:18 Mary died of, of, of acute grass exposure. They flushed the, they flushed the stash down the toilet. Um, So he starts interrogating the medium here, who is named the Great Teresa. And they talk about how, according to the Great Teresa, Mary died because of a book called the Book of Enoch, which they say was written 4,000 years ago. Now, I want to note that there is a real ancient text called the Book of Enoch, sometimes called the First Enoch, I guess because there's more than one. The first Enoch is a Jewish apocalyptic text from sometime in the first few centuries BCE, so not 4,000 years old, more like two, a little more than 2,000 years old. The actual Book of Enoch is really interesting. I'd love to find a

54:06 reason to come back and talk about it on the show someday. It's got wild dream visions in it and stuff. One's called The Animal Apocalypse. But as far as I can tell, the Book of Enoch in this movie has no resemblance to and nothing to do with the real text.

54:21 Yeah, it's more like, say, the Book of Ebeon or the Necronomicon or something from the world of weird fiction.

54:30 Right.

54:30 So the great Teresa explains that somehow this 4,000-year-old book described what happened to Mary in every detail in advance.

54:40 Hmm.

54:41 I would love to see what the text said. It was like, so there was a seance gathered in New York City. But the detective says to her, lady, you're either on grass or you're pulling my leg. And Teresa says to him, the problem is in your mind, but I'll help you. In the book of Enoch, the killer is, but before she can say, they are interrupted by something.

55:06 I would love to know how you would describe this, Robin.

55:09 It's like demon fire.

55:10 Yeah.

55:11 Yeah.

55:11 It's a ball of fire that belches itself out of thin air in the middle of the room, coming up from the floor, rising toward the ceiling, moaning while it rises. And then it reverses the footage and sucks itself back into another dimension.

55:26 Yeah.

55:27 Oh, and there's a great point. There's like a uniformed cop next to the detective here. And he points, he says, it came out of the floor. Yeah. And the police ask, you know, they're like, well, what's going on in the apartment below here? Apparently it's just vacant, abandoned apartment. And the detective is enraged. He's like, you know, these fireball belching pranks, they're not going to work on me. I'm going to get to the bottom of this. And Teresa here, I wrote down what she said. This is an exact quote.

55:56 First of all, she kind of taunts him. She's like, keep refusing the truth if you must. But then she says, at this very precise moment in some other distant town, horrendously awful things are happening.

56:09 It's true. It's true. Now, for those of you hoping that this film will be a police procedural, we're really not going to see much more from the detectives.

56:17 Oh yeah.

56:18 I was thinking the first time I saw this, I was like, okay, here's our main character.

56:22 But now this, this investigation is going nowhere.

56:25 Uh, so after this, we smash cut to Bob. What, what can we say about Bob? Uh, You know, actually, I think the first time I saw him, I thought, wait, is this guy a zombie? But no, he is a living human. He is presented as the town creep. I guess, as we mentioned earlier, it's not clear exactly to what extent he is like actually an awful creep or he is being falsely accused and persecuted by the townspeople.

56:53 Yeah, yeah. But he is definitely made up in almost zombie-like fashion. Or this would be zombie- makeup in many other movies in this film it's not anywhere near gross enough.

57:04 Right so pale almost like kind of green skin uh greasy hair dark circles under his eyes he looks like he lives on the food that the computer supplies and i have no mouth and i must scream uh like maybe like they only let him sleep for five minutes a week hanging upside down yeah it's pretty rough looking yeah and so when we meet him i guess that's fulci trying to overcompensate for him being too handsome yeah So we meet him standing in the middle of a field with wind whipping crazily around him and the sound of ravens calling from above. And he's staring off into the distance, looking half pitiful, half malicious. Again, he's sort of always balanced right on the edge between being somebody we're afraid for and somebody we're afraid of. And then

57:49 Bob turns into the wind and walks toward a big wooden house, um, I'm not sure how to describe this building. It's like raised up on beams above the ground. So I guess it's built in a place where flooding is likely. And based on the flora and sandy soil, it looks like a coastal area. So this may be around Savannah.

58:09 I don't know why, but I was thinking this looks like the service building attached to an abandoned alligator farm.

58:17 Yeah. Yeah.

58:18 Well, whatever it is, it does have some stained glass windows that we see later. And whatever it is, it seems to have been left behind by its original owners, and now it belongs to Bob. It's his squatter pad. Bob staggers inside, goes into a room, and finds a deflated blow-up doll of a woman on the floor. And then he tosses it across the room, and it instantly inflates itself, as if by sorcery.

58:44 Yeah, and I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be sorcery, or if this is something that this doll is supposed to do on its own. I don't know.

58:52 I don't know. It's like an emergency instant inflate. It's like those, you know, life rafts.

58:58 I guess so.

58:59 For emergencies only. Bob makes some creepy faces at the inflatable doll and kind of has himself a little chuckle and then walks up and grabs the doll. But then... looks across the room and sees something horrifying. On the floor, a human-shaped mass of slimy, rotten flesh covered entirely in exposed pink blood vessels and wriggling worms. And Bob is afraid.

59:25 I have no idea what's going on here. This is definitely dreamlike. disturbing imagery. But I don't know what these two things have to do with each other.

59:35 We cut away from this. Something else. Let's see something else. Let's go back to New York. Here we meet a new character. Finally, it's time for Peter Bell, played by Christopher George. Bell is sarcastic, streetwise. He's a reporter with a nose for a good story and an amoral skill set for chasing these stories down. He arrives on the scene of the seance death, wanting to get into the apartment to get some more details. He tries to bribe a cop at the door to get in there, but no luck. So no worries, he will find another way to run down this lead. And then we pop away to yet another location that will recur in the film.

1:00:11 This time we're at Junie's Lounge, which seems to be the townie bar in Dunwich. Did you get that feeling?

1:00:18 Yeah, yeah. This is... The local watering hole. Not a classy place, but this is where life happens.

1:00:27 It's got a package shop attached to it, right on the side of the bar. That's an interesting setup.

1:00:34 This is, I guess, wherever Dunwich is actually supposed to be. These are the county liquor laws, I guess.

1:00:41 What's your read on the food at Junie's? Do you think they have good food there?

1:00:45 I think they barely have food. I imagine it's literal packets of peanuts.

1:00:49 Yeah, probably. So, yeah, it's in the middle of the afternoon. The bartender is unpacking pallets of canned beer, and two guys are sitting at the bar drinking, I'm going to guess, Miller High Life, and they're talking local gossip. Suddenly, there is a crashing sound, and across the room, a mirror on the wall shatters, and we get a stab of high-pitched tones, and the three men wander over to look at the cracked mirror, and one of the men It says, you know something? Ever since Father Thomas hanged himself, Dunwich ain't been the same. It's kind of scary. So I guess they're attributing the sudden crash and the crack of the mirror to Father Thomas, I suppose.

1:01:31 I think just a lot of weird things, unexplainable things have been happening around here. And they're like, it didn't happen before that tragic suicide.

1:01:41 Yeah.

1:01:41 But the bartender, he tries to calm them. He's like, there's got to be a logical explanation, maybe a truck passing by the vibration. So he's the skeptic of the town. And then one of the bar flies says, you forget who our ancestors were. There will be more on that later. The bartender offers them another round of beers on the house.

1:01:59 And then suddenly there's another kind of quake. The earth shakes and the wall splits into a big crack, goes down the cinder block wall from the roof to the floor. And the barflies are both like, well, I got to go. Me too. And they run outside and the bartender is left alone cussing at his wall for being poorly built.

1:02:19 Next thing is we cut to a psychiatrist's couch. Here we're going to meet a couple of our other main characters. We meet Sandra, played by Janet Agron, and Jerry, played by Carlo DiMeo. Jerry is a psychiatrist and Sandra is his patient. And she's lying on a couch in his office with talking about her neuroses and obsessions. The core problem is that because of childhood experiences, she now has a hatred of all men. And Sandra comes off as someone who is always a bit spaced out. There's a bit of a Star Wars holiday special aura about her.

1:02:57 Jerry is calm, reassuring, and in a way professional, like he's wearing a suede jacket and has a squared off necktie and a beard. And so he, He looks the part of a very professional psychiatrist and therapist, though the way some of his lines are written, they feel like things that are not what a therapist would say. Also, she's like lying there talking about the painful memories of her Freudian complexes from childhood. And Jerry is standing in the office, standing over her, not sitting in a chair, but just standing there like while he's listening. That felt so wrong.

1:03:36 I mean, maybe it's a different branch of therapy. This is the looming method. You loom over the subject. I see Dr.

1:03:43 Loomis.

1:03:43 Do you? Yeah, yeah. There you go. Invented it.

1:03:46 Suddenly things get weirder because into the office comes another woman, Emily, interrupting this very personal and intense therapy session. Emily is Jerry's girlfriend and also seems to be a personal friend of Sandra. So she comes in in the middle of like this Freudian monologue and she's like, oh, hi, Sandra. Hey, Emily, how you doing? And Emily has interrupted the appointment to explain to Jerry that she has to break her date with him tonight because she needs to see Bob. And we're thinking, Bob? Yes, Bob.

1:04:17 The creep? Yeah.

1:04:18 The creep?

1:04:19 Yeah.

1:04:19 Jerry says, you've been seeing an awful lot of him lately, haven't you? And Emily says, poor Bob. He's a sick and lonely kid. I don't see why people hate him so. I mean, he looks like he's in his 30s, to be clear. Yeah, he doesn't look quite like a kid. But Sandra explains that Bob is discriminated against by the people of Dunwich because his mother was believed to be promiscuous.

1:04:45 And they say, in Dunwich, anybody like that is branded a witch. And then Emily, this is weird. Way to go with the conversation. Emily says, look, Sandra, I don't believe those idiots who tell me that our ancestors were Salem witch burners. All right.

1:05:00 Weirdly and specifically defensive on that. Okay. Yeah.

1:05:04 So, but the suggestion here is that Emily believes that Bob is actually fine. There's nothing wrong with him. He's just being mistreated by the people of the town and she's sort of mentoring him like she's his unofficial social worker. So she leaves to keep her appointment with Bob. So Jerry and Sandra resume their conversation. Sandra says, it's the same old problem. Men, why do they have to make life so difficult? And then suddenly there is a loud wrenching sound that fills the room. And I was thinking, is that men?

1:05:44 Is it men?

1:05:45 But no, it is not men. It's some kind of supernatural force. This will happen a lot throughout the rest of the movie. Suddenly there's a noise, just a growling of the earth and an animalistic yowling sounds all layered on top of that. And that sound fills the room. Sandra screams. And then a gray kitten, which has, I guess, been sitting in her lap the whole time, but we didn't see it. It yowls and it scratches the back of her hand and runs across the room. And she says, strange.

1:06:17 It's the first time he ever acted up like that.

1:06:19 Yeah. Well, cats are like that, too. It's the same old problem. Cats. But this is a really cute kitten. I can't stress that enough. Yes. And the scratch that it gives her is super grisly. Like, not so much that it's just completely ridiculous, but it's pretty bloody.

1:06:36 Yes.

1:06:37 It's like a tiny, adorable gray kitten that left a leopard, you know, gouge on her hand.

1:06:43 It's a Fulci scratch for sure. Right.

1:06:46 So after this is a great scene, the New York graveyard scene, we're back in New York at a cemetery in the middle of the day, broad daylight. And a couple of workers are sitting at the edge of an open grave, their feet dangling in where you can see just a fleshless bleached skeleton lying exposed at the bottom of the grave. The grave diggers are eating lunch. They're having some sandwiches, having a conversation basically about how it's cool to be a pervert.

1:07:14 Yeah.

1:07:15 And then suddenly Christopher George is here. So he's, again, this is the character Peter Bell. I like his outfit. He's wearing a cool corduroy blazer. He's got a cigar clenched between his teeth. And he approaches the two guys, and they have a brief disagreement about whether he is allowed to stare into open graves. The workers are like, get out of here.

1:07:35 There's just some dignified journalism going on here, just showing up and questioning a couple of grave diggers. Right.

1:07:41 So nearby is the freshly dug grave of Mary Woodhouse and her coffin right next to it. We briefly get a glimpse inside the coffin where Mary's body lies peacefully in the dark. And then Peter Bell, he leans on the coffin. He's making notes on his notepad and the two grave diggers come and they shoo him out of the way so they can bury her. So they deposit her coffin on the straps over the pit and then they use the machine to lower it down.

1:08:06 Again, I referenced who these individuals were earlier, and I just feel like if I was told, guess which one of these is the professional sex person, I would not choose the guy who actually was. I would have gone with the blonde guy or, of course, our actor, Christopher George, here. But no, it's the other guy.

1:08:26 Christopher George, in some stills from this scene, looks like a much more weathered version of Roger Moore.

1:08:33 He does. He really does. He's like American... roger moore uh smoking yeah.

1:08:39 Yeah so bell watches as the two guys start to shovel dirt uh in to cover the coffin but then when you look at the scene it's like that is a shallow grave the top of the vault is like six inches below the surface.

1:08:54 Yeah so some of the extras that i watched regarding making this film alluded to the fact that not only did they need to get permission to film in cemeteries and graveyards for this film, so obviously in the New York area and also in the Savannah area, but for this scene in particular, they also needed to be able to dig a hole. So maybe this was as deep as they were allowed to dig their hole. I believe they'd been kicked out of one cemetery already for digging a hole. I mean, they were supposed to be there, but then some sort of disagreement on how deep they were going to allow them to dig a grave for the shooting of the scene.

1:09:29 That makes sense. So while the earth is falling over the top of the coffin, we see inside the coffin again, and a pink rose in Mary's hand begins to wilt suddenly, shedding petals. With the coffin about 10% buried. One of the gravediggers looks at his watch and says, it's five o'clock. We bust our balls enough. Let's go.

1:09:50 Didn't they just take a lunch break?

1:09:52 They did.

1:09:53 Yeah.

1:09:54 So they quit. They just walk away. Peter Bell is a little incredulous, but what can he do? It's not like he's going to pick up a shovel and finish burying her.

1:10:02 I mean, he seems concerned enough. I was like, is that what he's going to do? Is he going to finish the job?

1:10:08 Then once again, we're inside the coffin with Mary and somehow she awakes. She wakes up from the sleep of death. She looks around, realizes she's trapped and begins to panic. She gasps and beats on the inside of the coffin with her fists. She rakes with her nails until her fingers are bloody. And just as Peter Bell is walking away from the cemetery, he stops and thinks he hears something it's very faint especially against the background noise of the traffic in the city but he makes out mary's screams and the thudding from inside the box he says oh my god and then he retrieves a pickaxe then the scene takes a turn so he's i guess he's gonna try to help but the way he's gonna help is he slams the pickaxe into the lid of the

1:10:57 coffin just chopping at it And we see from the inside, when it pierces through, it comes centimeters from Mary's face.

1:11:04 Yeah. I mean, on one level, you have to admit, sometimes when you do something for the first time, you make really bad choices in how you do it. And I doubt that Peter Bell had ever had to break into a casket before to retrieve somebody who'd been prematurely buried. That's a good point. But that being said, he is bringing this thing down right where her head is going to be. And usually on a casket, I don't remember the details on this one, but you can tell. And this casket's not even in a sarcophagus or anything. Additional questions, again, can't ask too many questions about Fulci dream logic. But this is indeed a terrifying sequence. And I'm to understand, somewhat terrifying to film, especially for the person inside the casket.

1:11:50 I'm not saying it was necessarily unsafe or anything. It seems like the crew really knew what they were doing. But it can't help but be terrified. Step one, climb inside this casket. Step two, prepare for things to break through really close to your face.

1:12:05 Several times, by the way. He keeps hitting it like four times. Finally, he pries away a big piece of the box and reveals Mary inside, alive and shrieking. Suddenly, we cut to Mary is out of the coffin. She and Peter Bell are hanging out back at the apartment with the great Teresa, the medium. They're all sitting around Teresa starts talking at Bell about her favorite subject, the Book of Enoch. In this scene, we learn a bit more lore. She reiterates that the book was written 4,000 years ago. Got that. But then she says it contains, quote, man's first description of his boundless mortal fear in the face of malice itself. And she says it is, quote, the implacable enemy whose thirst for blood is never satiated.

1:12:52 seems vague uh then mary begins to explain to him uh what was revealed to her during the seance where she died she says the city of the dead the living dead a cursed city where the gates of hell have been opened and now for some reason here fulci starts showing the characters only as extreme close-ups of their eyes not even going the shot not even going below the nose and I wonder why that is. I don't know, but it's very deliberate, obviously.

1:13:23 Yeah, I mean, I guess he's trying to capture, you know, inner emotional reaction to these revelations. Though the weird thing is, of course, these revelations are not completely out of keeping with what we already knew. But, you know, I don't know. Some of this is new material for the characters.

1:13:41 Yeah.

1:13:42 Mary says she doesn't know where this city is, but she does know what it's called. It's called Dunwich.

1:13:47 Dunwich.

1:13:49 And then the medium explains the danger. The gates of hell have been opened. If they are left open, it will be the end of the human race. And we only have until the stroke of midnight on the transition to All Saints Day. So that would be midnight on Halloween because November 1st is All Saints Day. So if we don't close the gates of hell by then, they will be stuck open forever and quote, no dead body will ever be able to rest in peace again. and so the dead will rise up and take over the earth.

1:14:21 Okay, so first step, they need to find out which Dunwich this is. Is it Dunwich, Texas? Dunwich, Tennessee? Dunwich, Wyoming? You know, presumably there's at least one in every state.

1:14:30 It's like Rome or Athens. There's a number of them. So our main characters have a mission now. Peter Bell and Mary Woodhouse are going to do a road trip to Dunwich to close the portal before All Saints Day. So here, I guess, I'm going to try to do a summary of the rest, a brief sketch of the rest of the story, and then we can zoom in on a few things. In Dunwich, increasingly evil and disturbing things happen. There are weird magic murders, insane visions. One of the first things to happen after this is the death of Emily, Jerry's girlfriend, when she goes to visit Bob that night, though she's not killed by Bob. Peter and Mary... Meanwhile, travel to Dunwich to track down the mystery.

1:15:15 As they're having their little road trip, there are some wonderful interactions. Christopher George keeps saying things like, I get visions too, you know, just give me a bottle of scotch.

1:15:26 Machismo seance there. Right.

1:15:29 And at one point they're pulled over on the side of the road looking at a map and Mary says, I'm starved. He goes, there's a lollipop in the glove box. He's like, you're the one who's got me out here in the armpit of the world chasing your galloping cadavers.

1:15:44 Oh, God, this is such a great line. And the way he says it, I can't properly replicate it, but it's like galloping cadavers. Yeah. This is right after he seems to have just heard about All Saints Day for the first time. And it's just seems to doubt that this is, again, not something that women just made up.

1:16:01 Yeah.

1:16:01 All Saints Day, huh?

1:16:03 Yeah.

1:16:03 What?

1:16:04 We meet a few other characters, such as the rest of Emily's family. Again, Emily is Jerry the psychiatrist's girlfriend. We meet her younger brother, John John, who is initiated into the horrors of the film when he sees the rotten ghost of his sister floating outside his bedroom window at night. She looks gross.

1:16:23 Yeah, she looks incredible. The lighting on the zombies is terrific in this film. I mean, we have different types. We did see one of the older bodies rising almost immediately after the priest's suicide, but The ones we're encountering increasingly later on in the picture are these fresher, rotting, disgusting looking zombie corpses. And yeah, the lighting is great.

1:16:44 Gives them this real brooding appearance. And the energy of the dead in this film will, I'm sure, keep coming back to this. But these are not your sort of like mindless, you know, me want brain zombies.

1:16:57 No.

1:16:57 These zombies seem to be like staring blankly out. Like there's a, There's an intelligence on the other side. Maybe it's just one intelligence. Maybe it's this void dweller that's been referred to. But they stare at us with some sort of almost at times unreadable what they actually want. But they don't intend anything good for us. That's for sure.

1:17:20 No, it is meaningful and it is cruel. To quote a film title, the feeling is the dead hate the living.

1:17:27 Yes.

1:17:27 Yeah. I also thought of that film title. I have not seen it. I haven't either. But it's such a great title that I think works so well with what we see here. The zombies do hate us. We don't understand all the parameters of that hate, but it's palpable.

1:17:43 So, Sandra, played by Janet Agron, she keeps having visions of death and corpses, and so she recruits Jerry the psychiatrist to help her out. Eventually, our four main characters die. join forces they meet up in the cursed cemetery they start to compare notes at least until they're caught in a maggot storm zombie Emily attacks and kills her family except for her brother John John who escapes the house with the help of our main heroes after this Sandra tries to take John John I think to some relatives but she gets killed by zombie Emily in the process in a murder method we will see quite a few times in this film The cranial grip and rip. I'm going to discuss more about that in a minute. John John runs away through the streets. He goes down some

1:18:30 very nice exorcist stairs and ends up in the custody of the police. The undead and magic murder attacks continue throughout the town. Eventually we hear on a radio broadcast that a state of emergency has been declared by the police. So I guess like, I don't know, news at the events of dunwich have gotten to the governor uh and as midnight draws near mary peter and jerry go back to the cemetery where father thomas the priest from the monologue died to find a way to stop the invasion of the living dead They open up a tomb, which looks like it's just a box on the surface that looks like it would have a coffin in it. But instead they open it up and it's a portal to this underground cavern. So they descend to go down some

1:19:14 ladders and find inside the tomb of Father Thomas himself. They open that up and that's yet another portal crawl through there to find this putrid underground world of the dead where. in some places, corpses are part of the architecture. They're poking out from the ceiling like ornaments. I was thinking of it as almost a zombie hive or nest.

1:19:38 Yeah, it really does have that kind of vibe. Terrific set. I believe this is one that they built in Rome. And, you know, lighting is amazing. On one level, you could say, all right, this is supposed to be underneath a graveyard that's just choked with human remains and they're just pushing down from above but also at the same time equally likely and maybe even probable this feels like another world like this is the world of the dead this is a true underworld and given again the dreamlike nature of the film you can't say it's necessarily one or the other it's probably all of these things at.

1:20:12 Once yeah So down here, Sandra reappears and then unceremoniously kills Christopher George. She does the grip and rip on his head. It feels almost like they were trying to get it over with as fast as they could.

1:20:24 This really felt like Fulci firing the actor and saying, you know, you were supposed to survive to the end, but I don't like you. Your character dies here and gets his brain ripped out.

1:20:35 Yeah.

1:20:36 Or part of the brain. That's the gross thing about it. It's like, it's not like a full on, like, I just pulled your brain out. It's just like, I just kind of like, ripped a portion of your scalp and skull open, and then brains kind of just inadvertently get partially scraped out and spilled out onto the ground. They don't even eat any of it. Yeah, yeah.

1:20:56 So Mary and Jerry, the two remaining heroes, venture further into Grave World. Oh, well, they stab Sandra, I think. I think Jerry stabs her with a big pole, like a big iron spike, to stop her from making... It's implied that she's going to kill Mary in the same way that we see another character die in one of the scenes. I'll describe in more detail in a minute. But, you know, her eyes get kind of bloody and it's like, oh, and so Jerry intervenes by stabbing Sandra. Mary and Jerry, they finally come across the reanimated corpse of Father Thomas, the priest. But did he ever really die? Unclear. He doesn't look rotten like the other corpses. but he seems to be, we were discussing earlier, is there actually a

1:21:43 villain of this film? Is Father Thomas the villain or is he being acted on by this evil magic? I couldn't quite tell.

1:21:51 Like, is he a focal point? Is he again like a legal loophole? Is he, has he become the host for this void dweller that's been alluded to? Unclear, unknowable.

1:22:02 But he seems to be at least the, Yeah, he's the vanguard of the army of the living dead, whether that's because of the malice of the original person in some way or his body's just being used. Anyway, Mary and Jerry manage to sort of defeat the priest with a move that has to be seen to be believed. We'll talk about it in a bit. But then everything catches on fire. All the zombies catch on fire and our two heroes escape the tomb. They crawl out in the daylight and you think, OK, well, evil seems to be averted. But the ending is quite ambiguous. As morning is breaking, we see the police arriving at the cemetery.

1:22:41 How they knew to come there, I don't recall. And we see Emily's younger brother, John John, and she runs toward Mary. I don't know why, as if they're like, you know, people who know each other and they're being reunited, but they don't know each other at all. But he's running toward her. And then we see Emily's face and she's like, oh no. And she starts to scream like something terrible has happened, but we don't see what it would be. And so the ending is totally ambiguous. I have no idea what it means.

1:23:07 Yeah, things slow down and then we get this kind of animated like spider web shattering of the film frame. Yeah. And that ends the film. And it is absolutely impossible to read. I mean, already to your point, it's already weird that he's like, new mom, new dad, you know, like the irresistible gravity of a post-horror movie newly formed nuclear family of survivors, you know, like he's like, you're my mom and dad now, let's do this.

1:23:37 He does know Jerry, they already know, but he doesn't know.

1:23:40 Her at all. Yeah. So there's that for sure, but that is way overshadowed by this, yeah, this sudden weird ending, which I don't know that it's ever been fully explained. Maybe there's a more recent extra or interview where someone sheds more light on this, but When I was reading about it, it seemed like there were a few different theories. Like, they shot a happy ending, and then Fulci decided he wanted more of a gloomy ending instead, and they just had to fix it in the edit. Or there was something that was shot that was lost, that was inadvertently destroyed.

1:24:13 You know, coffee spilled on the film or something. I don't know. But it really does have that feeling of being sort of stitched together. It feels like something is missing. But I don't know, given how cryptic and dreamlike everything else in the film is, I don't know. It just gives us one more point to contemplate. And, you know, you can't help but theorize, like, what is wrong? What did they see or feel? Like, I guess the darkness isn't completely defeated. Is it welling back up? Is it in the child? Is it in them? Is it standing off camera to the side? I don't know. We're going to have to do another movie to explain it. But that's not what happens.

1:25:05 OK, do you want to focus on a few of the geek scenes here?

1:25:08 Yeah.

1:25:08 Yeah. Let's get back into some of the gory details.

1:25:11 So there is, of course, the scene of Emily's death. This is where, remember, Emily was going to go out to meet Bob. So she goes to do this in some squalid, abandoned building. And I want to flag the atmosphere leading up to this scene is genuinely wonderful. It's so good. We see these exterior shots, obviously, from around Savannah with beautiful architecture, cobblestone streets and these brickwork arches underneath a bridge and stuff. We see shots of townhouses with iron stairways leading up the front. And as usual, everything is drenched in mist with soft, fuzzy focus and interesting placement of light sources. Emily parks this cool sports car at a dark, deserted gas station, glowing from inside

1:25:56 with pink and purple light. And then she goes inside a neighboring building. This building looks like a warehouse, calling out for Bob. When she finally sees him, He is curled up in a fetal position on a mattress on the floor, whimpering in terror, which is a bit funny because of the shot framing, because he's got pages from Playboy or something pinned up on the wall right next to him.

1:26:19 Yeah, the movie wants to remind us that he's that he's a creep.

1:26:23 Yeah.

1:26:23 Yeah. So what's the matter? Well, Emily goes and tries to comfort him. But suddenly there is a terrible sound again, that moaning, hissing, yowling from the bowels of hell. Bob runs away, and Emily is left behind on her own. Then appears Father Thomas, the priest. Is he undead? Again, he doesn't look rotten, just with some ghoulish purple makeup.

1:26:46 Emily falls to the floor and screams with fright, and we wonder how is he going to attack her. He smothers her with a handful of mud and worms in his hand, shoved into her face.

1:27:00 Yeah, just smears it on her face there. What a strange.

1:27:04 Horrible, nightmarish movie death.

1:27:06 Yeah, it's just like, here's some grave soil and rot.

1:27:11 And then pretty much right after that, the nightmares continue. We get to the gut emesis scene. This is one of the most shocking and famous scenes in the movie, I think. A young couple in Dunwich are hanging out in a parked car, which looks like some kind of safari vehicle. They're parked in an old vacant lot full of fog. They're making out. The dude here, is this guy played by Michel Suave?

1:27:34 This is Suave, yes.

1:27:35 Okay, yeah. And he comes off as a jerk. He's unsympathetic in the scene because he's being pushy and he's dismissive of her concerns about the bad vibes of the most cursed parking lot in Dunwich. And then while they're kissing, we start hearing those crazy layered moaning sounds from before. And the girl gets frightened because she thinks there's somebody out there. The boy is like, nah, nah, see, I'll turn the headlights on. So he flips them on and then, bam, we see the image of Father Thomas hanging from a noose right in front of the car. There's the infrastructure for a noose already there. So why did they park in front of the old gallows?

1:28:13 Well, you know, maybe the whole gallow thing is part of the hallucination or whatever. Maybe.

1:28:18 So Suave tries to start the car, but the engine won't turn over. And then possession takes hold. The girl is first hypnotized by a vision of the priest and then things get so gross. Blood starts to pool in her lower eyelids and then pours out of her eyes down her face. So tears of blood running in streams down her cheeks. then red and pink foam from her mouth then she just starts vomiting up guts and eventually all of her internal organs it's all just folding straight out of the mouth.

1:28:51 And you may well ask at this point um Do you really mean all of her guts? Because I had read the same thing in reviews. I was preparing myself for the film and asking myself, okay, am I up for it? Yes, she does puke out what appears to be all of her guts. You could basically like follow along with an anatomical chart and be like, okay, here we are in the intestine. There's the liver. Yeah, there's the stomach. Yeah, like everything seems to come out. And this in typical Fulci fashion with the gore, this just keeps going and going. Yeah.

1:29:23 Then after this, she does the first grip and rip I think we see in the film. So the way this works is Suave is there like, oh, what's going on? And then she grabs a fistful of the back of the guy's head, just grabs the head, clinches, tears his skull open, and rips out. So she gets part of the scalp, part of the skull, and part of the brain.

1:29:47 Just punctuating an absolutely grotesque scene. Like, this is the one that I figured a family member would walk in on me watching, and I'd have to, you know, run to pause the screen. But I do think, I thought a lot about this sequence, especially with the gut vomiting. And I was, you know, trying to just figure out, like, what is Fulci saying here? Like, what does it mean, you know? And I'm not saying this is a definite answer, but this is where my head was going. But fairly recently I was reading reading and rereading about various Southeast Asian traditions of flying vampiric heads that have their entrails hanging from their neck stump. I'm sure most of you have seen some sort of version of this in art

1:30:30 or even in some Southeast Asian films. There have been some horror films that depict these things and they have different names.

1:30:36 Wait, did a version of this show up in The Boxer's Omen? I remember a head with things dangling out of the neck.

1:30:42 Yes, there's something that at least is heavily inspired by this. Yes. And it would make sense since we're dealing with like a sort of a conflict in that movie that involves a lot of beliefs and traditions from Thailand or at least magical systems that are attributed to Thailand. Okay. Yeah. So so, yeah, we saw a little bit of it there.

1:31:05 We might have alluded to this in our episode on Lady Terminator because, you know, this kind of thing, I think, is also popped up in some Indonesian horror films. But when you get into like discussion of like, what do those mean? Like, why are guts hanging from the neck stump of a flying head? And there are different models. One, you know, one argument is that it feature it's the emphasis of the organs of hunger, you know. Like, oh, you're seeing the guts. The guts are hunger and the head hungers for blood or life force and so forth.

1:31:36 There's also the idea that it's like inner foulness and that it's the shame on the outside. And, you know, not quite the same message in this film, but I get a sense of guts here as human mortality, you know, in highly contradictory ways, to be clear. It kind of seems like the undead in this film must expel their guts in order to take on their unholy unlives, you know? Like, here she's transforming, she's becoming the undead. Don't need those guts anymore. That's just, yeah, that's just taking up room.

1:32:11 Just go ahead and eject all of that. But as we'll see later on, it also seems like guts remain the weakness for some of the undead entities in the picture. So I'll have more to say on this in just a minute.

1:32:22 That's a good point. So after this, let's see, a few more scenes. Oh, we should flag the scene where the police are investigating emily's death mainly because uh fulci is one of the investigators here he's like the medical examinator jerry is on the scene for some reason he doesn't seem too broken up about it he's a professional yeah and uh fulci is explaining that emily appears to have died of sudden cardiac arrest of fright he says And a cop, then a cop is like, what's that?

1:32:54 And points, and it's a pile of mud and slime on the floor with worms on it.

1:32:59 Yeah, we don't see what happens with it. Do they collect it? Does that go in a baggie? What's going to occur?

1:33:04 You think they're going to take it back to the crime lab and be like, I DNA sequenced the slime.

1:33:10 No.

1:33:12 We also get some scenes of people around town talking about all of the murders of the past few days. Consensus is, it's Bob.

1:33:19 It's got to be Bob.

1:33:21 We see Bob slinking around town. At one point, he goes back to his alligator farm shack, and he has visions of the hanged priest. Bob is seemingly being driven mad by these visions. There's also a scene I just wanted to mention briefly because it's at the funeral parlor where the mortician is stealing jewelry off the deceased in their coffins, and then one of them bites his hand.

1:33:42 This movie doesn't have a rosy opinion of the funeral industry.

1:33:46 No.

1:33:47 But, I mean, that's kind of standard for your horror movies.

1:33:50 Yeah. So maybe we should mention the scene where Jerry goes to Sandra's house. Sandra is at her house painting a rhinoceros. And yeah, that's she's a painter. She's painting a big rhinoceros head on a canvas. She suddenly freaks out and calls her psychiatrist, Jerry, for help. He comes over. She comes to the door with a gun. Jerry is like, what is that? And she goes, am I a basket case?

1:34:15 He says, no. And she says, OK, come look at this dead body in my kitchen. And, oh, this scene is funny for, I mentioned earlier that Jerry says a number of things that don't seem like what a therapist would say. At the beginning of the scene, he's like, you're not a basket case, though you could stand to drink less alcohol. And, okay, it seems like good advice.

1:34:36 And then she gets him in the kitchen. He's like, let's get to drinking. We need to have some booze.

1:34:42 Yeah, I thought you said I need to cut back. I guess he's like, you need to cut back in general, but. given the brewing zombie apocalypse, you know, we, this is one of those, you get a cheat day. Yes.

1:34:53 Yeah, exactly. When you, when there's a body that is in your kitchen and then suddenly is not in your kitchen, that's when you get to pour a tall shot of whiskey.

1:35:01 Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to stand by that for my own personal rule. I get to have an extra drink if the zombie apocalypse occurs. No questions asked. I just get to have one.

1:35:10 So Jerry, yeah. So the corpse goes missing and Jerry's like, someone took her away. But this leads up to that scene we talked about earlier with the great effect where they're standing in one room of the house and suddenly the window shatters, the glass shatters, shards of glass fly into the wall and pierce the wallpaper. And then the wall bleeds from all the places where it was stabbed.

1:35:32 It looks great.

1:35:33 Just amazing. And certainly go watch extras about this film. We go on all the details, but like the basics here are, is they had to have two panes of glass and then like fill it with gas until one of the panes or both panes legitimately explode, film that. And then they had to build a portion of a wall that's super soft. It has essentially artificial blood vessels flowing through it with fake blood in them. And then they had to have a bunch of people on set use little rubber bands to fire shards of glass at that wall all at the same time to create that practical effect. It's just amazing.

1:36:11 That yeah and it looks so good uh another famous gore scene in this film is the head drilling scene oh my god unbelievable so bob remember bob bob sneaks into the garage of mr ross one of the guys we've seen drinking at junie's lounge uh he's sort of like a grumpy old gruff guy uh and bob starts sleeping in the back of mr ross's car in his garage Then Mr. Ross's teenage daughter comes into the garage to find her stash of drugs. And she finds Bob and she's like, oh, hey, Bob, you know, you're cool.

1:36:46 Smoke a joint with me. And then we don't even, I think, really get to see how Bob reacts to this. He's just like, I don't know. And then suddenly Mr. Ross comes in, finds them. In a rage, he grabs Bob, shoves him down on his workbench in the garage where he's got a bunch of tools and equipment. And then he shoves Bob's head into a table mounted drill, or I don't know if this is a drill or a lathe, but it's like a huge rotating bit. And he just runs it straight through Bob's cranium.

1:37:17 Yeah. It's horizontally positioned.

1:37:19 Yeah.

1:37:20 And it, this whole scene is like, it's, it's, I mean, it is fabulously assembled in terms of how it's shot, how it's edited, how they use, you know, a mix of like prosthetic head and real life head and, Again, all the little details of how they filmed this are wonderful. But also just the plotting of it, like the drill gets turned on by accident as he's chasing after Bob.

1:37:43 And then he's like, well, drill's already on and I hate this guy. Might as well go ahead and commit murder. Yeah.

1:37:50 You almost get the idea that he wouldn't have quite murdered him if the drill had not been spinning.

1:37:56 Right. The beat by beat. I mean, when I say it out loud, it sounds ridiculous. But beat by beat, it works really well in the picture, which again, already we have such a dreamlike atmosphere. These things make sense.

1:38:07 Let's see, after this, we did already allude to the maggot storm scene, but I guess anything else you want to say about that?

1:38:14 Oh, I mean, I could go on and on about this. I mean, when that maggot wind comes blowing in, it's terrific because it is a great gross scene in and of itself in the context of the film. But on the other hand, it looks like it also one of these where the behind the scenes story of it is just so weird because it's like, yeah, they use some sort of high powered vacuum cleaner to blast the actors with just tons and tons of actual live maggots. They glued live maggots to their faces for those scenes where the maggots are hitting them. Yeah. And yeah, on the extras, one of the the filmmakers, you know, effects or something, they were like, oh yeah, Fulci loved filming this because he hates actors. It's like a dream come true for him,

1:38:59 which in some ways does seem to track. The actors apparently did not like this. And this scene would seem to be one of the reasons that Christopher George allegedly stuffed a handful of maggots into Fulci's tobacco bag where he kept his tobacco in his pipes. Punked. Yes, a regular George Clooney. right there um but yes it but it is such a crazy scene like it one of the many scenes in this film it was just jaw-dropping for me uh because this one this one especially had not been ruined for me it's like wow it's it's really happening it is blowing tons and tons of maggots into the house on them and what does it mean why it's just part of the the general disruption of the natural order of things because of this brewing apocalypse.

1:39:46 Just all dreams in the fulci house yeah I do want to mention the climax because, so this is the part where they climb down into the tomb of Father Thomas. Right as they're going in, Christopher George says, wish I had a cigar. I was wondering if that was in the script or if that was after the conflict from the other scene.

1:40:13 I don't know. Yeah, it was just like, I think my character would have a cigar in this scene. And maybe Folch is like, no, it's completely ridiculous. You would never have a cigar in an otherworldly tomb world. And he's like, it's America, damn it. Of course you would have a cigar in another worldly tomb world.

1:40:30 This scene also has some good surprise rats or something. Oh, there's a rat on me now. But yeah, so we already talked about how they come into contact with Sandra. Sandra does the grip and rip on Christopher George. He's dead now. So Jerry and Mary go further into the tomb to finally confront the priest. And here's where we get to a weird thing we mentioned earlier. The priest seems to be having another kind of psychic, maybe deadly scanner type hypnosis thing with Mary. And Jerry saves the day by grabbing hold of a wooden cross. Like, I guess crucifix gives the wrong idea because that suggests something small.

1:41:10 There's like a huge spear sized wooden cross. And then stabbing the priest, zombie priest in the crotch or where the crotch should be. But then when we see the stabbing, it opens up and it's guts.

1:41:25 Yeah, guts fall out.

1:41:26 Green, gray guts and different colors. So all the other guts in the movie have been very, you know, red and pink and purple. And these are more green, gray guts.

1:41:37 Yes. I don't know how much we're supposed to make of that. But yeah, yeah. Obviously, there's a lot to deal with here again, because it's like earlier a zombie seems to get rid of all its guts in order to become the undead menace that it is. Here, the undead priest still has a lot of guts in him, or at least there's some guts that have settled down into the lower portion of his body. Stabbing in the crotch?

1:42:00 I don't know.

1:42:00 There's a lot to be made out of that.

1:42:02 With a cross. Stabbing the priest with a cross in the crotch.

1:42:05 And making the guts fall out. Like, yeah, this sounds like something that maybe needs to be worked out in therapy a little bit. I don't know. This movie is his therapy, I guess. And then I couldn't help be reminded of... Well, a couple of things. It made me think of Lady Terminator again. There's a lot of crotch violence in that movie. But also, I recently, my family always rewatches a bunch of Treehouse of Horrors around this time of year. So, of course, it reminded me of the scene where Homer is pounding the stake into the Mr.

1:42:33 Burns Dracula vampire. And then Bart is like, Dad, that's his crotch.

1:42:40 So after this, all the zombies catch on fire. Of course, the priest catches on fire. All the zombies burn, burn, burn. And then We see them, interestingly, just kind of turn to sand. There's a sudden peaceful physical resolution as there's been all this violence and chaos. They burn and then they just turn to dust.

1:42:59 From dust we were made. From dust we will return. Guts are just an interruption in our dust nature. That's true. Maybe that's what the film's trying to say. From dust to guts to dust again.

1:43:11 Guts, wet guts are a deviation from the dust stasis.

1:43:15 Yes.

1:43:15 Yeah.

1:43:17 And then finally, we get the thing we already talked about, the freeze on John John running towards the screen. And what does it mean? I don't think I'll ever know.

1:43:25 Yeah, it just I mean, all it seems to really be about is just ultimately making sure that the audience leaves the film feeling a little uneasy, which to be clear, I think they were always going to do. I think maybe Fulci was just a little extra paranoid here about like, are they going to forget the lady's? puking up all those guts if we give them a happy ending? I can't have it. I cannot have it. Not on my watch.

1:43:49 I can't remember what the ending of The Beyond or House by the Cemetery is like. I don't recall. Are they happy endings? Are they gross endings? What's the deal?

1:43:58 The Beyond is certainly not, if I remember it correctly. Again, it has been decades since I've seen The Beyond, but I believe it basically ends with a horrifying dreamlike emergence in another world. Yeah.

1:44:14 OK.

1:44:15 And as for House by the Cemetery, I've seen that one much more often and more frequently, and I don't remember exactly how it ends. I think it might have a little bit of a grim haunted. Yeah, there's some sort of a haunting element with the ghost girl at the end, at the very least.

1:44:29 Have we talked about how Fulci movies induce amnesia? I've seen this movie twice before, and one of the times I saw it was a couple weeks ago, and I had forgotten so much of what happens in it when I did the rewatch for today. Truly, like, there was like, the scene was not even in my head, and I literally just watched this.

1:44:51 Yeah, I mean, I rewatched it yesterday, and I can, I can, I agree with that. Yeah, I guess a big part of it is, you know, for the millionth time, dreamlike quality of the picture, less of a focus on characters and plot beats and traditional narrative. And those are the sort of like stories. Stories are what we latch on to. Like stories are such a key part of the human experience. And so when a film.

1:45:13 And they're mnemonic devices.

1:45:14 Yeah. And so when a film depends less on that, it sticks in the mindless. This may be a reason why House by the Cemetery does stick with me more in broad strokes compared to other films of his because it does kind of have a more traditional haunted house narrative. Yeah, yeah.

1:45:31 Well, I would say There's actually a division. So these Fulci movies have moments that are incredibly memorable. So there are scenes and images from them that I'm never going to forget. I mean, more just the moment to moment happenings of the film, like in between a lot of those big scenes. I that that's the stuff where I'm like, I totally forgot about this. It absolutely left my head the way a dream does after you wake in the morning, just fades away. Like you can't even, you can't grasp it.

1:45:59 You know, it was there.

1:46:01 Yeah. You'll remember that a character vomited guts, but not necessarily who that character was, why they did it, what scene it was in and how it connected to other moments in the picture. Yeah.

1:46:12 Okay. Anything else on a city of the living dead?

1:46:15 No, no, I think we have succeeded here. And hopefully, I think we got it done all before All Saints Day. So you're welcome. We have saved the world for another year.

1:46:24 But it wasn't worth it if they won't let us smoke in church.

1:46:28 It's America. Gosh, darn it. All right.

1:46:31 Happy Halloween, everybody.

1:46:32 Absolutely. Happy Halloween. Just a reminder to everyone out there that Weird House Cinema is the Friday episode here in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We're primarily a science and culture podcast, but on Fridays, We just talk about a weird movie. This month has been all about Halloweeny selections. We're about to bust on over into November.

1:46:53 So we'll be mixing it up a little bit more. There'll probably still be some horror or horror-esque films going on. We'll probably exercise a little noir-vember energy as well. But just stay tuned to see what we cover next. And if you are on Letterboxd.com, you can look us up. We are Weird House on there, and you can find a nice list of all the movies we've covered over the years and sometimes a peek ahead at what comes next.

1:47:18 Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J.

1:47:21 Posway.

1:47:22 If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, if you would like to suggest a topic for the future, or if you would just like to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com.

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