George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) had been financed in part with Italian money and received an Italian release as Zombi. Called upon to cash in on the vogue for excessively violent horror films was tradesman Lucio Fulci, whose unrelated Zombi 2 (AKA Zombie and Zombie Flesheaters, 1979) was sold in his homeland as a sequel to the Romero film. The formula for Zombi would be repeated in the wake of its international success (and infamy). As Fulci had shot scenes for Zombi in New York City, he would head for Savannah, Georgia, to make City of the Living Dead (1980), to New Orleans, Louisiana for The Beyond (1981), and to Boston, Concord, and Scituate, Massachusetts to shoot locations for The House by the Cemetery (1981). Cobbled together from narrative bits and bobs cadged from the likes of Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, fueled by the adrenaline rush of nightmare logic, and particularized by an orgiastic excess of hyper-violence, Fulci's 80s horrors earned him the well-deserved (if not entirely comprehensive) nickname "the Godfather of Gore."
The House by the Cemetery (in Italy, Quella villa accanto al cimitero) went into production in March 1981 under the working title Freudstein. The original story was the work of Zombi alumna Elisa Livia Briganti, with screenplay credit claimed by Briganti's screenwriter husband Dardano Sacchetti, Fulci, and Giorgio Mariuzzo. The tale of a modern American family that takes possession of a creepy country house that endeavors to take possession of them was familiar territory, reflecting Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror (1979), Dan Curtis' Burnt Offerings (1976), and even William Castle's spookhosue satire 13 Ghosts (1960) - to say nothing of the made-for-TV terrors of Walter Grauman's Crowhaven Farm (1970), Steven Spielberg's Something Evil (1972), and John Newland's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) - each a sobering parable of the dark side of home ownership. (One might even detect the influence of Paul Wendkos' 1975 telefilm The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which located in the Borden family basement a ghoulish mortician's lab not dissimilar from the lair of House by the Cemetery's resident bogie, Dr. Freudstein.) Though the narrative structure is boilerplate - with a generalized feeling of unease metastasizing into inexplicable occurrences and gruesome deaths - distinction arises from Fulci's charnel insatiability, a no-holds-barred/no-quarter-given authorial intent straight out of the Roman Bread and Circuses.
A key ingredient to the fun of Fulci's 80s output is his rotating repertory of actors. British leading lady Catriona MacColl was at this point making the last of three films for Fulci, having played the leading lady in both City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. MacColl's leading man, Italian Ron Silver lookalike Paolo Malco, would turn up as the second male lead of Fulci's brutal 1982 slasher The New York Ripper while child actor Giovanni Frezza (recipient of perhaps the worst English dubbing in recorded history) would play another terrorized tot in Fulci's Manhattan Baby (1982). The House by the Cemetery's roster of unfortunate victims includes Dagmar Lassander and Daniela Doria (both dispatched with gory aplomb in Fulci's 1981 take on Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat) and cameos are contributed by City of the Living Dead's Carlo De Mejo and Fulci himself. The comfort factor - if one might call it that - of House by the Cemetery is completed by the camerawork of frequent Fulci collaborator Sergio Salvati, who cloaks the proceedings in appropriate shades of doom and decay... though the throbbing, insidious electronic score by Fulci one-timer Walter Rizzati plays a significant role as well in encouraging repeat viewing.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci by Stephen Thrower (FAB Press, 1999)
