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The project of describing the best of Fulci's films, his gory horrors, is a paradoxical one. Being required to describe these films might expose them as poverty stricken within the constraints of signification of images, narrative and their capacity to be viewed as a readerly text. In order to evoke the powers of Fulci's best films I must first reconfigure the seemingly given paradigms of cinema. Here I ask the reader to variously rethink or forgo these concepts as necessary for cinematic pleasure. This involves letting go of: narrative as a temporalisation of viewing pleasure which accumulates the past to contextualise the present and lay out an expected future; images as deferrals to meaning, signs to be read or interpreted; characters as integral to plot, both in film in general and horror in particular as that which must be conceptually characterised in order to be meaningfully killed  off or destroyed; narrative as intelligible contextualiser of action; exploitation as gratuitously existing for its own sake or to affirm and intensify traditional axes of oppression in society; gore as demeaning or a lesser focus in the impartation of visual expression; pleasure as pleasurable; repulsion as unpleasurable; violence as inherently aggressive; horror as dealing only with notions of returned repression, infantilism or catharsis. I ask the reader, in the tradition of Lyotard's economy of libidinal pleasure, to shift their address from why or what the images mean to how they affect.
Fulci began his gore film series with the George A. Romero figlia Zombi 2, a surprisingly engaging reconfiguration of the Living Dead mythos, where the ethnographic zombie films of Val Lewton contracted with
Zombi 2 the bodily horror of George Romero in the USA and Jorge Grau in the UK. Fulci's success in presenting gore anchors on his acute understanding of violence against bodies as reliant on the particular significations of the parts of the body being destroyed, rather than a semiotic destruction of flesh in general, hence his propensity for showing eyeball puncturing. His zombies are cheap looking, but this makes them unnerving in their abject grittiness, rather than unconvincing. Fulci followed Zombi 2 with his opus latifundium, his “real estate” trilogy: Paura nella città dei morti viventi (City of the Living Dead, 1980), a Lovecraftian story of a priest who hangs himself thus opening the gates of hell; L'aldila, about a hotel which is a gate to hell (noticing a theme?), and Quella villa accanto al cimitero (House by the Cemetery, 1981), about one Dr Freudstein – surely one of the best ever character names in a film! – who, by transplanting parts of his victims to his body for over a century has managed to stay alive, although, in keeping with the trilogic theme, he looks like hell. These films saw the first paradigmatic shift in Fulci's interest from the temporality that defines traditional cinematic narrative, to a focus on space, broadly meaning atmosphere, acts which may or may not bear relevance to preceding and successive images, claustrophobic mise en scène set within houses and damp landscapes which drip with the viscosity of the bodies crawling therein. Fulci manages this oppressive environment even in the clinical world of the pathology lab or the infinite space of the bridge which leads to the island of New Orleans, both in L'Aldila. These films resonate with places rather than people, events rather than story, ergo ecstasy (event outside of temporality) rather than time. Fulci states “Our only refuge is to remain in the world but outside time” (1). It may seem a stretch to claim Fulci distorts time in the same way as more deliberately artistic filmmakers; his films retain a rudimentary relationship with narrative, whether for the sake of loose coherence or the producers of the film.
These three films saw Fulci collaborate with screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti, who had previously written Il gatto a nove code (with Argento) and Reazione for Bava. Sacchetti later wrote the stories for Lamberto Bava's first films, La Chiesa (1989) for Michele Soavi, two screenplays for Ruggero Deodato and Sergio Martino (in collaboration with the brilliant Ernesto Gastaldi) and the strange yet fascinating Apocalypse domani (1980) for Antonio Margheriti. For Fulci, Sacchetti wrote the giallo 7 note and his later gore films Manhattan Baby (1982) and the controversial slasher pseudo-giallo film Lo squartatore di New York (The New York Ripper, 1982). The third member of the trilogy responsible for Fulci's most accomplished work is Giannetto De Rossi, whose special effects are more interested in the body transformed rather than destroyed by violence. It is this alchemical combination that formed the delirious dream-like worlds of the real-estate trilogy. Whether the viewer awaits a narrative to explicate the murders, the reanimation of the dead and the baroque methods of death, or whether they are there to explore the sensations of the images unto themselves, these films offer images as possibility – the possibility of experiencing film otherwise, the possibility of meaning without the satisfaction of affirmation of interpretation, and the possibility of the masochism of watching horror, an eternal anticipation that confuses rather than pleases when the shocking images arrive. |
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Another genre Fulci worked with throughout his career can loosely be described as the adventure film, although related more to adventures in machismo. Peplum fantasy in I guerrieri dell'anno 2072 (Warriors of the Year 2072, 1984) and La conquista (Conquest, 1983), spaghetti western (with Franco Nero no less) in Tempo di massacro(Massacre Time, 1966) and Los desesperados (Desperate Men, 1969), vengeance, murder and wildlife of the order of Grizzly Adams gone violent in Zanna Bianca(1973) and its sequel Il ritorno di Zanna Bianca (1974), American frontier injustice in Il Quattro dell'Apocalisse (Four for the Apocalypse, 1975) and the ultra-violent mafia film Luca il contrabbandiere (The Naples Connection, 1980) all explicate disillusioned masculinity in a more aggressive and less poignant way than the comedies. These films are rugged, in their characters, in their characters' lack of sympathy
 La conquistaexpressed in environments themselves without sympathy, and in their execution. Some, such as Conquista and Zanna Bianca, express the hero as essentially dull men in interesting worlds. Whereas the characters succeed in being irrelevant in the later horror films, here the dullness is markedly more a failure than a distraction. Although each film is set in a heterotopic world populated by cartoonish figures of the flawed epic hero (Conquista's protagonist Ilias' name bears this aim), or, more interestingly, all-male communities, Fulci's lack of traditional narrative and character crafting (admittedly probably more to do with lack of interest) cannot be balanced by his talent in phantasmagoric vistas and viscous configurations of flesh. With the possible exception of the peplum films, whose clumsy special effects are belied somewhat by a strangeness that is appealing rather than amusing, the adventure films can seem mean spirited in their almost pragmatic violence. While the comedies are almost tragic in their mourning of masculinity, these films make one glad it is over. Fulci's setting of these films in dystopic, unrealistic worlds appears to insinuate that the characters are themselves unrealistic and this may be why I am so unsympathetic to them. It comes across like Fulci is filming a requiem for a cinematic archetype that is met less with nostalgia and mourning than with “good riddance”. These characters whiff of the seductive but guilty pleasure of the butch alienated hero in the westerns, however they lack the nuance of more accomplished maestros of the western. Yet Fulci's compulsion to include the unintelligible in dream-like sequences and quiet, gothic landscapes makes these films worthwhile by virtue of the simple, if not accidental, way Fulci expresses meaning through subtle and disorienting situations rather than through characterisation or narrative. These films demonstrate at best directorial competence and, at worst, disinterest. They are not failures so much as indications of Fulci's failure in traditional film methods and, perhaps more importantly, the failure of traditional film form and theory to comprehend the incomprehensibility of affect, disorientation and cinematic pleasure launched along trajectories beyond the holy trinity of character, narrative and satisfaction. It is in this sense that Fulci is an artist, rather than an artisan. |
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While Fulci contextualised the erotics of male homosociality through comedy and reaffirmation of machismo in the adventure films, he was simultaneously venturing into the horror territory with his gialli. These films adhere to the traditional giallo narrative structure while questioning and doubling standard cinematic concepts: the mistaken identity story Una sull'altra (Perversion Story, 1969), the mistaken reality (is it real or is it a dream?) story Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, 1971), the more claustrophobic Calabrian village murder mystery Non si sevizia un paperino (Don't Torture a Duckling, 1972) and another exercise in phantasy becoming reality in the psychic tale 7 note in nero (1972). With the exception of 7 note, all films were written by Fulci and introduce the delirious and arid worlds of Fulci's tenebrous imagination, yet oscillate between glamour and power (for instance, he reintroduces the pedagogic male as the businessman/doctor in Una sull'altra and politician inLucertola). Even though, as in his previous films, Fulci's mind strained against the parameters of generic convention, through violence and dream sequences, special effects and a fascination with perversion (human rather than specifically sexual) he expressed a vision at once fascinatingly resonant with its horror genealogy and unique in its imaginative vision. Here he was first mentioned in the same category as Dario Argento, (whose  L'uccello dale piume di cristallo was almost contemporaneous with Fulci'sUna sull'altra), Sergio Martino and, particularly, Mario Bava, based on the best of Bava's gialli, Sei donne per l'assassino (1964) and Reazione a catena (1971), the first for the elegant cinematography and saturated colouring, reflected in Lucertola, and the second for the general themes of violence and
7 note in nerodishevelment of flesh in all of Fulci'sgialli. Interestingly 7 note begins with the body-behind-a-plaster-wall that forms the crescendo of Argento's Profondo rosso(1975), reflecting Fulci's reinterpretation of the blind killed by the guide dog that forms a link between Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) and E tu vivrai nel terrore: L'aldila (The Beyond, 1981). Far from being plagiarism however, this shows that Fulci's many nods to other directors in various film refers more to a symbiotic proclivity in Italian filmmaking rather than a unidirectional simple case of pastiche. However his films belong more to Bava's gothic genealogy, suspending logic and pleasure for fascination and strange worlds. It is clear, particularly in Paperino, a film that reveals a paedophilic priest as the murderer in a town where the other male inhabitants are equally if not more horrible than the murderer, that Fulci's configurations of violence were not the generally hygienic and fetishistically composed violences of Bava or even Argento. Fulci's violence is rarely clean, aligning itself with repulsing effluence of bodily secretion and violence which crumbles rather than cuts its victims. Fulci exchanges a knife for a chain whip in the harrowing murder of Martiara (Florinda Balkan) inPaparino and gruesomely eviscerates three dogs in Lucertola in a scene that clearly influenced Carpenter's creatures in The Thing (1980).
Lucertola opens with an acid (the drug kind, not the corrosive kind which features in many later films) orgy that sets the film up as more stylised and yet timely in its elegant depiction of free love, refining the burlesque raunchiness seen in Una sull'altra. All of these gialli seem to mourn the fallibility of the machismic figures of the earlier films, but here we see for the first time Fulci's solution to his disdain for small-minded men through the introduction of the 'sight' of women. Whether this is the second sight of 7 note's psychic Virginia (Jennifer O'Neill), the hallucinations of Lucertola's Carol (Florinda Bolkan) or the ability to be more-than-one of Una sull'altra's Susan (Marisa Mell), Fulci sees the inflexibility of the male's role in society as precisely that which will destroy him. Whether this incarnates through a lack of imagination, the inability to negotiate the world through images and thought rather than evidence, or, as in Paperino, the demand to regain and reaffirm patriarchal power in the face of chaos that results in violence in spite of a lack of evidence, Fulci mourns society's failure to engage with the possible rather than the pre-conceived. This vision, in my opinion feminist but also creatively post-structural, is fundamental in understanding why many of Fulci's later films feature female protagonists, often incarnated by his muse (but at no point fetishised, neither cinematically nor as an enigma) Catriona McColl. Get your custom designed checks and buy DVD if you missed this movie in cinemas. |
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Lulci's directorial debut Il ladri (The Thieves, 1959) brought vision to the scriptwriting work he had done for previous films starring Italian comic legend Toto. The film's abysmal response coincidentally mirrored the responses to Fulci's first major international success Zombi 2 (Zombie Flesheaters, 1979) while also generically mirroring his work as a director of figlia (literally small stream, meaning a film which takes a popular film and independently makes sequels; Zombi 2 was a self-proclaimed unauthorised sequel to Romero's Dawn of the Dead and his work for Toto was a continuation of the many previous Toto films.) Fulci's early comedies functioned as competently written and directed vehicles for stars such as Toto (where Fulci worked as assistant director under Steno) and Italian pop star Mina in Urlatori alla sbarra (Howlers of the Docks, 1960). At this stage Fulci showed an inclination towards directing a particular type of comedy. Unimpressive acting and disjointed scripts are secondary to the elements of these films which, like his horror films, evoke a corporeal response. Slapstick comedy, which the Italians refined to high effect, and jukebox teen music, impregnated with the current interest in jazz as (like teenagers and youth culture) designed to repudiate and challenge the intelligible for  the sensible, formed these films. Both films point to adeptness for making films designed to affect rather than be interpreted.
Fulci's comedies frequently pastiched other genres in which he had already directed. The mafia, addressed in Gli imbroglioni (The
002 Operazione Luna Swindlers, 1963), is parodied in I due evasi di Sing Sing (Two Escape from Sing-Sing, 1964). Bond films become the 002 films 002 Agenti Segretissimi (002 Most Secret Agents, 1964) and 002 Operazione Luna (002 Operation Moon, 1965) and the Come series takes on the army in Come inguaiammo l'esercito (How We Got Into Trouble with the Army, 1965), the bank robber-caper in Come svaligiammo la banca d'Italia (How We Robbed the Bank of Italy, 1966) and the bomb in Come rubammo la bomba atomica (How We Stole the Atomic Bomb, 1967). Ironically the horror genre was treated in the last of Fulci's comedies, the sex comedy All'onorevole piacciono le donne (Nonostante le apparenze... e purché la nazione non lo sappia) (English titleThe Eroticist, 1972, pre-dating The Exorcist but the lexiconic resonance is uncanny), replete with naked nuns and juxtaposing sex, religion and politics; and Il cavaliere Constante Nicosia Demoniaco ovvero: Dracula in Brianza (1975, English titleYoung Dracula, one year after Margheriti's Dracula cerca sangue di vergine e…mori di sete, known as Young Dracula in various English language releases) about a thirsty vampire's attempts to navigate blood drinking in an industrial age.
Both the comedies and the sex comedies show adherence to the Italian proclivity for the ineptness of masculinity in general, and machismo in the case of the sex comedies. These films suggest a criticism of the hierarchical compulsion of the male, insinuating that a homosocial fidelity (companionship in the comedies, vague homoerotics in the sex farces) is, in the end, redemptive of the solitude and the social responsibilities which ablate the baser desires of man. The Come films point to the compulsion to failure toward which modern man is fated through a variety of grand narratives of masculinity – the Army, the Robber, the Secret Agent. All'onorevole shows up the public, not the politician, as hypocritical in expecting a man to be signifier of stoicism and saviour of community in the face of the natural drives of humans, both male and female, ecclesiastic and secular. In this film, Count Nicosia has been so drained (of imagination, of the decadent individuality suggested by the decrepit bourgeois family) by industrialisation that he subjugates himself to capitalism by turning his factory workers into an on-site blood production line for his own needs. Although these rudimentary modern fairy tales of the antagonistic effects of capitalism, industrialisation, religious and political institutions can hardly be described as subversive or radical, they do point to a non-conformist nihilism in Fulci's work that transformed later into a multi-coloured overwhelming nightmare world due to the oppressive nature of the everyday. As in the work of H.P. Lovecraft (Fulci and his scriptwriter Dardano Sachetti's prime literary inspiration), by taking cinesocial nihilism out of space, impossible colours and worlds consume Fulci's viewing victim in a way that, although more horrific than that of the everyday, is excessively imaginative and inspiring. This suggests that inherent in Fulci's comedies is their cathartic effect, another cinema-corporeal aspect of the themes which Fulci continued throughout his career. |
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