The House by the Cemetery (1981) Almi Pictures/Horror RT: 87 minutes No MPAA Rating (plentiful bloody graphic violence and gore, brief nudity) Director: Lucio Fulci Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Dardano Sacchetti Music: Walter Rizzati Cinematography: Sergio Salvati Release date: October 12, 1984 (Philadelphia, PA) Cast: Katherine MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza, Silvia Collatina, Dagmar Lassander, Giovanni De Nava, Daniela Dora, Giampaolo Saccarola, Carlo De Mejo, John Olsen. Box Office: N/A Body Count: 6 (including a bat)
Rating: ****
Lucio Fulci’s Italian-made shockfest The House by the Cemetery is the third installment of his “Gates of Hell” trilogy that began with City of the Living Dead and continued with The Beyond. They all involve a series of gruesome murders in some cursed place after a doorway to Hell has been opened. The thing about Fulci is he doesn’t spell things out for the audience. He sits back and lets them try to make sense of it all. Not that his movies make a lot of sense to begin with.
Additionally, Fulci’s movies tend to be extremely gory. When they get released in the US, they’re either heavily edited or released uncut with a “No One Under 17 Admitted” policy in place. The House by the Cemetery is the first Fulci movie I saw. I went on a Saturday afternoon in October ’84 and could barely contain my excitement at the prospect of seeing a horror flick with a “No One Under 17 Admitted” policy. I knew I was in for a total gorefest. It didn’t disappoint. It’s bloody as hell!
The House by the Cemetery opens with a young woman (Dora) getting stabbed through the back of the head by an unseen person after finding her murdered lover in a dusty, abandoned house next to a cemetery (hence the title) in New England. Right away, we know somebody or something doesn’t like intruders. That’s too bad for Dr. Norman Boyle (Malco, The New York Ripper) who moves into the house with his mentally unbalanced wife Lucy (MacColl, The Beyond) and young son Bob (Frezza, Manhattan Baby). He’s there to continue the work of a colleague who was researching old houses. He lived in the house before killing his mistress and taking his own life.
Things get weird before they even leave New York. Bob claims that a young girl (Collatina, The Great Alligator) he sees in a picture of the house warned him to stay away. Naturally, Mom doesn’t believe him. Life gets even stranger when they move in. Bob meets the girl from the picture. It turns out they can communicate telepathically. The real estate agent (Lassander, Hatchet for the Honeymoon) who set them up in “Oak Mansion” sends a babysitter Ann (Pieroni, Tenebrae) to help out. She’s a weird one. She doesn’t say a lot; she mostly stares, especially when Lucy speaks to her. The basement door has been nailed shut for some reason. Could it be because that’s where the house’s dark secret resides? Oh, let’s not forget the tombstone inside the house.
It belongs to a Jacob Freudstein, a deranged doctor from the turn of the century who was the subject of private research by his late colleague. His license was revoked because of his bizarre, gruesome human experiments. As Norman delves deeper into Freudstein, things get more and more out of control inside the house due to the unknown occupant residing in the basement. I wonder who that occupant could be.
People die gruesomely in The House by the Cemetery, but that’s a given. The kill scenes are good and gory. A woman is stabbed in the torso and throat by a fireplace poker. Somebody is slowly decapitated with a knife. This is followed by the head rolling down the basement stairs. A guy has his throat ripped open. As for the bat, Norman stabs it to death after it attacks him. I didn’t know those little creatures contained so much blood.
The House by the Cemetery is anything but your typical assembly-line horror movie. It has a peculiar rhythm all its own. Its creepy vibe is palpable. So what if Fulci doesn’t tie all the narrative threads together at the end. Early on, somebody claims to recognize Norman from a previous visit to the small town with his daughter. It wasn’t him, of course. The director never follows up on this. Like I said, the movie doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s still great though. The final scene is simply brilliant.
The eerie music score by Walter Rizzati gives The House by the Cemetery a distinctive Italian giallo flavor. The set design by Massimo Lentini- inside the house, in particular- is perfectly chilling. Maurizio Trani does fine work on the makeup and gore effects. The cinematography (Sergio Salvati) and editing (Vincenzo Tomassi) work in conjunction to make the viewer feel like they’re inside a nightmare. There’s a cool sequence where the camera slowly pans over bloody body parts strewn about the basement as the anguished and pained screams of children are heard.
Some of the dialogue is ridiculous. My favorite line is when Bob goes looking for the late Ann in the basement. He shouts down the stairs, “Ann?! Mommy says you’re not dead! Is that true?” Speaking of him, it’s obvious his dialogue was dubbed by some other kid. The dubbing is typically bad in Italian-made horror movies and The House by the Cemetery is no exception. It’s part of the experience.
Fulci knows how to put a creepy movie together. He’s also not afraid to bring on the splatter. His scary movies are transcendent. Nobody makes them like he did. I only hope that some misguided filmmaker doesn’t try and remake The House by the Cemetery (or ANY of his films).
