Weirdhouse Cinema: City of the Living Dead

In this special Halloween episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the 1980 supernatural zombie film “City of the Living Dead,” directed by the legendary Lucio Fucli, scored by Fabio Frizzi and starring Christopher George and Catriona MacColl.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, Happy Halloween, and welcome to Weird House Cinema. My
name is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
And my name is Joe McCormick. And on this special
Halloween episode of Weird House Cinema, we're going to be
talking about Luccio Fulci's supernatural gore Dream City of the
Living Dead, released in the year nineteen eighty, also known
as Fear in the City of the Living Dead. I
think the Italian translation of that was the Italian title

(00:40):
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 Fulchi verse, particularly with this movie for Halloween,
because this movie arranges its climax round Halloween, according to

(01:02):
in the story, the prediction of an ancient prophecy that
must be averted before the dawn of All Saints Day
or else the dead will rise to rest 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 Fulcie's

(01:24):
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 nineteen eighty and then after that you've
got The Beyond and House by the Cemetery, both released
in nineteen eighty one, the last of which is a

(01:46):
film that we've talked about on Weird House Cinema before
and has a lot in common with City of the
Living Dead. Though it's called a trilogy, 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.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
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, I just,

(02:26):
you know, sometimes it's good to have some some foul
Chie that you haven't seen yet, that you can always
enjoy for the first time.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
Save a little for later in the mid loker.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, yeah, don't be greedy, don't eat all the full
chee at once.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
I don't know, I mean.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
The other obvious argument is, you know, you only live once,
watch all the full Chi you can while you can.
But it is a joy a film like this for
certain film fans anyway. It is also, you know, a
notoriously gory picture.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
That's right, so a warning, especially if you haven't seen
a full Chi 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 ful Chy,
I think, gets a lot more academic attention and treatment

(03:23):
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. There are a couple of exceptionally nasty scenes.
One in particular, I'm thinking of the gut Emesis scene

(03:45):
that tends to make people say wow out loud when
they see it.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
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, ah, you know, it's an Italian
B movie, I can watch some gore, it's not gonna
really affect me all that much because it's gonna look fake.
But these effects are really solid. I mean it's a
combination of great just great practical effects work, great editing,

(04:14):
great lighting, you know, maybe using a little bit of
actual viscera here and there as well. Non human of course,
but but yeah, it's gonna be when it's not gonna
be one of those cases where you can be like,
ah haha, fake blood, hit fake guts. I think the
gore in this film hits pretty hard.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
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 yeah, I'm a I'm not one of those film
fans that needs to see every single zombie film. I
want to, you know, throw some some Draculas and Frankenstein's
in there as well and so forth. But it has

(05:05):
such a particular flavor of zombie. It is kind of
a super It's certainly a supernatural zombie film. So the
zombies are there, We're not sure exactly what's happening here.
Everything has a dream like illogical quality to it, but
there's some sort of supernatural event that's happening. It may

(05:26):
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 Living deal it almost seems to

(05:47):
be not a disturbing entity, but like a disturbing idea,
just the idea of something that is shocking enough that it,
you know, tears open the shroud that it exists between
our world and the next that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Does this film have a villain, like a main bad
guy monster, and I've seen it several times. I'm not
sure if I could answer that. I don't think it
really does.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
There is a figure that reappears, yeah, well frequently, and
you could make a case that he's sort of like
the you know, the the lead antagonist, you know, but
he also seems, as much as anything, a symbol, you know,
maybe even just maybe he is a kind of a ghost.

(06:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
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. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
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 a yeah, it's like a
there's a great dam that is rotting, and there's a
hole that has rotted out in that dam, and there
might be a way that our heroes can can stop

(07:14):
up that hole for a little bit anyway, but the
rest of the dam still kind of feels like it's rotting.
But again, the picture definitely has that dream like illogical
quality to it, so things will feel, you know, highly
contradictory 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, you know, and within

(07:37):
the context of your dreams, those aren't necessarily plot holes.
So like I was thinking about the guts in this movie,
you know, as we were talking about the other day,
regarding full Chee's work, like 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

(07:58):
so forth, and sometimes it can really feel like a
flaw in their presentation, like they don't really know how
to present things. With full she it's definitely not that
Like full She is showing you something and you might
ask yourself, Full Shee, why are you showing me this?
Why are we spending so much time on this? And
full She seems to be telling us, no, you must

(08:19):
see this, this is important. Yeah, and we might not.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Have hading the movie out or something. It's like, no,
you need to look at this. It's important.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Yeah. We were talking about this off mic the other
day about how there is a really singular quality to
a full Chi 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

(09:02):
the remake treatment, and whether that's a good idea. In
each individual case, you can almost always at least see
how it could work, you know, 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

(09:24):
ful cheese movies are not like that. 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 Fulchae 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

(09:45):
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 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

(10:05):
built around it. The texture is everything that the movie is.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
Yeah, yeah, if you were to strip this down to
the bones, you would find that the bones are cartilage
or something even softer, you know, putting your own spin
on a film like City the Living Dead. It's already
all spin, you know, And I mean that in the
best way. Like it's again, this is not a film
where character matters all that much. It's not a film

(10:31):
where the plot, you know, is this this tight skeleton
to be adhered to. So yeah, if you strip away
what fult she did with it, you're left with something
else entirely. So like if you were to remake it.
What would you be doing? Yeah, would you just be
making a Beat for Bee remake that would be useless?
Would you be creating something so entirely new that it's

(10:51):
pointless to even point to this being its key origin?

Speaker 3 (10:55):
Yeah? I mean, I guess you could take certain esthetic inspirations,
but you could didn't really remake this film. I would
argue it would be like trying to dream someone else's dream.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, I think that puts it perfectly well. I have
more thoughts about the guts in this movie, but I'll
save them again to some examples of the guts.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yes, and one of the great things about Dunwich here Dunwich.
Of course, this is an allusion to like HP Lovecraft's
The Dunwich Horror, and on IMDb, for example, that it's
that they list the works of HP Lovecraft and Clark
Ashton Smith as inspiration. Though this film is not based

(11:53):
on anything that either author actually wrote, as far as
I know, it's just kind of general vibes, I guess,
and we get the name done. Which 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

(12:17):
a certified Georgia picture. 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 Luccio Fulci
Tour of Savannah, Georgia.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
Now 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 Lovecrafts in New England. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
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,
have great character. Savannahs a you know, a lovely town,
but they also wanted it to be more dismal than
it was. I think they were shooting pretty hot weather

(13:08):
if I remember correctly, but any rate, they needed to
be more dismal, so they they wanted to blast a
bunch of like sand and in or like baby powder
around to make everything dusty. But they also couldn't get
a hold of actual cinematic wind machines, so they had
to get a couple of swamp boats of kind of

(13:29):
with the big 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
you know, exterior scenes in Savannah, Georgia aka Dunwich.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
That would have been good too. Yeah, all right, let's
go ahead and listen to a little bit of the
trailer audio. This is this is one of those pictures
from a time period 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 that
grindhouse flare.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
The City of the Dead the Living Dead, a cursed
city where the gates of how have been opened.

Speaker 1 (14:21):
You've got to you must be close those gates.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
We interrupt this program to bring you a special broadcast.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
So much police authorities have declared a state of emergency,
effective immediately, and that much county.

Speaker 4 (14:36):
All citizens are thrusting them to.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
Return to their homes as quickly as possible in case
of necessity. Decide eight to five. All citizens are uraged
to remain. Did you see when you in this trance?

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Did you see anything besides that tombstone?

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Oh? Yes, I saw a priest. Guess what. It's all

(15:21):
the same stay a demanding, implacable enemy who search for
blood is never sad.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
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 at least several years ago.
I rented it from Video Drum here in Atlanta.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
I actually bought the recent four K 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.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
Cauldron Films is new to me. I had not really
paid attention to their releases, but I checked out the
website and it looks like we have a lot of
cool releases out already.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
All right, let's talk about some of the folks involved
in this picture, starting at the top once more with
Luccio Fulcio lived nineteen twenty seven through nineteen ninety six.
He was the director. He has a story in screenplay credit.
He was one of the producers, and he has a
little bit of a cameo and they're playing doctor Joe Thompson.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Oh love a love a Fulci cameo.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, though he didn't have his 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.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
I honestly don't remember. I can't picture what he looked
like in the movie. Now.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Yeah, yeah, I guess that's a good thing about a
director cameo. It would not stop him from from taking
on the starring role as a version of himself. However,
in nineteen nineties A cat in the brain.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Never seen that one, but I familiar with the idea.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
It's very much on my list, but it's that's one
of the ful chees I'm saving for myself. And now,
as we've been referring to, this is our third Fulcie
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 ful cheese easily.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah. Orge Rivera as a leather diaper barbarian with just exquisite.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
With nunchucks made from bones, going up against were wolves
and ghouls and an an evil sexy witch. It has
literally everything.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
That one is magnificent.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, So Fulgi is of course a horror legend today
and a titan of Italian beast cinema. But all this
really kicked into high gear after nineteen seventy nine Zombie
came out. This was a very prolific period of his
career to produced some of his best remembered films. But
he had been directing full length films for twenty years
at that point, including satarror films as nineteen seventy one's

(18:27):
a Lizard and a Woman's Skin and nineteen seventy twos
Don't Torture a Duckling.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
I think these are both considered Jello or jello adjacent
films Lizard and Woman's Skin definitely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
He'd also done a Jalloh film in sixty nine titled One.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
On Top of the Other.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
But yeah, he directed a number of different genre films
before the nineteen eighties. He did westerns, he did spy thrillers,
he did comedies, and more so, he was a very
capable director, could tackle various genres, but really excelled and
found success us with these phantasmagorical gore and violence late

(19:05):
in horror films like it just seemed like he really
found his thing here, and again that's what we remember
him for the most.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Horror films that are exercises in spectacle that almost seem
to be comprised of individual paintings and images and scenarios
or scenes. Famously in Zombie or sometimes known as Zombie too,
because I think because the original title Zombie was the

(19:36):
title used in Italian for Dawn of the Dead.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
I 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 assign it a number, and then it's
just a simpler system for everybody.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
A random number. Yeah, 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 every knows what you're talking about. Well, not everybody,
I don't know. Everybody with a certain kind of movie
diet knows what you're talking about. When you say the
movie where a zombie fight's a shark.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yes, yes, and I think there's like a topless snorkeler
in that scene.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
As well, maybe so. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
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. All right, we also have Dardano
Sacchetti born nineteen forty four. He has the other screenplay
and story credit here. Italian screenwriter who worked with the

(20:39):
likes of Lomberto Bava, Luccio Fulci, Zog Castarelli, and Dario Argento.
His first credit was Argento's The cat O Nine Tales.
He worked with Fulci a lot, including some of his
most well known films, including Zombie, Housed by the Cemetery,
The Beyond, New York, Ripper, Manhattan Baby, and so forth.
He worked on Bava's Monster, Shark and Demons, and he

(21:01):
was on Couste Eldi's nineteen ninety 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 Cypher's. You don't need
to really think too long and hard about who they

(21:24):
are and why they're doing what they're doing.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
It's not entirely wrong. They're almost like pieces being used
in the Little Diorama play.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Yeah, but still top billing and in many ways 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, almost
noir as cigar smoking reporter. I don't know, he's not

(21:55):
really noir, but you know, he's very much that kind
of like bad guy cut corners, probably a womanizing reporter.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
Yeah, he's a wily, street smart rascal.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Yeah, yeah, it is. We were talking about this earlier
in the week. It is an unintentionally hilarious performance.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
So often whenever he had a line, whatever it was,
I ended up laughing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
There's a line later on the picture where he's traveling
with Mary to done which, you know, to get to
the bottom of things, and she's brought up the importance
of All Saints Day and all, and first of all,
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 says something about chasing

(22:41):
your galloping cadavers. It's just, oh man, it's so it's
so rich, it's so wonderful. Yeah, so cheesy, but still
if to give Christopher George credit, you know, this was
a solid actor of the sixties and seventies especially. He'd
been nominated for a Golden Globe for his work on
the sixty seven TV show The Rat Patrol. Other major

(23:04):
credits include nineteen sixty six's El Dorado and nineteen seventies 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 genre films, including
seventy six Is Grizzly, seventy seven's Day of the Animals,
eighty one's Graduation Day, and Enter the Ninja, And in

(23:24):
nineteen eighty two he was in Pieces and Mortuary. Have
you seen Pieces, Yes, it's been a while. That's from
a director we've discussed on the show before.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah, one Picer Simon.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah, oh 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.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah. Pieces isn't the most pleasant, but it has things
about it that are pretty interesting. It's nutty. Yeah, it's
like it's trying to be a version of the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre but set in an urban setting, like on
a college campus.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
So Christopher George here rather famously did not get along
with with the director of Luccio Fulci. Though, to be sure,
Fulci had a very strong reputation as being just difficult,
difficult to work with if you were an actor, harsh
on his actors. If we're being generous, he's he's you
would not say that he was an actor's director, And

(24:30):
I don't know, there are various ways to cut that apart.
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. So you can
easily imagine how, you know, how an actor who just
you know, like Christopher George comes onto a project like

(24:52):
this and ends up clashing numerous times with full Chi
over various things, like like one of the things they
apparently on over was whether his character Peter would smoke
inside a church, and Fulchi was like absolutely not, and
George's like, no, this is America. My character would smoke

(25:12):
in a church and it was apparently a big blow
up over that.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
Interesting. I can feel that kind of tension between them
just with Christopher George's on screen demeanor. But yeah, thinking
about Fulchie having a lot of conflicts with actors, this
is maybe reading too much into things because I'm not
like a expert on ful Chi's psychology or biography, but

(25:37):
what little I do know about him, I almost get
the sense that he would 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,

(25:58):
like could be frustrated.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
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 you know exactly how he
wanted to frame a shot, you 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,

(26:21):
you know, if he got on set and suddenly the
actor said, hey, I've got some ideas for my character.
Folshi 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.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
In his head. Yeah, 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. Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, I mean, of course, it's one of 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 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 even manipulate their way

(27:15):
into getting the best possible performance.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
On the other hand, I am aware that Fulchi had
a reputation for like having certain actors that he liked
to work with. Again and again, like wasn't Catriona McCall
in multiple of his Gates of Hell movies.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Yeah, she's in all three, okay, yeaheah. So she plays
Mary Woodhouse in this born nineteen fifty four British born
ballet dancer, returned 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 Fulchie's favorites.
She's said in interviews that it was perhaps because she

(27:51):
really did recognize the serious aspects of his films and
leaned hard into the emotional depths of those scenes. Like
she's maybe she got ful Chee's work on a level
that other actors didn't. You know, 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 full she maybe probably didn't have as

(28:11):
much time for that sort of thing. But she's also
pointed out that, like, hey, I might have been one
of his favorites, but he still blasted me with a
Maggot phill vacuum cleaner for this movie. So so being
full She's favorite doesn't even necessarily mean you're going to
have an easy time on the set.

Speaker 3 (28:29):
But still like, I can see why she's great for
these projects, because she's very good in this movie in
the sense that any actor can be good in this movie,
because she is not like she's not approaching it ironically,
she's not like going for laughs. She's taking the role seriously.

(28:49):
And she's also not half passing it. She's like all in.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that was the reason, one
of the reasons that full she really liked her and
she's great in it. All right, we have some other
humans here. We also have the character Jerry, played by
Carlo du Mejo lived nineteen forty five through twenty fifteen,
an Italian actor born into show business musician, father, actress mother,

(29:15):
whose breakthrough role was the role of a male prostitute
in Passolini's Tiorema from nineteen sixty eight. That was a
film that starred Terrence Stamp. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is
back yeah, back when Terrence Stamp was Yeah. He had
a number of very There are a few Terrence Stamp
films on my list of possible weird house selections for

(29:36):
the future. He did some very interesting European films. But anyway,
Carlo here worked with Fulci on three different movies, so
full she apparently didn't hate him. There was this eighty
one's House by the Cemetery and also eighty two's Manhattan Baby,
And in general, this guy has a pretty nice footprint
in Italian BT cinema. His other credits include seventy two's

(29:58):
The Dead or Alive like that title, seventy five is
the Net, and the nineteen eighty alien knockoff Contamination.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
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 from a recent album by the band Blood Incantation.
Do you know what I'm talking? I feel like I
sent this to you. It's like a metal album that

(30:26):
has some tangerine dream in it.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
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. It's one of those I need to
come back to. Okay, what in the film's thought? It
was my thought. I just didn't finish it.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
But I think I have a memory of letterboxed reviews
for that film, many of which were along the lines
of the best part was when people exploded.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
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 Dmijo
was also in a nineteen seventy anti drug movie called
Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion. I glanced at this, looks

(31:10):
like you can watch this online. It at least looks
like one of these anti drug movies that is also
very psychedelic. It's no making style, so it raises some questions.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
It probably made by people taking a lot of drugs.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
I think, Yeah, I think some people have given that
exact review of it.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Anyway, I like Carlo in this. He has a He's
sort of our third tier protagonist, third tier lead character.
But I also get the impression that Folchi 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

(31:52):
gets the girl, he gets to be in the final scene.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah. So there are sort of four main characters of
the movie. I would say it's these three just mentioned
and then also Sandra played by Janet Agren, would you agree.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, yeah, Sandra, Yeah is also important and we've we've
mentioned Janet Agrin before on the show. She was born
in nineteen forty nine and when she was in Hands
of Steel from nineteen eighty six from Sergio Martino, the
post apocalyptic cyborg action film. She was a Swedish model
turned actor who appeared in nineteen eighty five's Red Sonia

(32:25):
and a number of other genre films, including eighty H Ratman.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
You remind I had completely forgotten about this, but you
reminded me digging up our old notes from Hands of
Steel that Janet Agrin was the actress who did that
absolutely bizarre Italian disco song called Teddy Bear. Yes, I
wonder if we can get a little sample of that

(32:58):
Gimmy gimme Teddy teddy My Heeddy Bartt. I kind of
feel like this song could do things to you that
that happened to the characters in Gates of Hell, Like
you know, you're listening to this enough and eventually there
is full on like intestinal emesis.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Yeah, it might be the sort of you know, troubling
idea that awakens something like this for sure.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, that way lies madness.

Speaker 2 (33:21):
Let's see 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 has a small child.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
Had the same question, couldn't I don't think that makes
any sense. Like, no, just happens to be two different Bobs.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
But this Bob is like an older I guess he's
a sex criminal. There are a lot of 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, like, is accurate, and how much of
it is just hey, we hate the local weirdo.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Yeah. 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 remember.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
I think they just talk about it and where, And
he 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.

Speaker 3 (34:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Right then the film doesn't give us enough ammo to
really lean one way or another.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah, but he is played by Giovanni Radici, who lived
nineteen fifty four through twenty twenty three. We previously talked
to him, talked about him in our episode on Cannibal Apocalypse,
which was partially filmed Indicator Georgia. So another Italian Georgia zombie.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Movie hometown favorite.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, I want to see all Italian zombie films that
were made and at least partially in Georgia. Now I
feel like I have fonsibility to do so.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
But so this was the same year as Cannibal Apocalypse. Yeah,
nineteen eighty Yeah, so he was he was getting around
working Italian actor working in Georgia that year.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yeah yeah, yeah. Redici was indeed an Italian actor. Played
a lot of sleeves, bags, and monsters. His credits include
ful Chi, City of Living Dead, of course, Joe Tomatto's
Cannibal Love alongside George Eastman, Michael swab Is, The Church
from nineteen eighty nine, and Umberta Lindsay's Cannibal Ferrox, a
film that proudly boasted that it was banned in thirty

(35:32):
one countries.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
Okay, 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's some kind of story where
Fulci was mad at this guy because he was too
handsome for the role he was supposed to play. Is like, you,
you are too good looking, I will make you hideous.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, 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 a
like a Paul Nashy character or anything. So I can
see where Okay, this whole idea that, like the locals

(36:12):
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 outside or
sort of a thing. But instead he just looks like
a slightly coked up young Robert de Niro which you know,
is like, maybe that's a reason to blame the local
crimes on him, but maybe it's just happenstance.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
I mean, he's like really in the film, they make
him up to look really pale, with circles under his
eyes and all, yeah, greasy hair.

Speaker 2 (36:41):
But everybody in this film looks like that at one.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
Point, everybody except Christopher George, who's always suave and death.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
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 Jovin 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

(37:09):
may or may not be our chief antagonist. He is
a priest who has committed suicide in a graveyard and
in doing so has at least helped open the gates
of hell.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
That has something to do with the opening of the
gates of hell.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
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 Cinebite from
Hell Raiser. He kind of pops up like that, but
sometimes more as again as a symbol as opposed to

(37:49):
a character, like sometimes he'll just pop in on his noose.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
Yeah exactly. He's not well, much like the lead Cinnabyite.
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 from the news, the Cinnabite does talk.
The priest does not talk.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeahah, 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 Full Cheese, The Psychic from
seventy nine and nineteen eighties, The Day Christ Died, in
which he plays Philip all Right. Another actor we have
Daniella Doria Age unknown horror actress who appeared as a

(38:33):
victim in House by the Cemetery. She's also in Full Cheese,
The Black Cat from eighty two and The New York
Ripper from eighty two. 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

(38:55):
on to direct Cemetery Man and the Church and so forth.
He's popped up. He popped up in Absurd, which we
talked about last year. He became that as an actor. Yeah,
he was in it as an actor and also motorcycle
provider that I don't think he was able to bring
his motorcycle on the flight to Atlanta and then bring

(39:15):
it on I guess the bust is Savannah or however
they did it. But he has a minor character here
as a victim, and he does get his brain opened up.
See also the mask guy and demons. Yeah, in fact,
that is I think still his IMDb photo is him
from that movie with that metal mask. I think he

(39:38):
had He had a motorcycle in that one. That one
was desperately bring your motorcycle to work, Swaby.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Now this movie has a grave digger scene to rival Shakespeare.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
I would argue, 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
Digg is played by Cannibal Holocaust actor Perry Perkannon and
the other by seventies adult film actor Michael Gaunt. And

(40:09):
they're discussing they're discussing pornography briefly whilst digging the grave.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
They're just like shoveling in a cemetery and be like, hey,
have you heard about sex?

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Yeah, it's a terrible This is one of those things
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. Sometimes hard to tell, 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 nineteen forty two

(40:39):
through twenty twenty one. He played a key role in
bringing to life some of the more memorable effects in
this film, which is looking at some of the extras
on the Blue Underground disc for this movie, and they're
quite impressive. Like he was talking about, like getting there,
and you know, he had the task of figuring out
how to bring these ideas that Fulci and the screenwriter

(41:02):
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 you know.

Speaker 3 (41:15):
That's a great looking effect.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
But it's an amazing looking effect, you know, and 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 like a week's worth of planning went into
it and just some amazing details. So this guy was
a true master. We previously talked about him in our
episode on let Sleeping Corpses Lie and he worked with

(41:38):
everyone from Joe Tomato to David Lynch, like he was
involved in bringing the Guild Navigator to life.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
Oh okay, I'm sure in this film the most common
question he would get asked is what's the deal with
the grub Nato? Like where does the maggot storm? How
did that work?

Speaker 2 (41:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:08):
You know.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Not all the effects in this movie are are sort
of like that blatant there. Like I say, there's some
excellent use of like mixing prosthetic and live action and
then cutting it just right so that everything feels believable.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
But yeah, the effects in this film are really good.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
And another great thing about this movie is, of course
it's music. It's a score by Fabio Frizzy of born
nineteen fifty one. This is, as far as I'm concerned,
itallo horror disco at its absolute.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
Finest, really great. I love the score to this movie,
and it varied. Do 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

(43:00):
see disco elements. I see more of an electronic synth
score elements. And then there are parts that almost feel
like a cult folk rock. There are parts where it
sounds like a Pentangle song and I think that what's
her name, Jackie, she is about to come in singing.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah. Yeah, the score is highly effective, but it's also
it's funky, it's brooding, it's surreal and dream like. You know,
some of you might out there you know, you squares
might be saying, oh, disco is dead right, No, no, no,
disco is undead and it's coming through your precious guts
in this movie.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
That's good. By the way, did I just say I
think I accidentally called her Jackie. She Jackie Miks of Pentangle,
the singer and Pentangle. This is the British folk band,
right yeah. Yeah, with that comparison, I'm thinking particularly of
the parts in the soundtrack here, where like the acoustic guitar,
the disson and acoustic guitar Rift comes in boom doom, doom, ding,

(43:55):
Do Do Do doom, and you can just imagine she's
about to come in with the witchy voke like ah
yeah on the Moonlight Night.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
But yeah, okay, yeah, I definitely see what you're saying there.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
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 zombie moans thrown in there at times, as
well a lot of soundscapes, Yeah, yeah, some great soundscapes.
And you know, given that Fabio Frizzy worked on several
fol Chy movies, so he worked on the Beyond Zombie,

(44:27):
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
frizzy sound here is just a key part of the
overall full, chy vibe, you know.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
Yeah, yeah, I agree much in the same way that
I think. 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

(45:00):
a John Carpenter film.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah, it is just such an important part of the flavor. Absolutely,
So this is one. For example, I've been listening to
parts of this score for years. It often pops up
and mixes that I listened to, So yeah, it really,
it really has a life outside of this movie, but
it is also clearly an essential part of this movie.

Speaker 4 (45:22):
Yeah, okay, are you ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Let's talk about the plot of the Living Dead.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
To the extent there is a plot, I think the
way I want to approach it this time, what 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. Okay, So the film
opens with a heart stopping scream in the dark, and

(45:58):
then the credits play over panning footage of an eerie location.
It is a hazy, deserted cemetery, clearly in the southern
United States. 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,

(46:22):
with a languid beat accented on the snare drum, dark cords,
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,
but eventually we see the figure of a man far
off in the distance step out from behind one of

(46:43):
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 as
a priest in a black clerical shirt with a white
tab collar, and he looks morose with red raw skin
on the underside of his eyes. And then text on
screen tells us this is Dunewich. Obviously again a nod

(47:06):
to love Craft. I think the Dunwich is all lowercase.
Interesting choice on the typeface there. Then the music playing
underneath it 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,

(47:29):
the soul that pines for eternity shall outspan death. You
dweller of the Twilight Void, Come Dunewich.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
This is one that this will reappear at different points
in the picture. And I'm still trying to figure out
what it means.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
Ya. I mean, I like the phrasing, especially the second sentence,
you dweller of the Twilight Void, come Dunwich. It feels
like it's missing a preposition somewhere or I'm not sure,
but yeah, that's what it says, and then the priest
wanders past this gravestone, looks up at a branch in
one of the trees overhead, and then we cut to

(48:08):
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. 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

(48:29):
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

(48:49):
trembling in terror and awe, and she whispers, see, I see.
And then next to her at the table, a medium
is speaking, and the medium says the contact has entered
the contact the contact, and then we see Mary's vision
somewhere else in daylight, surrounded by treetops. A hemp noose

(49:11):
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,
And this is when we start to get that pretty
sick dissonant acoustic guitar riff. The thing I was saying
sounds like pentangle or something like that. Yeah, it's great.
So in the vision, the priest has hanged himself in

(49:33):
the churchyard, 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

(49:55):
of life.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
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 you know, is it just
the idea, this disturbing idea itself has opened up the
gates of hell. Is it some sort of like theological
legal loophole allows the gates of hell to open? We

(50:17):
don't know, and we'll never know. We can never fully
understand these supernatural mysteries.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
Yeah. 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 that she looks frenzied, and then she lets out
a shriek, falls away from the table and collapses on
the floor, and then lying there on the floor, she's

(50:44):
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

(51:06):
comes to rest again on that headstone with the message
we saw earlier, You dweller of the Twilight Void, Come Dunewich.
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

(51:28):
Mary's dead. 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

(51:51):
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, like why he's there,
but he just goes up to this random guy and

(52:12):
gets in his face and says, James McLuhan busted twice
for pedaling in 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?

(52:35):
Coke grass? Where's the stash down the toilet? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (52:39):
Yeah, this detective knows that clearly hippies name yes, sir,
that's what happened here. Hippies were doing drugs, and that's
all there.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Is to it. Mary died of acute grass exposure, and
then they flushed the They flushed the stash down the toilet.
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

(53:09):
the Book of Enoch, which they say was written four
thousand years ago. Now, I want to note that there
is a real ancient text called the Book of Enoch,
sometimes called 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 four thousand
years old, more like two little more than two thousand

(53:32):
years old. The actual Book of Enoch is really interesting.
I'd love to find a 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.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Jae Like it's more like say the Book of Abion
or the Necronomicon or something from.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
A world of weird fit. Right. So the Great Teresa
explains that somehow this four thousand year old book described
what happened to Mary in every detail in advance. I
would love to see what the text said it was like.
So there was a seance gathered in New York City.

(54:19):
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. I would
love to know how you would describe this rob.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
It's like demon fire. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
Yeah, 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. Yeah. Oh, and there's a
great point. There's like a U informed cop next to
the detective here any points. He says, it came out

(55:03):
of the floor 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 department, and the detective is enraged.
He's like, you know, ah, these fireball belching pranks, they're
not gonna work on me. I'm going to get to
the bottom of this. And Teresa here I wrote down

(55:24):
what she said. This is an exact quote. 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.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
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 detective.

Speaker 3 (55:48):
Oh yeah, I was thinking the first time I saw this,
I was like, okay, here's our main character. This navigation
is going nowhere. So after this we smash cut to Bob.
What can we say about Bob? 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,

(56:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Yeah, yeah, but he is definitely made up in almost
zombie like fashion, or this would be zombie make up
in many other movies. In this film, it's not anywhere
near gross enough.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
Right, So, pale almost like kind of green skin, 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 like maybe like they
only let him sleep for five minutes a week, hanging
upside down. Yeah, roughly. Yeah, And so when we meet him,

(56:56):
I guess that's full ty trying to overcompensate for him
being too handsome. So we meet him standing in the
middle of a field with wind whipping crazily around him
and the sound of ravens cawing 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 were afraid for and somebody were afraid of.

(57:19):
And then Bob turns into the wind and walks toward
a big wooden house. 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,
looks like a coastal area, so this may be around Savannah.

(57:39):
I don't know why, but I was thinking this looks
like the service building attached to an abandoned alligator farm.

Speaker 2 (57:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:48):
Yeah, well, whatever it is, it does have some stained
glass windows that we see later. 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,

(58:09):
and then he tosses it across the room and it
instantly inflates itself, as if by sorcery.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Yeah, and I wasn't sure if it was supposed to
be sorcery or if this is something that this doll
was supposed to do on its own.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
I don't know. It's like an emergency instant. It's like
those you know, life wraps. I guess 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

(58:45):
shaped mass of slimy, rotten flesh covered entirely in exposed
pink blood vessels and wriggling worms. And Bob is afraid.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
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, street wise. He's a reporter
with a nose for a good story and an amoral
skill set for chasing these stories down. He arrives on

(59:25):
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.
This time we're at Junie's Lounge, which seems to be

(59:45):
the towny bar in Dunwich. Did you get that feeling? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (59:49):
Yeah, this is the local watering hole. Not a classy place,
but you know, not a this is where life happens.

Speaker 3 (59:57):
It's got a package shop attached to it right on
the side of the bar. That's an interesting Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
So you know this is I guess wherever done, which
is actually supposed to be you know, these are the
county liquor laws, I guess.

Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
Yeah. Yeah, But what's your read on the food at Juny's.
You think they have good food there?

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
I think they barely have food. I imagine it's literal
packets of peanuts.

Speaker 3 (01:00:20):
Yeah, probably so. Yeah. It's in the middle of the afternoon.
The bartender is unpacking palettes of canned beer, and two
guys are sitting at the bar drinking I'm gonna 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

(01:00:40):
high pitched tones, and the three men wander over to
look at the cracked mirror, and one of the men says,
you know something, ever since father Thomas hanged himself done
which 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 Thomas. I suppose.

Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
I think just a lot of weird things, unexplainable things
have been happening around here, and they're like, it didn't
happen before, before that tragic suicide.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
Yeah, 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 barflies 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,
and then suddenly there's another kind of quake. The earth

(01:01:33):
shakes and the wall splits into a big crack, goes
down the cinderblock wall from the roof to the floor,
and the barflies are both like, I gotta go, me too,
and they run outside and the bartender is left alone
cussing at his wall for being poorly built. Next thing
is we cut to a psychiatrist's couch. Here we're going

(01:01:53):
to meet a couple of our other main characters. We
meet Sandra played by Janet Agrin and Jerry played by
Carl Meyo. Jerry is a psychiatrist and Sandra is his patient,
and she's lying on a couch in his office talking
about her neuroses and obsessions. The core problem is that
because of childhood experiences, she now has a hatred of

(01:02:17):
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. Yeah. 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 looks the part of a very professional

(01:02:40):
psychiatrist and therapist, though the way some of his lines
are written they feel like things that are not what
a therapist would say.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
Also, she's like lying there talking about the painful memories
of her Freudian complexes from childhood, and Jerry is standing
in the off as standing over her, not sitting in
a chair, but just standing there like while he's listening.
That felt so wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Maybe it's a different branch of therapy. This is the
looming method.

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
You loom over this, I see doctor loomis, do you yeah, yeah,
there you go. 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

(01:03:32):
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 creep, Yeah, the creep. Jerry says, you've been seeing
an awful lot of him lately, haven't you. And Emily says,

(01:03:55):
poor Bob, He's a sick and lonely kid. I don't
see why people hate him so and.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
I mean he's he looks like he's in his thirties
to be.

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
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,
and they say, in Dunewich, anybody like that is branded
a witch. And then Emily, this is a weird way
to go with the conversation. Emily says, look, Sandra, I

(01:04:25):
don't believe those idiots who tell me that our ancestors
were Salem witch burners. All right, woo.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Weirdly and specifically defensive on that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:33):
Okay, yeah, 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.

(01:04:59):
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? Is it men? But no, it is
not men. It's some kind of supernatural force. This will

(01:05:20):
happen a lot throughout the rest of the movie. Suddenly
there's a noise, just a er you know, growling of
the earth and 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 laugh the whole time, but we didn't

(01:05:41):
see it. It yowls and it scratches the back of
her hand and runs across the room, and she says, strange,
it's the first time he ever acted up like that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
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 grizzly, like not so much that
it's just completely ridiculous, but it's pretty blood.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
Yes, it's like a tiny adorable gray kitten that left
a leopard you gouge on her hand. It's a full
chee scratch for sure. Right. 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

(01:06:27):
the edge of an open grave with 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 have some sandwiches, having a
conversation basically about how it's cool to be a pervert. Yeah,
and then suddenly Christopher George is here. So he's again

(01:06:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
There's just some dignified journalism going on here, just showing
up and questioning a couple of grave diggers.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
Right 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 show him out
of the way so they can bury her. So they

(01:07:32):
deposit her coffin on the straps over the pit, and
then they use the machine to lower it down. Again.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
I reference to these individuals were earlier, and yeah, 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 or
Christopher George here. But now it's the other guy.

Speaker 3 (01:07:56):
Christopher George in some stills from the scene looks like
a much more weathered version of Roger Moore.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
He does, he really does. He's like American Roger Moore smoking.

Speaker 3 (01:08:09):
Yeah. Yeah. So Bell watches as the two guys start
to shovel dirt 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. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
Some of the extras that I watched regarding making this
film alluded to the fact that that not only did
they need to get permission to film and cemeteries and
graveyards for this film, so you know, obviously in the
New York area and also in the Savannah area, but
for the scenes for this scene in particular, they also
needed to be able to dig a hole. So maybe
they this was as deep as they were allowed to

(01:08:47):
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, you know, some
sort of disagreement on how deep they were going to
allow them to dig a grave for the shooting of
the scene.

Speaker 3 (01:09:00):
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 ten percent buried,
one of the grave diggers looks at his watch and says,
it's five o'clock. We bust our balls enough, let's go.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
Didn't they just take a lunch break?

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
They did, Yeah, so they quit. They just walk away.
Peter Bell is a little incredulous, but what can he do.
He's not like he's going to pick up a shovel
and finish burying her.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
I mean, he seems concerned enough. I was like, is
that what he's gonna do? Is he gonna finish the job?

Speaker 3 (01:09:39):
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. Ugh And just to Peter, Bell is

(01:10:00):
walking away from the cemetery, he stops. He 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 pickax. Then
this scene takes a turn, so I guess he's gonna

(01:10:22):
try to help. But the way he's gonna help is
he slams the pick axe into the lid of the coffin,
just chopping at it, and we see from the inside
when it pierces through, it comes centimeters from Mary's face.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
Yeah, 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, you know, But that
being said, like he is bringing this thing down right

(01:10:57):
where her head is going to be, and usually on
a casket. I don't remember the details on this one,
you can tell, and this cass was not even in
a sarcophagus or anything. The additional questions. Again, can't ask
too many questions about the about full cheap dream logic,
but it is a this is indeed a terrifying sequence,
and I'm to understand somewhat terrifying the film, especially of

(01:11:18):
the person inside the casket. I'm not saying it was
necessarily unsafe for anything. It seems like the crew really
knew what they were doing. But it can't help but
be terrified if you were I. Step one, climb inside
this casket. Step two, prepare for things to break through
really close to your face.

Speaker 3 (01:11:36):
Several times, by the way, he keeps hitting it, like
four times, but finally he pries away a big piece
of the box and reveals Mary inside, alive and shrieking. Suddenly,
we cut to Marius out of the coffin that 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, to

(01:11:59):
the Book of Enoch. In this scene we learn a
bit more Lore. She reiterates that the book was written
four thousand 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

(01:12:19):
is never satiated. It seems vague. Then Mary begins to
explain to him 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

(01:12:44):
of their eyes, not even going the shot, not even
going below the nose. I wonder why that is. I
don't know, but it feels it's very deliberate obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
Yeah, I mean, I guess he's trying to capture inner
emotional reaction to these revelations. Though. The weird thing is,
of course these revelations are not, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 (01:13:12):
Yeah, Mary says she doesn't know where this city is,
but she does know what it's called. It's called Dune, which,
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

(01:13:32):
to All Saints Day, so that would be midnight on Halloween,
because November first 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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
Okay, so first step they need to find out which
done which this is? Is it Dunwich, Texas? Down which Tennessee?
Dune which Wyoming? You know, presumably there's at least one
in every stay.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
It's like Rome or Athens. There 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

(01:14:25):
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.

(01:14:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:56):
And the cheese.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
No seance there right 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 glovebox. He's like, you're the one who's got me
out here in the armpit of the world, chasing your
galloping cadavers.

Speaker 2 (01:15:14):
Oh god, this is such a great line, and in
the way he says it, I can't properly replicate it.
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.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
Yeah, all Saints Day? Huh, yeah what. 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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
Yeah, she looks incredible. The lighting on the zombies is
terrific in this film. I mean we have different types,
see like one of the older bodies rising almost immediately
after the priest suicide, but the ones we're encountering increasingly
later on the picture are these fresher, rotting, disgusting looking
zombie corpses. And yeah, the lighting is great, gives them

(01:16:15):
this real brooding appearance and the energy of the dead
in this film. Well, I'm sure keep coming back to this,
but these are not your sort of like mindless you
know me want brain zombies. No, 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,

(01:16:36):
maybe it's this void dweller that's been referred to, but
they stare at us with it's some sort of almost
at times unreadable what they actually want. But they don't
intend anything good for us, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
No, it is meaningful, and it is cruel to quote
a film title, the feeling is the dead hate the living.

Speaker 2 (01:16:57):
Yes, yeah, I thought I also thought of that. I
have not seen that movie. I have it there, 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.

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
So Sandra played by Janet Agrin, she keeps having visions
of death and corpses, and so she recruits Jerry, the
psychiatrist to help her out. Eventually, our four main characters
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,

(01:17:35):
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 Oh
discuss more about that in a minute. John John runs

(01:17:59):
away through the streets, goes down some 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
I don't know. News of the events of Dunwich have
gotten to the governor, and as midnight draws near, Mary,

(01:18:23):
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,

(01:18:44):
go down some 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

(01:19:06):
zombie hive or nest.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
Yeah, it really does. That kid does have that kind
of vibe, a terrific set. I believe this is the
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 the graveyard. It's just
choked with human remains they're just pushing down from above.
But also at the same time, equally likely and maybe

(01:19:29):
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 can't say it's necessarily one or the other. It's
probably all these things at once.

Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
Yeah. So down here, Sandra reappears and then unceremoniously kills
Christopher George. She does the Griffin rip on his head.
It feels almost like they were trying to get it
over with as fast as they could.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
This really felt like Fullgy 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, yeah, or part of the brain.
That's the gross thing about it is, 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

(01:20:16):
then brains kind of just inadvertently gets partially scraped out
and spilled out under the ground. They don't even eat
any of it.

Speaker 3 (01:20:25):
Yeah. Yeah, So Mary and Jerry, the two remaining heroes,
venture further into grave world. Oh well, they stab Sandra,
I think to like, 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

(01:20:45):
Mary in the same way that we see another character
die in one of the scenes. So I'll describe in
more detail in a minute. But you know, her eyes
get kind of bloody and it's like, uh 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

(01:21:06):
rotten like the other corpses, but he seems to be.
We were discussing earlier, is there actually a villain of
this film? Is Father Thomas the villain? Or is he
being acted on by this evil magic? I couldn't quite tell.

Speaker 2 (01:21:22):
Like, is he a focal point? Is he again like
a legal loophole he has He become the host for
this void dweller that's been alluded to unclear, unknowable, but.

Speaker 3 (01:21:33):
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
managed 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.

(01:21:56):
All the zombies catch on fire, and our two heroes
escape the tomb. They crawl out in the daylight, and
you think, okay, well, evil seems to be averted. But
the ending is quite ambiguous. As morning is breaking, we
see the police arriving at the cemetery. 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

(01:22:19):
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, have no idea what it means.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
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 blame. Yeah,
it's 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,

(01:23:02):
newly formed nuclear family of survivors, you know, like he's like,
you're my mom and dad, Now let's do this.

Speaker 3 (01:23:07):
He does know Jerry, they already know, but he doesn't
know her at all.

Speaker 2 (01:23:11):
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 ful She decided he

(01:23:34):
wanted a 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, 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

(01:23:55):
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 with one more point to contemplate,
and you can't help but theorize, like, what is wrong?
What did they see or feel like the I guess
the darkness isn't completely defeated. Is it welling back up?
Is it in the child? Is it in them? Is

(01:24:16):
it standing off camera to the side.

Speaker 3 (01:24:19):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:24:20):
We're gonna have to do another movie to explain it.
But that's not what happens.

Speaker 3 (01:24:36):
Okay, So you want to focus on a few of
the geek scenes here.

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
Yeah, yeah, let's get back into some of the gory details.

Speaker 3 (01:24:42):
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 old architecture, cobblestone streets and these brickwork arches

(01:25:05):
underneath a bridge and stuff. We see shots of townhouses
with iron stairways leading up the front, and as usual,
everything is drenched and missed 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

(01:25:27):
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

(01:25:49):
to him.

Speaker 2 (01:25:50):
Yeah, the movie wants to remind us that he's that
he's a great yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:54):
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.

(01:26:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:26:30):
Yeah, it just smears it on her face.

Speaker 3 (01:26:32):
There. What a strange, horrible, nightmarish movie death.

Speaker 2 (01:26:37):
Yeah, it's just like, here's some grave soil and rot.

Speaker 3 (01:26:41):
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

(01:27:03):
guy played by Michelle Swave. This is Swave, Yeah, 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 the

(01:27:25):
girl gets frightened because she thinks there's somebody out there.
The boy is like, na, na, see, I'll turn the
headlights on, and so he flips him on and then bam,
we see the image of Father Thomas hanging from a
noose right in front of the car, where there's the
infrastructure for a noose already there. So why did they
park in front of the old gallows?

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
Well, you know, maybe the gallow, the whole gallow thing
is part of the hallucination or whatever it may be.

Speaker 3 (01:27:49):
So Swab 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

(01:28:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:28:21):
And you may well ask, at this point, do you
really mean all of her guts? Yeah, because I had
read the same thing in reviews. So I was preparing
myself for the film and asking myself, Okay, am I
up for it? Yes, she does puke out up what
appears to be all of her guts. You could basically
like follow along with an anatomical chart and be like, okay,
we're here, we are in the intestine, or here's the liver. Yeah,

(01:28:45):
there's the stomach. Yeah, Like everything seems to come out,
and this in typical full she fashioned with the gore,
it just keeps going and going.

Speaker 3 (01:28:53):
Yeah. Then after this she grabs she does the first
grip and rip I think we see in the film,
So the way this works is swabs. They're like, oh,
what's going on? And then she grabs a fistful of
the back of the guy's head, just grabs the head, clenches,
tears his skull open, and rips out so that she

(01:29:14):
gets part of the scalp, part of the skull, and
part of the brain.

Speaker 2 (01:29:18):
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 have to, you know, run
to pause the screen. But I do think I've thought
a lot about this sequence, especially with the the gut vomiting,
and I was, you know, trying to just figure out, like,
what is fool She's saying here, Like what does it mean?

(01:29:39):
You know? And I'm not saying this is a definite answer,
but this is where my head was going. But I
fairly recently I was 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, you know, version of this

(01:30:00):
in art or even in some Southeast Asian films. There
have been some horror films that depict these things, and
they have different names.

Speaker 3 (01:30:07):
Wait, did a version of this show up in The Boxers? Omen?
I remember ahead with things dangling out of the neck.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
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,

(01:30:33):
so yeah, we saw a little bit of it there.
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
did those mean? Like why are guts hanging from the
next stump of a flying head? And there are different models. One,

(01:30:55):
you know, one argument is that it features it's the
emphasis of the organs of hunger, you know, like, oh
you can we're seeing the guts. The guts are hunger,
and the head hungers for blood or life for us
and so forth. 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.

(01:31:17):
But I would 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's she's transforming,
she's becoming the undead. Don't need those guts anymore. That's

(01:31:39):
just that's just taken up room. 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.

Speaker 3 (01:31:53):
That's a good point. So after this, let's see a
few more scenes. Oh what we should flag the scene
where the police are investigating Emily's death, mainly because full
Chi 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.

Speaker 2 (01:32:12):
He's a professional.

Speaker 3 (01:32:13):
Yeah, and full Chi is explaining that Emily appears to
have died of sudden cardiac arrest, a fright, he says,
and a cop. Then a cop is like, what's that
and points and it's a pile of mud and slime
on the floor with worms on it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:30):
Yeah, we don't see what happens with the right Do
they collect it? Does that go a baggie? What's going
to occur?

Speaker 3 (01:32:35):
You think they're going to take it back to the
crime lab and be like I DNA sequenced the slime. No.
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. It's got to be Bob. We
see Bob slinking around town. At one point, he goes
back to his alligator farm shack and he has visions

(01:32:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
This movie doesn't have a rosy opinion of the funeral industry, no,
but I mean that's kind of standard for your horror movies.

Speaker 3 (01:33:20):
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's like,

(01:33:43):
what is that and she goes, am I a basket case?
He says no, and she says, okay, come look at
this dead body in my kitchen, and oh, this scene
is funny for saying. 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

(01:34:03):
drink less alcohol, and okay, this seems like good advice.
And then she she gets him in the kitchen. He's like,
let's get to drinking. We need to we need to
have some booze.

Speaker 2 (01:34:13):
Yeah, 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, this is one
of those you get a cheat.

Speaker 3 (01:34:23):
Gay Yes, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:34:31):
Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna stand by that for my
own personal room. I get to have an extra drink
if the zombie apocalypse occurs, no questions asked, I just
get to have one.

Speaker 3 (01:34:41):
So Jerry, uh 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

(01:35:02):
was stabbed.

Speaker 2 (01:35:02):
It looks great, just amazing, and certainly go watch extras
about this film. We've go on all the details, but
like the basics here ares They had to have two
panes of glass and then like fill it with gas
until one of the panes, like or both pines legitimately explode.
Film that and then they had to like build a
portion of a wall that's like that's you know, that's

(01:35:23):
super soft, has essentially blood artificial blood vessels flowing through
it with fake blood in them. And then they had
to have a bunch of people on set use like
little rubber bands to fire shards of glass at that
wall in all at the same time to create that
practical effect.

Speaker 3 (01:35:40):
It's just amazing that, yeah, and it looks so good.
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 mister Ross, one of
the guys we've seen drinking at Junie's lounge. He's sort
of like a grumpy, old gruff guy. And Bob starts

(01:36:03):
sleeping in the back of mister Ross's car in his garage.
Then mister 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, Oh you're cool.
Smoke a joint with me. And then Bob, 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

(01:36:25):
suddenly mister Ross comes in, finds them in a rage.
He grabs Bob, shoves him down on his work bench
in the garage where he's like 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

(01:36:46):
through Bob's cranium.

Speaker 2 (01:36:48):
Yeah, it's horizontally positioned. Yeah, and this whole scene is
like it's I mean, it is fabulously assembled in terms
of how it 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

(01:37:09):
of it, Like the drill gets turned on by accident
as he's chasing after Bob, and then he's like, well,
drill's already on and I hate this guy, might as
well go ahead and commit murder.

Speaker 3 (01:37:20):
Yeah, you almost get the idea that he wouldn't have
quite murdered him if the drill had not been spinning right.

Speaker 2 (01:37:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:37:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:37:45):
Oh, I mean, I could go on and on about this.
I mean, when that maggot wind comes blowing in, it
is it's terrific because it is a great gross scene
in and of itself in the context of the film,
but on the other like it's also one of these
behind the scenes story of it's just so weird because
it's like, yeah, they use some sort of high powered

(01:38:06):
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.
And yeah, on the extras, one of the the filmmakers,
you know, effects or something, they were like, oh, yeah,
fol she loved filming this because he hates actors. It's

(01:38:28):
like a dream come true for him, which so 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 Folche's tobacco bag where he kept
his tobacco in his pipes punked. Yes, Yes, the regular

(01:38:49):
regular George Clooney right there, but yes, but it is
such a crazy scene, like one of the many scenes
in this film that was just jaw dropping for me
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

(01:39:11):
part of the general disruption of the natural order of
things because of this brewing apocalypse.

Speaker 3 (01:39:17):
Just all dreams in the full She 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,

(01:39:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:39:44):
I don't know. Yeah, it's like, I think my character
would have a cigar in this scene, and maybe full
She's like, no, it's completely ridiculous. Would never have have
a 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.

Speaker 3 (01:40:00):
This scene also has some good surprise rats or something like, oh,
there's a rat on me now. But yeah, so we
already talked about how they come into contact with Sandras.
Andrew does the grip and rap 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

(01:40:24):
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.
There's like a huge, spear sized wooden cross, and then

(01:40:44):
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. Yeah, 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. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:41:08):
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, I

(01:41:30):
don't know. There's a lot to be made out of that,
Like ful.

Speaker 3 (01:41:32):
Tree with a cross, stabbing the priest with a cross
in the crotch.

Speaker 2 (01:41:36):
And making the guts fall out like 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 these reminded of
what 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 Hors around this time of year,

(01:41:58):
so of course it reminded me of the scene where
Homer is pounding the steak into the mister Burns Dracula vampire,
and then Bart is like, Dad, that's his crotch.

Speaker 3 (01:42:11):
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
have been all this violence and chaos. They burn and
then they just turn to dust.

Speaker 2 (01:42:30):
From dust. We were made from dust.

Speaker 3 (01:42:32):
We will return.

Speaker 2 (01:42:33):
Guts are just an interruption in our dust nature. That's
what the film's trying to say. From dust to guts
to dust again.

Speaker 3 (01:42:41):
Guts wet guts are a deviation from the dust stasis. Yes,
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.

Speaker 2 (01:42:56):
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 Vulhi was just a little extra paranoid here about like,
are they gonna forget the lady puking up all those
guts if we give them a happy ending? I can't

(01:43:17):
have it. I cannot have it, not on my watch.

Speaker 3 (01:43:19):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:43:28):
The Beyond is certainly not if I remember it correctly,
if it's again, it has been decades since I've seen
The Beyond, but I believe it it basically ends with
a horrifying dream like immersion and emergence in another world.

Speaker 3 (01:43:44):
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:43:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:43:58):
Girl at the end. At the very least. Have we
talked about how fulchy 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

(01:44:20):
just watched this.

Speaker 2 (01:44:21):
Yeah, I mean, I rewatched it yesterday and I can
I can't. I agree with that. Yeah, I guess a
big part of it is, you know, for the million
of time, dreamline quality, the picture less of a focus
on characters and plot beats and traditional narrative, and those
are the sort of like stories, stories or what we
latch onto like stories are such a key part of

(01:44:42):
the human experience, and so I want to film.

Speaker 3 (01:44:43):
The mnemonic devices.

Speaker 2 (01:44:45):
Yeah, and so when a film depends less on that,
it sticks in the mind list. This may be a
reason why Housepy 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.

Speaker 3 (01:45:01):
Yeah. Yeah, well I would say there's actually a division.
So these ful two 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. That's the stuff where I'm like,

(01:45:21):
I totally forgot about this. I absolutely left my head
the way a dream does after you waken, the morning
just fades away like you can't even you can't grasp it.
You know it was there.

Speaker 2 (01:45:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:45:41):
Yeah, okay, anything else on City of the Living Dead.

Speaker 2 (01:45:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:45:55):
But it wasn't worth it if they won't let us
smoke in church.

Speaker 2 (01:45:58):
It's America, gosh, darn it.

Speaker 3 (01:46:01):
All right, Happy Halloween, everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:46:03):
Absolutely, Happy Halloween. Just a reminder to everyone out there
that Weird House Cinema is the Friday episode here in
the Stuff to Billyonmind 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, so we'll

(01:46:24):
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 November energy as well,
But just stay tuned to see what we cover. And
if you were on letterbox dot com, you can look
us up. We are a weird house on there, and
you can find a nice list of all the movies

(01:46:45):
we've covered over the years, and sometimes a peek ahead
at what comes next.

Speaker 3 (01:46:48):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
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.

Speaker 1 (01:47:13):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.