City of the Living Dead - Not Approved by the Dunwich Board of Tourism

Welcome back for another October here at the Third Row.

Mind the newspapers. This series is gonna get messy.

Probably should have thought of that last year, but hindsight's 20-20.

Speaking of which, be sure your protective eyewear is properly secured, we're in Fulci territory now.

Okay, with all that cheek aside, let's dive into City of the Living Dead.
AKA The Gates of Hell.
AKA Paura nella città dei morti viventi.

One of the fun parts of Italian horror - more often than not, these will have multiple titles. I'll include the alternates where I can within reason, though for the rest of this, let's stick to CotLD.

To set the scene, this movie came about thanks to the success of Fulci's earlier Zombie (aka Zombi 2 and Zombie Flesh Eaters.) There was interest in him making another horror movie, and he began working with previous scriptwriter Dardano Saccheti (who is one of a few collaborators who worked on all three movies in this trilogy, others including composer Fabio Frizzi and lead actress Catriona Mac Coll.)

The idea they came up with is one heavily inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Set in the town of Dunwich (a big tip of the hat), the suicide of a local priest sets in motion a chain of events that signal the opening of a portal to Hell. As the clock ticks down to its opening, a psychic and a journalist race to stop the opening before it's too late.

I'll admit it - I don't have a quip for this.
I just really like how Fulci frames this transition.
...and no, the Dunwich tourist board didn't
okay this one either.

That’s the elevator pitch, in any case. The story in the film plays a bit looser, including things like a police investigation in New York and a vagrant who, even by the standards of Fulci’s characters, has spectacularly bad luck. These both play in the orbit of the growing doom descending on Dunwich, however, even if the connections don’t always feel concrete.

Yeah, it’s not intricately plotted, but honestly, with the influence Fulci is working with, I feel like that helps. There’s any number of works that play to Lovecraft’s specific mythos of ancient eldritch gods and arcane texts (while carefully cutting around his uncomfortable racial issues), but Fulci opts to go for the broader strokes of the creeping unknown rather than a specific evil. It’s a big part of why I find this series fascinating - rather than a singular monster or straightforward threat, the films share an idea of a sort of growing corruption, starting from a single incident and growing outward with greater scope and stranger horrors.

It’s something I haven’t seen done as often in other horror movies (Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness comes to mind as the most immediate comparison), so it’s part of what makes these movies standout. The horrors, in this case running anywhere from Fulci’s signature zombies, to a rain of maggots, to one particularly memorable set piece in which a woman vomits up her own organs (an effect accomplished with veal intestines, a prosthetic head, and one INCREDIBLY game actress that I hope was paid well for her part.)

Seriously. This scene goes a good way before they
swap to the prosthetic head - partly because no human
being can regurgitate that much safely.
This woman is a damn trooper!

While a part of me feels odd putting the gory set pieces first and foremost in the strengths, the fact is, they really do make up the backbone of this movie. Not simply as gore for gore’s sake, but as reflecting  the growing escalation that goes with that otherworldly corruption. We start the movie with a priest hanging himself and a man finding a decayed body. From there, we see first graphic standalone deaths, then carnage unfolding on greater and greater scales. To his credit, Fulci maintains the momentum almost perfectly, save for the last twist of the movie that feels like a fumble, and possibly a reshoot for how little set-up it has compared with a lot of what came before.

The movie opened to its share of mixed reception - besides the series of violence cuts for different countries, as was the style at the time, the movie earned its Gates of Hell moniker in response to a legal response from United Artists who felt that the distributors were trying to ride George Romero’s coattails. Critically, there were some who praised Fulci’s style, but many who were turned off by the violence and some of the looser writing of the movie. In the years since, it has developed a respectable following in horror circles.

Granted, it’s still somewhat in the shadow of its successor, but we’ll be going into that more next time. For now, I’ll say this much - on its own, City of the Living Dead is still a very fun, watchable, work of Italian horror. Its set pieces may sometimes be disjointed, but they move at a brisk pace that keeps you invested (so long as you have the stomach for some low budget carnage, anyway.) As its own movie, it’s a good time, as part of the trilogy, it walked so The Beyond can run, but it still stands well on its own.

In the interests of playing somewhat fair with the
good townsfolk, I have been asked to say this:
Come see scenic Dunwich, where you will more than
likely NOT have your brains squeezed out of your
skull by the undead!

If this has gotten you interested in checking this out (and if it hasn’t, you might want to turn back now - Fulci’s penchant for blood, guts, and strange, dreamlike narratives persists in this series), you can watch this, and its sequels, for free on Tubi as of this writing.

In the meantime, unless you’re sticking around for a watch or rewatch, it’s time for us to bid farewell to the ill-fated town of Dunwich as we make our way south to a little hotel in Louisiana. There, we’ll be opening one of the seven doors of Hell with 1981’s The Beyond.

Until then.