Lucio Fulci's The House By The Cemetery and Nightmare Concert
Calum sent me a couple more Fulci films to have a look at so I could add a little article onto the web page...on the tape was The House By The Cemetery, which I'd wanted to see for a while, and Nightmare Concert, made late on in Fulci's career and starring the big man himself. The only problem was that Calum had previously refered to this by its alternative title, Cat In The Brain (which is surely one of the Dr. Suess 'Cat in the Hat' books, isn't it?), and so when I saw 'Nightmare Concert' on the tape, I imagined the worst: Calum had sent me some Oasis by mistake. By the way, if you haven't seen these films, then reading this may spoil them for you. You have been warned.
The House By The Cemetery
The House By The Cemetery (1981) comes across as a very strange film. Well, two very strange films, to tell the truth.
It starts off very much like one of the Poltergiest or Amityville films; family move into old house with something of an unpleasant past. This is strange enough for a start; all Fulci's other films are about individuals or a makeshift group trying to struggle through some very nasty experiences...this is the only family featured in any of Fulci's films. And it is of course the wife that gets the majority of the house's misanthropy in the early stages of the film; reduced to a trembling wreck by the unseen voices and claustrophobic, peeling walls around her, she states weakly that she wants to leave. And of course they don't. Instead, the unseen killer picks off the babysitter and the estate agent (both women, funnily enough).
And then everything changes. As more clues are dropped, it becomes clear that the source of evil is either something supernatural in the house itself or one of the characters, especially the weird but not entirely unattractive babysitter (until the point that she's decapitated). But no. The killer in The House By The Cemetery is Dr Freudstein, the house's owner in times past, who has kept himself alive through killing those who enter the house using "human victims to renew his cells". Now, there are quite a few things that could be said about 'Dr Freudstein'... I could, for example suggest that Fulci's trying to show how the patriarchal doctor has turned himself into Frankenstein's monster as the man of the house, consuming all to maintain his phallic power. But that would be pish.
The House By The Cemetery does therefore come across as part 'family in haunted house', part 50s sci-fi horror. And here's another strange thing; not one single eyeball gets pierced, gouged or sliced up. You can just imagine Lucio Fulci sat in his director's chair at the end of the shoot, muttering away to himself, "you know, I'm sure I've forgotted something"...
The House By The Cemetery is however one of Fulci's best for building up tension. Maybe that's because its format is far easier to follow than The Beyond, etc., and of course it does play the frightened child card well. It can't be that nice seeing your babysitter beheaded in front of you, followed by watching the death of your parents.
Nightmare Concert is now here!
One of the things that most interested me about watching Nightmare Concert (1990) was the prospect of seeing Lucio Fulci play himself. Sure, I'd seen his several cameo roles in his own films (just like Alfred Hitchcock, that other corpulent director often accused of misogyny), but a whole film starring Fulci? I got this idea into my head of old Lucio just pottering about the place. This turned out to not be too far from the truth...
Nightmare Concert could be seen as being an unrecognised precursor to Wes Craven et al's creation of the post-modern horror; apparently set outside of the normal boundaries of horror, with Fulci as the tortured director whose on-screen gore follows him into his everyday life. And the ending poses a bit of a "is this a film within a film?" question. Of course though, that's about as far as you can take the post-modern angle, because the film as a whole is less post-modern than pre-sense.
Here's the basic plot for you, although it doesn't really do justice to the utter bizarreness of the film. Fulci is making yet another horror film. He's seen on set, shooting a scene where a woman is dismembered and then put through a mincer. Her killer/boyfriend then eats her. Fulci goes to lunch, but starts to feel a bit off when the waiter offers him a slab of steak. The film then follows Fulci as he potters around, at each step seeing things that remind him of gore scenes; guy chopping wood becomes guy chopping limbs, and, most ingeniously, red paint becomes blood.
Fulci, understandably distressed at seeing all this, decides to go to a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, out of all the psychiatrists in the world, Fulci chooses one who's also a psychopath. So this guy decides that he can (literally) get away with murder by hypnotising Fulci into believing that he's the one responsible for the killings. And so it goes on.
As Fulci begins to doubt his sanity more and more, the film shows ever stranger footage of killings. While some might say that this is just the film mirroring Fulci's deteriorating mind, I'm fairly sure it's more to do with just trying to cover up how little money the film has by, instead of showing things that look seriously shoddy, showing what is just nonsensical. The effects budget is visible from the very start of the film; we get an early look at Fulci's 'cat in the brain', and it appears to be some schoolkid's attempt at making a puppet. I didn't get too worried about the cat in Fulci's brain when I saw this thing mechanically pawing at his brain fibres. I thought that the papier-mache would fall apart before it could do any serious damage.
No expense seems to have been spent on the guy playing the psychiatrist either. I can only assume that he's one of Fulci's mates...surely no-one that is an actor in any real sense would go through all the death scenes with this one facial expression, a fixed grimace that seems to be part drug-induced, part constipation.
But it certainly wasn't for lack of money that Fulci had the main role. The most satisfying thing about the film is being able to see how Lucio Fulci sees himself. Probably my favourite bit is when he first goes to see the psychiatrist. "Ooh, Lucio Fulci the director!" his secretary squeals, "maybe he'll give me a role in his new film!" And then, just before the credits roll, he sails off in his yacht with another attractive "friend". At least Fulci was happier than I was at the end of the film.
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