Lucio Fulci's Zombie

Lucio Fulci was an Italian film director who worked in just about every genre there is.  He did sex comedies, westerns, historical/period pieces, gialli, and basically anything else Italian cinema had to offer during his long career.  His directorial credits go back to short documentaries in the late 1940s.

Laserdisc edition by The Roan Group

However, it wasn't until the late '70s that he would begin the work that would form his legacy, whether he liked it or not.

VHS release by Anchor Bay Entertainment

1979 saw the release of his film Zombie (aka Zombi 2, Zombie Flesheaters, Woodoo, Zombie 2: The Dead Are Among Us, and many others).  This film would kick off the most celebrated part of his career, with films like House By the Cemetery, The Gates of Hell, The Beyond, and The New York Ripper to follow.  Written by Dardano Sacchetti (who ended up taking his name off the movie) and Elisa Briganti, Zombie was Fulci's first foray into horror.  He had previously tackled the giallo a few times, but giallo, contrary to popular belief, is not really a horror genre, but really is a type of thriller-- more specifically, a murder mystery thriller.  Certainly, giallo (a term which some people seem to think is just a blanket term for Italian horror) often overlaps with horror, depending on how any given movie is made and what it focuses on, but the gialli that Fulci had made at this point were more on the thriller end of the spectrum, while his later giallo, The New York Ripper, is undoubtedly running amok all through the horror genre.

The story is simple and straight-forward: a derelict boat arrives in New York Harbor and when the Harbor Patrol investigates, a zombie attacks and kills one of the officers.  The daughter of the boat's owner wants to find out what happened to her father, crosses paths with a news reporter who wants to find out what is going on also, and they set off to a remote island where the dead are returning to kill and eat the living. 

The main cast of the film is comprised of Ian McCulloch as Peter West, Tisa Farrow as Anne Bowles, Al Cliver as Brian Hull, Auretta Gay as Susan Barrett, and Richard Johnson as Dr. Menard.  Ian McCulloch would go on to appear in a couple of other Italian films: Zombie Holocaust and Contamination, though he apparently didn't actually see these movies until years later.  Tisa Farrow had a relatively short acting career, lasting from 1970-1980, spending the very end of that short career in Italy, first with Zombie, then Joe D'Amato's Anthropophagus and the Vietnam-themed The Last Hunter.  Al Cliver, real name Pierluigi Conti, appeared in various movies by Lucio Fulci and Jess Franco.  Richard Johnson had previously appeared in The Haunting and Auretta Gay is something of a mystery, apparently only appearing in five movies over the course of about a year.

DVD release from Shriek Show with slipcase

When discussing this film, most people like to point out that Zombie is an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead or will sometimes call it a rip-off of Dawn of the Dead.  While this is kind of true, I think it is a bit of a simplification.  Zombie isn't really meant to be a sequel to Dawn of the Dead and makes no real attempt to connect to it at all, aside from using the same concept of the dead coming back to life to kill and eat the living and only being killed by someone destroying the brain, which many other films have also done.  Zombie was marketed in Italy as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead.  This was a fairly common practice in Italy at the time, at least for exploitation films.  The movies weren't necessarily made to be passed off as sequels, but the distributor would title it and market it as a sequel, as Italian copyright laws allowed for anybody to market a movie as a sequel to another movie and it seemed a good idea to have an already successful name on the film.  A couple of interesting examples are Alien 2: sulla terra and Terminator 2 (not James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but a slightly earlier Italian film).  Despite the titles, neither of these movies has really anything to do with movies they titled after.  Now this is not to say that Zombie doesn't owe much to Romero's films-- it quite clearly was heavily influenced by them and it would not exist had Romero's films not existed.  According to Dardano Sacchetti, the film was really inspired by Night of the Living Dead, rather than Dawn, but when the film came out, Dawn had been a big hit, so Zombie was marketed as a sequel to it for the previously mentioned reason.  To dismiss Zombie as a Romero rip-off is unfair, unless you label pretty much every other post-Night of the Living Dead zombie flick the same.  Fulci definitely built upon Romero's work, but he did it in his own distinctive way, much in the way a band will take ideas from other bands that had come before and add its own new elements, creating something new, but still technically a bit derivative, but that is how all art works, really.  That is my take on it, anyway.

Some people will say Zombie works well as more of a prequel to Dawn of the Dead, but this really doesn't work, either.  As I mentioned, Fulci had his own approach, leading to some interesting differences between his zombies and Romero's.  The main one is one that is a big deal to me, one of the main reasons I enjoy Fulci's zombies just as much as Romero's: Fulci's zombies actually rise from the grave.  In Romero's movies, only the recently-deceased return to life.  No zombie digs its way out of a grave.  Fulci's zombies did (well, not all of them, of course, but some did).  This leads to one of the greatest scenes in the film and even in horror history, in my opinion, when the film's heroes find themselves in an old cemetery and decayed hands start reaching out of the ground, followed by several zombies slowly standing up, dirt falling from their bodies.

Bobblehead of the "worm-eye" zombie

Zombie is quite notorious for its gore and wonderfully putrid-looking zombies.  The zombies rip through flesh, blood spews everywhere, and heads are shot, busted open, etc.  The zombie makeup is probably some of the most classic of all zombie movies.  These zombies look dead as can be.  They are grimy, ugly, dirt-caked cadavers that shuffle around, looking for their human victims.  In fact, one of the most iconic zombies is the "worm-eye" zombie, which became something of a mascot for the movie, appearing on theatrical posters and more home videos releases than anybody would probably care to count.  It is so iconic that seeing just the zombie itself with no other context, horror fans know instantly what movie it is from.  This zombie, played by Ottaviano Dell'acqua, is only in the film for about one or two minutes, but it is a memorable one or two minutes. 

Blu-ray release with slipcase from Blue Underground

It would be remiss of me to discuss Zombie and not mention its musical score.  It is credited to Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Tucci, but generally you only really hear about Fabio in regards to the score.  This, along with the fact that other scores credited to Fabio alone have a similar musical thumbprint, leads me to believe Giorgio was likely just more of an assistant or perhaps just an additional performer for the music, but to be fair, I really don't know.  What I do know is that when I first saw this movie, which was when I rented the big-box VHS release by Wizard Video many years ago, I was instantly hooked to the music when it kicked in at the beginning of the movie.  It was clear that early in the film that I was watching (and listening) to something rather special.  Fabio Frizzi has quite a number of excellent scores under his belt, utilizing a mixture of synthesizers, guitars, choirs, strings, and percussion to create some of the best film music ever, in my opinion.  I will discuss him more in some other posts, such as whenever I decide to tackle Fulci's The Beyond.  Suffice to say that music gives the film this moody, haunting tone.  Not to mention, you will likely have the main theme stuck in your head for days after watching the film.

Cover for CD release of Zombie and Cannibal Ferox scores from Blackest Heart Media

Some other fun stuff I would like to mention now.  First, there is the location used for the film.  It is quite scenic, despite the zombie infestation, which helps make Zombie a rather gorgeous film much of the time.  The clear blue water, the trees, not to mention the house Dr. Menard and his on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown wife live in, all make the setting seem the perfect place for a vacation, if the dead hadn't begun that nasty habit of rising from the grave and attacking the living.  Then there is the late Auretta Gay (I can find very little information on her, but according to the Italian Wikipedia, she died back in 1996, although I have found other sources saying she died in 2006), who goes SCUBA-diving wearing very little in the infamous zombie versus shark scene.  Aside from her lovely lack of clothing in this scene, there is also her first appearance in the film, in which she wears a light-weight white blouse that is clinging to her throughout the scene allowing you to see through it quite clearly.  I honestly never noticed this until getting the Blu-ray release from Blue Underground, then it kind of jumped out at me.  The old VHS editions which cropped the picture to fit old TV screens basically cut it from the film by doing this and some of the earlier widescreen releases may just not have good enough resolution for it to be noticeable (although I want to go back and check, just for the hell of it).  Zombie has also had a comic book adaptation, originally published in black-and-white by Blackest Heart Media, but more recently revised and colorized as part of a expanded series from Eibon Press.  Another fun thing with Zombie is the radio spots for its American release.  These are quite entertaining and are really worth a listen, if haven't already heard them.  "You're in a room filled with your friends, but they're all dead!"