Perhaps second only to The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery is Lucio Fulci’s greatest example of his trademark aggregation of overt terror, eerie atmosphere sponsored by the routine drudgery which surrounds its Lynchian secondary characters who juxtapose the commonplace banality of the director’s primary figures, and subtle hints of the paranormal, all of which culminate in an experience found nowhere elsewhere in the whole of cinema. Unfortunately, the hallowed director of the grotesque subsequently distills his effort, resulting in a muted, yet nonetheless interesting, work.
A prominent research scholar by the name of Peterson hangs himself and New York academe Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco) is hired to move with his family to the small New England town of New Whitby in order to continue his predecessor’s studies only to discover that, instead of historical inquiries, the recently deceased was obsessively fixated upon the life and writings of the notorious 19th century surgeon, Jacob Freudstein, a man who, among other things, was banned from practicing medicine after leading a series of radical, illicit experiments.
Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery is, on paper, that by which Italian horror nightmares are made. The film’s impetus is to be found, once again, within the pages of H.P. Lovecraft as a story was fashioned from the source material into a prose tale by the pen behind Zombi 2, Elisa Briganti, the product of which was then handed to the co-writers of The Beyond, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Dardano Sacchetti, who adapted the work to the screen. The Fulci party continues in that famed make-up artist Giannetto De Rossi returns alongside The Beyond’s cinematographer, Sergio Salvati, as the director’s staple lead actress, Catriona MacColl, works her apprehensive magic one more time.
The House by the Cemetery opens with slight thematic overtones of Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror before continuing on to slyly capitalize upon the social apprehension of extrasensory perception when placed alongside uncanny young boys as brought about a year prior via Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. However, unlike Rosenberg’s infested abode or the ominous Overlook, Fulci’s New England estate is haunted, not in a paranormal sense (for we get our dose of otherworldliness from a mysterious, seemingly omnipresent and omniscient girl, played by Silvia Collatina, whose identity is sure to surprise by the end of the feature), but literally in the form of a refreshing variation upon Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein mythos as we are greeted by a mad doctor who has lived over 150 years due to his perpetual subsistence upon the living.
Yet Fulci’s picture is far from being an inferior effigy or even homage to Shelley, Kubrick, or Rosenberg as his odd mixture of a zombie-cum-slasher-cum-vampire plotline forms a hybrid dynamic all its own, its narrative zeal met, highlighted, and succinctly complimented by the creative camerawork of Salvati in the midst of the director’s consummately beautiful, yet always disconcerting, compositions.
However, it is perhaps the ease by which Fulci produces an almost overbearing sense of psychological dissonance in his viewer that is so admirably daunting. By providing us with an overtly annoying child, Bob Boyle (Giovanni Frezza), as a pivotal character, in what appears at first a mere instance of sadism by way of the boy’s childish naiveté and outright stupidity, we–intriguingly considering the goading of such is a rarity in film–welcome the thought of the youngster’s ensuing demise as Fulci concludes his tale with an epitaph by Henry James which seconds our not unjustified pedophobia.
Even though we are treated to Fulci’s vast creativity and assiduous attention to detail–readily signaled in The House by the Cemetery when a person is dragged down a stairwell, heading banging upon each step as we go, while the soundtrack is cast from a purely subjective POV: we hear the cacophonous thuds, not as a passive, omniscient observer, but inside the tortured individual’s head–Fulci’s film is not his masterpiece in lieu of the often, and perhaps conveniently, overlooked theme of karmic just desserts as we watch the Boyles suffer as a consequence of their greed. Shortly after arriving in their new home, Norman reminds his wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl), that his work will garner the family an additional five grand after they have been hoodwinked by their realtor, Laura Gittleson (Dagmar Lassander), who convinced them, against their intuition and better judgment (to say nothing of their son’s forebodings) to take the estate, a house which, due to a swift retitling from “the Freudstein House” to “Oak Mansion,” is made to seem completely innocuous.
Most viewers readily fall into one of two categories regarding the Italian auteur: bitter hatred or besotted fascination. Of the latter, all too many return to the director time and time again on the sole basis of the unrepentant gore found within Fulci’s horror canon. That said, those who abhorred the director’s previous works due to their disjointed, nonlinear structure (some aficionados lovingly argue this to be early instances of postmodern terror par excellence, your critic included), will find comfort in The House by the Cemetery until its ethereal, The Beyond-esque climax. Those who would tentatively lament the omission of the filmmaker’s unique brand of surrealism have the opportunity to applaud his visceral signature once again and will undoubtedly be pleased to find the ever-present fixation and incorporation of the human eye as a motif, alongside Fulci’s staple inclusion of maggots, in ready abundance. However, it is this rare instance of general audience appeasement from all sides that dilutes the work as, by pleasing all of the people some of the time, Fulci’s film fails to amaze us with an overwhelming whole.
For example, the director illustrates early in the picture that Lucy is on nerve pills, medication which carries the side-effect of hallucinations and that, after experiencing a spell upon the discovery of Freudstein’s tomb within the confides of the Boyle house, Fulci wisely cuts to a bottle which has subsequently overflowed while refusing to quell our curiosity of whether the spill was a product of the discovery or vice versa. However, instead of leaving his audience in the quagmire of doubt using Lucy’s pharmaceutical dilemma as a tension-mounting springboard, the Godfather of Gore completely abandons the idea, thus adding further insult to injury for having wasted our time with what came before (unlike a wry red herring during the feature). It is with this that The House by the Cemetery remains interesting but fails to incite vested concern within its viewer, either from a philosophical or emotional perspective, unlike his previous outings as his last notable work of terror settles itself between the potency of The Beyond and Zombi and that of the lackadaisical fright called City of the Dead.
-Egregious Gurnow
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