Beyond the Wall of Sleep: The Lovecraftian Realities of Lucio Fulci

We truly live in an age where the concept of cinematic universes reigns supreme. One of the most polarising yet perennial topics within film discussion right now is that of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, a mammoth series of motion pictures and TV series that comprise a single universe and timeline, beginning with Iron Man (2008) and currently on the 29th iteration in the franchise with Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). Due to the popularity of such an arrangement, even DC managed to ride on the coattails of Marvel’s winning formula with their own DC Extended Universe, and more relevant to horror, James Wan’s The Conjuring has become its own de facto Universe, with several sequels and side stories encompassing a shared timeline of the fictionalized lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the franchise’s main protagonists. While the lucrative box office returns and trickle-down effect into mainstream pop culture are hard to miss, and while debate rages on to determine whether these money-making cash cows from huge corporate behemoths can ever be considered true cinema, it’s sometimes easy to forget that shared universes within film are really not new at all. On the contrary, they’ve always been here.

Any wise horror fan would be foolish to not acknowledge the incredible marketing power and box office dominion of the early Universal horror films from the 30’s to the 50’s. Though their literary origins made no mention of occupying the same universe, the figures of Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf-Man, Dr. Jekyll, the Mummy and the Invisible Man were able to occupy the same timeline, with recurring cast, crew, tropes and themes cementing the idea of a shared continuity. Some of these older franchises still exist today, such as the James Bond series, beginning with Dr. No (1962) and with a 25th film (No Time to Die, 2021) just released, or the Star Wars series, which began with the titular Star Wars (1977) and ended originally with 1983’s Return of the Jedi. As time has wore on, the main timeline has been expanded with prequels and sequels, resulting in the renaming of the original film to Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope and several spin-offs like Rogue One (2016) and Solo (2018) fleshing out an extended fictional universe for fans to enjoy. In more recent years, Universal attempted to reboot the idea of a shared universe with their release of 2017’s The Mummy, but decided to withdraw the plans after the film’s lukewarm reception, leading to 2020’s The Invisible Man to be released outside of the original intended ’universe’ format.

A whole world away from titan superheroes, space operatics and international spy agencies, the films of Lucio Fulci have a completely different aesthetic, audience and structure. Known colloquially as the ‘Godfather of Gore’, an Italian equivalent to America’s own tongue-in-cheek auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis, Fulci began his career in feature-length movies in the late ‘50s with a sequence of Italian comedies. Throughout the ‘60s, Fulci continued with the popular comedy formula, notably producing a string of titles starring the reliably hilarious pairing of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. It was in the later half of the decade that Fulci began to deviate from the comedy arena, directing a spaghetti western (Massacre Time, 1966), a giallo (One on Top of Another, 1969) and a historical drama (Beatrice Cenci, 1969), the latter of which began to show Fulci’s personal style for violence and contempt for organized religion. These themes would become more prevalent as Fulci moved into the horror and thriller genres, which the ‘70s would provide in the form of three well-regarded gialli, 1971’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, 1972’s Don’t Torture a Duckling and 1977’s The Psychic. Fulci also produced some sex comedies, more spaghetti westerns and even some wholesome adventure films by adapting White Fang (1973) and then producing a sequel The Return of White Fang (1974). It was however in 1979 that a defining production in Fulci’s filmography would forever change the trajectory of his work: Zombie Flesh Eaters.

While originally offered to The Inglorious Bastards director Enzo G. Castellari, the project was handed to Fulci for his unique approach to graphic violence as evidenced in his giallo works. Marketed as a direct sequel to the insanely popular zombie epic Dawn of the Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters allowed Fulci to really cut his teeth on an extravagant scale, featuring daring set-pieces (including a zombie attacking a shark underwater), a suffocating tropical-flavoured atmosphere and what would soon to be known as his most-loved calling card: intensely bloody violence, especially involving eyes. Whilst Fulci would occasionally indulge in other subgenres, such as his poliziotteschi (spaghetti crime) film Contraband or his sword-and-sandal and post-apocalyptic examples (Conquest, Warriors of the Year 2072), the resounding success of Zombie Flesh Eaters ensured that the remainder of Fulci’s output stayed within the horror genre, encompassing a mix of giallo films, sexual thrillers and most importantly, supernatural horrors. Three of these are considered Fulci’s most famous works, so much so that they have been retroactively dubbed as his ‘Gates of Hell Trilogy’ despite their original production not indicating a legitimate connection.

The first of these is 1980’s City of the Living Dead, released in Italy as Fear in the City of the Living Dead (Paura nella cittá dei morti viventi). Opening in New York, this macabre tale follows a young psychic named Mary, who during a seance endures a terrifying vision of the suicide of a Father Thomas, a clergyman from the nearby town of Dunwich. Positing that this fell act will cause a chain of cataclysmic destruction by opening a gate to Hell, Mary falls into a death-like state and is barely rescued from being buried alive by interested reporter Peter Bell. The pair decide to join forces and head to Dunwich themselves, to close the unholy portal before the arrival of All Saint’s Day, where it is assumed the gate will remain open evermore. In Dunwich itself, the influence of Father Thomas’ death is apparent on many of the town’s children, including Tommy, Rosie and Emily who are all killed by undead spectres. One in particular, Bob, is haunted by Thomas himself, causing the suspicious parents of the town to blame him for the recent slayings and culminating in his murder by an angry father. Emily’s younger brother John-John, psychiatrist boyfriend Gerry and Gerry’s patient Sandra begin to suspect something much more otherworldly is afoot when they notice the reanimated corpses of various townspeople. As Hell begins to bleed into reality, the town is enveloped in a cosmic fog and the majority of the townspeople are killed at the hands of all those who’ve died before. Mary and Peter finally arrive and join up with Gerry, Sandra and John-John, intent on finding Father Thomas’ grave and ending the invasion once and for all. Sandra and Peter fall prey to the town’s malevolence and are killed, while Mary and Gerry are confronted by the sinister shadow of Father Thomas himself as the dead converge around them. As Mary almost succumbs, Gerry plunges a crucifix into the undead priest and vanquishes his spirit, causing the fog to roll away and the dead to return to dust. As the pair reach ground level to the morning sun, John-John excitedly runs to greet the pair, but instead of relieved joy, Mary screams in guttural terror…

Even casual horror fans would be forgiven for assuming that with such a title, Fulci’s movie would be a continuation of the same theme established by Zombie Flesh Eaters, a gut-muncher of various gory set pieces and similarly putrescent perpetrators. While partially true, for a film with frequent scenes of bloodletting and brain-ripping, City of the Living Dead is actually a more cerebral experience than this initial preconception would suggest. Unlike its contemporaneous examples, the origin of the rampaging dead is firmly and definitively supernatural in description, rather than technological or scientific. The profane act of suicide by a man of the cloth is enough to open a metaphysical gateway under Dunwich, unleashing the essence of Hell into the streets, cloaking the roads and houses in a cloying fog and allowing paranormal violations of reality’s rules. Rather than simultaneously cause all the dead to arise, Father Thomas’ spirit is corrupted and he becomes a conduit for the diabolical power flowing from the portal, spreading it further wherever he ventures. Throughout the film’s runtime, the invasion of Dunwich increases gradually until Thomas’ power is such that he can command primordial corpses to reanimate from the vast catacombs under the city streets. The horror encountered by the film’s protagonists therefore is something much more abstract rather than any concrete monstrosity, which lends a lot of credence to the film’s original Italian title of Fear in the City of the Living Dead.

An intangible force of pure fear seems to be the direct consequence of the gate’s opening, with Mary’s fractured vision of the act causing her to effectively ‘die’ of fright. The resultant Father Thomas’ spectre and his dead victims are able to materialize without warning and spontaneously disappear, with most of those merely gazing upon the priest suffering fatal consequences. One of these victims, the already ostracised and troubled Bob is made even more isolated due to his genuine fear of what is happening around him, which only leads to his death when the equally affected adults in the town suspect something is awry. It’s notable that Bob’s killer, Mr. Ross, runs the terrified Bob’s head through a drill because of a fear that Bob is involved sexually with his daughter Annie, a concern well-known among the entire town after a public incident years prior. Annie herself of course is unafraid and trusting of Bob, suggesting they smoke a joint together, presumably because their relationship is friendly rather than abusive or coercive. Unfortunately, it’s this fear and paranoia of the adult Mr. Ross that ultimately dooms Bob, another indirect consequence of the hellish takeover which amplifies the town’s conservative and old-fashioned concerns. The townspeople are especially susceptible to this dark energy due to Dunwich’s fictionalized origins as built upon the ruins of Salem, a society wrought in superstition, suspicion, and of course, fear. In this continuity, the townsfolk’s ancestors burned witches at the stake rather than simply hanged them, only exemplifying their quantum of superstition to outsiders and strange ideas. Their aversion to even contemplating the supernatural is no more demonstrated by the fact that the majority of the film takes place on Halloween, yet no character mentions the holiday, nor indulges in the traditional activities of decorating or trick-or-treating.

In another moment, Emily is floored by the vision of Father Thomas and he slowly, fatefully advances his hand towards her face, eventually smothering her with a vile smattering of otherworldly mud, slime and worms. The protracted length of this act begs the question of why Emily doesn’t attempt escape, but her eyes indicate only too well that she’s paralyzed by the fear of what is coming. Indeed, the coroner (played by Fulci himself) explains the death as cardiac arrest induced by intense fear. Other local teenagers who fall prey to the evil engulfing the town are Rosie and Tommy, who are accosted by the sight of Thomas whilst making out in a car. Rosie is unable to look away from the malefic stare of the priest, causing lachrymal bleeding and eventually, a fatal regurgitation of her own digestive system, a ghastly corruption of the body’s natural mechanisms. Tommy, forced to witness this due to an inexplicable jamming of the car door, is then relieved of his brains as an assailant rips through his skull. Though their deaths are definitely at the spectral hands of Father Thomas, the languid pace and enforced witnessing of their demise reinforces the involvement of intense fear. Other notable scenes of a paralyzing fright include the corpse of Emily stalking her younger brother John-John in a tense moment very similar to the previous year’s Salem’s Lot, and the squirm-inducing sequence of Mary, Peter, Gerry and Sandra being bombarded with an unexplained tempest of maggots, their disgust and revulsion rooting them to the spot despite an easy way out. Even in the film’s finale, Mary is entranced by Father Thomas and almost dies again from the sheer evil in his eyes and in one of the more puzzling aspects of the film to most viewers, the film’s ending can also be explained by this omnipresence of fear. Rather than the expected joy upon seeing John-John alive and well, Mary is still unable to feel anything except a palpable, inexorable fear and screams as the credits begin to roll.

While some sequences eschew this lingering portrayal of fear, including Sandra’s very sudden scalping by the ghostly Emily or the bar scene where the adults of the town are cannibalized by the undead victims (where Bob wreaks vengeance on Mr. Ross in a glorious pantomime of poetic justice), it’s safe to say that Fulci was trying to craft a bleak world in which the horror was something suffused within the imagery on-screen and not just embodied in the antagonistic undead husks. It’s no secret that Fulci was inspired by French playwright Antonin Artaud, a surrealist practitioner who devised the so-called Theatre of Cruelty, a stylistic approach to theatre that sought to make the viewer as uncomfortable as possible by exposing to them harsh realities through purposeful imagery and set design. In his own words, he wanted visual style to convey more to the audience than spoken lines, with “gestures, sounds, unusual scenery, and lighting combine to form a language superior to words, that can be used to subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world.” In essence, Fulci also wanted his depicted world to unsettle and scare the audience, simply through its bizarre imagery, lapses in conventional logic and frightening ugliness. He would develop this style even further with his next films, but there’s one other influence that would form a significant backbone to his material: the macabre works of American writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s impact is felt almost everywhere in Fulci’s chiller; the town of Dunwich itself is from his 1929 story, The Dunwich Horror in which a young man called Wilbur is born to a mysterious family in the titular town, entangled in a dark plot to summon a monstrous god-like entity to the family’s farmhouse. When the young man is killed, the invisible monstrosity grows larger and larger, until it ventures angrily into the town and causes a rampage, killing many residents before a spell causes its demise. The shunned and ‘different’ Wilbur is almost analogous to the character of Bob, who likewise is despised by most of the townspeople and who looks particularly gaunt and anemic. Both versions of Dunwich are also intruded upon by a mostly invisible presence that has been summoned to the town by malefic practices, both notably involving a gate. Gates to unknown hellish dimensions are cornerstones of certain H. P. Lovecraft lore, featuring prominently in 1921’s Ex Oblivione as a near unbreachable bronze gate, purported to contain the wonderful and frightening infinite void of death within. Similarly, in Lovecraft’s The Statement of Randolph Carter (1920), the titular character uncovers one such passageway into the underworld concealed in a tomb within a town graveyard, much like the characters’ descent in City of the Living Dead. Other works also integrate into Fulci’s vision, like the 1939 short The Evil Clergyman, in which the narrator is assailed by ghostly visions of priests when he disturbs the contents of an attic, with one of them notably hanging himself from the room’s rafters. The putrid and decaying Dunwich is also uncannily described by passages from 1923’s What The Moon Brings, in which a man’s vivid dream of endless gardens eventually reveals a self-described ‘city of the dead’, characterized by darkness, foul watery shallows filled with rotten putrescence, slimy weed-covered walls, ruined streets and roads, and corpses being devoured by disturbing swathes of sea-worms. The fog-ridden streets in Fulci’s film certainly fit the bill of such a ‘city of the dead’, especially with the frequent sight of unrecognizably foul corpses writhing with worms, or patches of muddy rot evident throughout the town. Even the reanimated corpses of Emily, Tommy and Bob also bear this signature putrefied look, with bizarrely colored patches of decayed flesh, a viscous covering of slime and a mixture of encrusted and living carrion worms.

By the next year, Fulci followed-up his Lovecraftian ode with another, The Beyond, which was originally released under the Italian title E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà (And You Will Live in Terror! The Beyond). A sepia-toned prelude introduces us to the Seven Doors Hotel in 1920’s Louisiana, where an artist called Schweick paints a series of haunting images in the comfort of Room 36. As a pitchfork and torch-bearing mob converge upon the hotel, a young lady called Emily discovers an old tome entitled Eibon, which foretells the opening of a gate to Hell, one of seven which exist in the world. The mob eventually catch Schweick and brutally beat him with chains before crucifying him to the wall and dousing him in quicklime, despite protesting his innocence of their charges of witchcraft. In the present day 80’s, the hotel is inherited by New York businesswoman Liza, who intends to re-open the hotel. Acquainting herself with local doctor John after a series of accidents at the hotel, she soon encounters Emily, now inexplicably blind and guided by her dog Dicky, who warns her against reopening the hotel. Sure enough, people connected to the hotel begin to die mysteriously: after a mechanic called Joe is killed in the basement of the hotel by the reanimated corpse of Schweick, both their bodies are taken to the hospital, where Joe’s wife is killed by spilled acid as her daughter Jill watches helplessly, blinded by the incident. Liza’s maid Martha is killed by a revived Joe in the bathroom of 36, while Liza’s realtor Martin is killed by flesh-eating spiders after discovering the hotel’s blueprints at a library. Liza herself begins to experience supernatural phenomena in Room 36, such as terrifying visions of the crucified Schweick and the Book of Eibon. John finds the Book of Eibon at Emily’s house which has apparently been abandoned for years, while Emily herself is confronted by Schweick and all the reanimated dead so far. Her dog Dicky repels the intruders but then inexplicably turns on Emily, savaging her to death. Liza and John eventually pair up as the events leave the town deserted and eventually overrun with undead husks, forcing them to seek refuge at John’s hospital. Harris, John’s assistant, is killed by supernaturally flying glass while the blinded Jill is shot by John when she suddenly attacks Liza. Escaping the increasing hordes of dead marauders, Liza and John bewilderingly find themselves in the hotel basement again as reality distorts. They then find themselves in a vast landscape of desolation and emptiness, exactly the same location that Schweick depicted in his art. Trying in vain to escape the void, the pair eventually go blind and fade away into nothingness as the film ends.

The original outline for The Beyond had much less emphasis on zombies, much more akin to a haunted house feature with more prominent metaphysical ideas and concepts than that of Fulci’s preceding City of the Living Dead. In the same vein as its predecessor however, the plot of the film involves an interdimensional gateway to Hell that is inadvertently opened by the death of a person atop it, allowing the undead to invade the world of the living. The person in question this time is Schweick, an enigmatic artist who has seemingly stumbled upon the Book of Eibon by accident, now doomed to see the realm beyond the gate and painting his macabre visions on his canvases. In a moment lifted from Fulci’s earlier giallo effort Don’t Torture a Duckling, Schwieck is encroached upon by the suspicious locals who blame him for some undisclosed trouble, attacking the poor man for suspected witchcraft in a series of brutal punishments including bludgeoning him with chains, crucifying him to the walls of the basement and then dousing his face in caustic quicklime, melting his face away in an agonizing ordeal. It is perhaps the unjust nature of the villagers’ killing of an innocent man or the extreme nature of the violence that they inflict on him that inevitably causes the gate to Hell to open up, but similar to Father Thomas of the previous film, Schweick becomes a conduit for the gate’s emissions and is frequently seen afterwards as a harbinger of the diabolic power taking over. It’s unknown whether Schweick had any malicious intent prior to his death, but certainly, his corpse eventually becomes the film’s symbol for the invasive supernatural forces. Unlike the previous film’s focus on pervasive fear as the main obstacle in the way of the characters, this film instead features a highly corruptive force of dimensional evil from the Beyond, specifically one that can violate natural laws and in one way or another, blinds all those who are witness to it.

Liza’s renovation of the hotel appears to kick-start the whole invasion, presumably because the hotel’s abandonment has left the gate undisturbed and confined the forces within to the hotel’s basement. Within a short period of her arrival, the strange Emily turns up and meets Liza on a desolate bridge, last seen during Schweick’s stay as a hotel resident who also reads the sinister revelations in the Book of Eibon. She is now unaltered and unaged, save for a very prominent blindness which has caused her irises and pupils to be clouded. She’s heavily implied to have been taken to the Beyond herself all those years ago, and has managed to escape into reality to warn Liza. Indeed, she has no footsteps when she flees the hotel in a later sequence, her supposed home has in reality been empty for a long time and when Schweick and his minions visit her later, she cries out “No! No, Schweick! Go away, I don’t want to go back!”, indicating her unearthly presence. The gate therefore allows both lost and dead souls to return to the living plane. No more is this evident than in one of the film’s first moments of violence post-introductory sequence with Joe the plumber, who ventures into the hotel’s flooded basement to stop the leak and drain the fluid. He comes across the wall where Schweick was killed, noting the strange symbol of Eibon and watches the wall beginning to melt unnaturally rather than crumble due to its proximity to the Hell gate. Seemingly dismissing it, he is suddenly attacked by a putrid hand from the aperture, which viciously rips his eyeballs out and kills him, his body quickly swelling with the basement’s diluvial waste. The perpetrator was Schweick’s corpse, almost instantly crumpling to the floor as quickly as it sprang to life. The fact that Schweick was murdered in this location too seems to suggest that the gate has actually manifested behind the wall, especially as the brick and mortar begins to dematerialize like flesh. It’s also pretty significant that Schweick physically blinds the plumber by manually removing his eyes, for even daring to look upon the abyss behind the wall.

Both Joe’s and Schweick’s bodies are subsequently taken to the local hospital, where this ‘infection’ further contaminates the town; Joe’s wife comes in to tend to her husband’s body and dress him in preparation for his funeral. She becomes terrified by something and her daughter Jill enters the room to see her mother unconscious on the floor as a large jar of highly corrosive acid spills onto her face. In a bizarre reminiscence of Schweick’s death, the mother’s facial features are melted away in a lengthy sequence, with the dissolved tissues and flesh forming a threatening puddle that approaches Jill’s feet. Jill herself runs away from the spectacle, only to encounter a living corpse that emerges from a nearby freezer, sending Jill into a screaming frenzy, after which she is shown to have lost her sight just like Emily. Once again, the gate’s malevolence causes the dead to rise (Schweick and the freezer bodies), natural laws to bend (the mother’s face abnormally melting into a seemingly sentient puddle of body fluids) and those who witness it to be struck with blindness (in this case, the young Jill). Other sequences have very similar energy; the realtor Martin discovers the architectural plans of the hotel at a local reference library, only to be struck unconscious by the sight of a supernatural lightning flash. Inexplicably, large tarantulas crawl towards his body and attack his face, biting off chunks of flesh before devouring his eyes from their sockets and shredding his tongue to ribbons. Since tarantulas neither appear from nowhere nor bite and devour pieces of flesh from their prey, Martin’s death is completely unnatural and a result of the law-bending corruption from the Hell gate, in this case causing phantom spiders with uncharacteristic squeaky legs who devour live prey, contrary to their own physiology and nature. He also loses his eyes, blinded for being even tangentially involved in the hotel’s business. Housekeeper Martha also suffers a bizarre demise, cleaning out a filth-filled bathtub in Room 36, only to discover Joe’s bloated corpse inside, which exits and forces her screaming head onto a protruding nail, which pierces through her skull and pokes her eyeball out from the socket. Possibly due to reality warping, Martha doesn’t even feel a corpse in the tub, even though her entire forearm goes in to find the clogged plug to drain the befouled water. Joe’s hulking form is characterized by his now sewn-up eye sockets and he likewise blinds the terrified Martha by shoving her onto what appears to be one of the same bolts that anchored Schweick to the wall. 

As the gate leaks the Beyond into reality more and more, even Emily is targeted by the undead. As the undead revenants Schweick, Martha, Martin, Joe and Arthur congregate in her home, Emily begs her seeing-eye dog Dicky to protect her from the intruders. Her faithful dog does so on her command, savaging the zombies and causing them to retreat. As all seems quiet, Emily sighs a breath of relief until Dicky suddenly turns on her owner, tearing out her throat and chewing off her beloved owner’s ear. Even Emily herself is not impervious to the gate’s influence, enough to corrupt her dog’s loyalty and cause her to attack her own owner. As John and Liza begin to take refuge at the hospital, the whole area is so consumed by the Beyond that the undead readily wander the medical hallways and wards, with John and Liza barely unable to fend them off. John’s friend Harris is killed when he is impaled by glass from a shattered window, though it is not surprising that his eyes are one of the first things gouged by the shards. The previously blinded Jill is now also taken over by the malevolence of the gate, attacking Liza and trying to rip her eyes out, until John dispatches her with a gunshot to the head. As they descend into the hospital’s basement, the geometry of their reality is now hopelessly damaged, causing them to be back in the hotel’s flooded cellar and ultimately results in their stumbling into the Beyond itself, a never-ending plateau of dead bodies, dust, mist and emptiness. The pair both become blinded by the sheer malignance of their surroundings and eventually begin to fade away into nothingness. It’s unknown whether they are now ‘lost’ like Emily was, or whether they are simply now dead themselves.

In addition to his usual integration of Artaud’s ‘cruel’ practices, Fulci takes a more liberal dose of H.P. Lovecraft iconography and inspiration in The Beyond, especially in the MacGuffin plot point of the Book of Eibon. The book itself was initially described by writer Clark Ashton Smith and was featured in several Lovecraft titles such as The Dreams in the Witch House, The Horror in the Museum, The Shadow Out of Time and The Man of Stone. The Statement of Randolph Carter is hearkened to again, especially with its very similar narrative of a book which reveals the existence of several underground passages that supposedly lead to an underworld. The narrator, Randolph Carter, is said to have never returned from his excursion into one such passage. Similarly, Lovecraft’s The Book from 1938 focuses on a strange book that is gifted to the storyteller by an eccentric bookseller, only to cause supernatural phenomena once he gets it home. Liza has just such an encounter in The Beyond, where she sees the Book of Eibon in a bookshop, only for it to have disappeared when the giggling shopkeeper engages her in conversation. The aforementioned The Dreams in the Witch House (1933) features the Book of Eibon, as well as a house in Massachusetts with a peculiar geometry that allows access to alternate dimensions, while the corrupting nature of the Hell gate’s emissions is thematically similar to the cosmic effects of a crashed meteor in 1927’s The Colour Out of Space. Pickman’s Model (of the same year) follows a Boston-based painter who paints a series of grisly paintings that seem to depict otherworldly creatures, only for it to be revealed that the monsters are real, which roughly describes the plight of Schweick. Some smaller sequences in the film also seem to take some inspiration from other tales, like Jill’s encounter with a freezer zombie which is reminiscent of 1928’s Cool Air, in which a doctor manages to achieve eternal life through a complicated system of refrigeration. Another is that of The Transition of Juan Romero (1944), in which two miners are inexorably drawn towards a chasm in their mine, only to be driven mad and killed by what they witness in the darkness, similar to Joe’s demise in Fulci’s example. Ideas may also have been plucked from 1923’s The Lurking Fear, in which a remote mansion bears a labyrinthine basement of tunnels and passages and someone even suffers a melted face when they gaze out of a window. Emily’s demise at the jaws of her dog is very similar to the death of Wilbur from the aforementioned Dunwich Horror, who is killed by a guard dog due to his inhuman, supernatural smell. This actually suggests a much more impactful interpretation to the scene in The Beyond; having fended off the zombies at Emily’s request, Dicky may have actually confused Emily for being one of them as well, since she bore the same inhuman smell as the dead who surrounded her. Finally, Martin’s death at the pedipalps of the spiders is preceded by a spontaneous supernatural bolt of lightning, a frequently employed Lovecraft trope in many of his works.

Fulci’s final entry into the unofficial trilogy would come later in 1981 in the form of The House by the Cemetery, originally released as Quella villa accanto al cimitero (That Mansion Next to the Cemetery). Young Bob is whisked off by his parents Lucy and Norman away from New York and to a small town in New England, where they are to live in Oak Mansion, an isolated manse near a cemetery infamous for its disturbing past. Norman is to take up the mantle of his predecessor, the mansion’s previous occupant, intending to finish his research project but instead comes across a whole host of papers related instead to a local celebrity, Dr. Freudstein. At the house, Bob receives several warnings from his friend Mae who says they have to leave the house due to its danger, while Lucy begins struggling with the house’s strange noises and peculiar features. The realtor Mrs. Gittelson visits to address the couple’s concerns, only to die at the hands of a shambling man who stabs her to death with a fire poker. Bob’s babysitter Anne is likewise killed when she becomes trapped in the basement, to be approached by the killer who painfully cuts her head off with a kitchen knife. After Norman closes in on some vital information about Freudstein, Bob gets trapped in the basement with the shambling man and is forced to see a plethora of the victims’ bodies strewn about the basement rooms. Norman and Lucy eventually get into the basement and confront the man, revealed to be Freudstein himself, still alive due to radical biological experimentation using the tissues and fluids from his victims. Norman is unable to kill the monster and has his throat ripped out, while Lucy tries to help Bob escape through a crack in the ceiling. She is also killed when Freudstein drags her painfully down a set of stairs, leaving Bob alone to escape. At the penultimate moment, Mae rescues him and the pair walk off into the unknown with Mae’s mother, both of them revealed to be the ghosts of Freudstein’s family…

Compared to City and The Beyond, House by the Cemetery is a much more conventional narrative with less emphasis on metaphysical ideas and dimensional invasion. Notably, it’s the only one of the trio to not contain any reference to a gate to Hell, nor does it involve a swelling of undead rampaging through the main cast. That’s not to say however that a portal to hellish forces is not in play underneath Oak Mansion; indeed, the immediate area of the house and surrounding town seem under the influence of a compelling effect that seems to create bizarre behavioral instability. A great many of the characters display strange behaviors at various points, most of them incongruous with the current events and there’s a repetitious theme occurring with the situations occurring in the house. There’s even subtle signs that suggest Oak Mansion is caught in a temporal cycle of some kind with recurring events, relationships, victims, all colored by the perspective of a child’s imagination. 

To explore these, we can start with the film’s antagonist Dr. Freudstein, an enigmatic character whose only expository background is that he was an unethical medical practitioner, ostracised by his peers and the wider medical community for illegal experimentation. At some undisclosed point in the story, Freudstein’s wife and young daughter Mae are killed by him, remaining in and around the house as ghosts and maintaining a loose sense of normal life. What caused Freudstein’s devolution into illicit experiments and eventual murder of his family is yet unknown, but it’s not unheard of to assume that it is the same culprit as Fulci’s previous films; a gateway underneath the basement charnel-house that amplifies and exacerbates the manic behavior of those who dwell above it. It would certainly explain the sudden change in Freudstein’s temperament; neither Mae nor Mrs. Freudstein makes mention of the doctor’s ill temper or abusive position in the family, which suggests that his acute madness must have been rather sudden. Freudstein’s objective of revitalizing his cells with the blood of his victims also falls short when such an act would only require a specific number and quality of bodies, whereas in the film, he blindly attacks anyone who encroaches nearby. He also slaughters them in such a fashion that they lose a significant portion of the precious plasma, rendering his madness to be the product of something much deeper.

Before the Boyle family move into Oak Mansion, the unseen Dr. Peterson occupied the same house and conducted research, eventually stumbling upon the existence of Dr. Freudstein and murdering his mistress before committing suicide. This is compounded by the fact that his wife and children were victims of the doctor, brutally eviscerated and mutilated in the basement, causing him to become insane upon the discovery. Presumably a family man, Peterson’s actions of being unfaithful to his wife could realistically be caused by the mansion’s arcane powers, the sight of his dismembered family a grisly push over the already fragile edge. The fact he then murders his mistress and then kills himself despite their relative safety from Freudstein’s clutches, suggests that Peterson’s research and proximity took a heavier toll than one would automatically assume. Then we come to the Boyle family and the characters that are physically present in the film; both Lucy and Norman seem like the very picture of a typical American nuclear family but shortly after their arrival in New England, it becomes evident that their characters are not so rosy. Lucy exhibits many signs of both paranoia and hysteria, feeling an immense sense of unease about their new family home right from the beginning. She suspects the house is the same as a picture she saw back in New York, she reacts with an unnecessary revulsion when finding Mae’s china doll and she frequently descends into violent outbursts of screaming when she encounters a threat, such as supernatural knocking, shadows or even bats. Norman by comparison becomes immediately suspect, brushing off several insinuations that he’s visited the town before, dismissing his wife’s problems as her simply forgetting to take her pills and becoming increasingly distant from his family as he becomes embroiled in his research. While not exactly to the level of Jack Torrence in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Norman’s behavior does seem to be negatively affected by the house in the same way that Lucy is altered. Even some of the secondary characters behave oddly such as Mrs. Gittelson, who is very friendly with the couple at first only to virtually blank them later after they move in. In fact, Gittelson never interacts with Norman and Lucy after their initial meeting and is killed by Freudstein in an agonizingly torturous sequence involving a fire poker. Anne the babysitter is a candidate for the strangest character of the film, bearing an almost permanent thousand-yard-stare that goes through everyone she interacts with. She goes straight to her work without much conversation, gives Lucy the silent treatment consistently and engages in some bizarre activity such as removing planks of wood in the dead of night and mopping up the blood of Mrs. Gittelson without questioning why it is there. Lucy likewise notices the puddle and doesn’t even enquire further, being satisfied by Anne’s indication that she’s put a pot of coffee on. She falls victim to Freudstein as well, with her head severed slowly using a kitchen knife, which then becomes a frequently utilized tool to frighten Bob several times. Lastly there are the library staff who introduce Norman to Peterson’s materials, Wheatley and Douglas, who are a little eccentric to say the least; Wheatley is extremely enthusiastic and smiley while Douglas is incredibly nervous and simpering. It feels like there’s a backstory to the pair but their low impact on the main plot just renders them as rather quirky, only adding to the bizarre catalog of behaviors from the film’s characters. Even an inconsequential bat in the mansion’s cellar reacts rather imprudently to being disturbed, viciously mauling Norman’s hand with such ferocity that being stabbed several times with scissors does nothing to impede its violent temperament. The only being who seems exempt from this is Bob, though many viewers would arguably find his English dubbing an oddity for various reasons.

The wormhole to another dimension also seems to affect those connected to the titular house, ensorcelling them into a strange dimension where events repeat themselves, future events are almost predetermined, and reality seems teeteringly close to a never-ending nightmare. Even from the very start, Bob is acutely aware of Mae simply from looking at a picture back in their home in New York, a picture of Oak Mansion which the family inexplicably possesses despite not knowing about the place beforehand. Lucy herself notices this but her concern is dismissed by Norman upon their arrival. Young Mae has a few moments where she also is fully aware of future events before they happen; a particularly visceral vision outside a clothing store sees the little girl horrified as a mannequin resembling the enigmatic babysitter Anne is suddenly decapitated, with blood seeping from the broken porcelain head. When Anne is indeed murdered at Freudstein’s hands, her head is continually rolled downstairs to frighten Bob, which eerily predicts the fate of Lucy, even using similar sound effects as her head is bashed against the stairs. Mae is not exclusively aware of the future in this regard; several of the townsfolk, including Mrs. Gittelson and Wheatley, are convinced that Norman has visited the town before even though he claims that he has not. Further to this, they elaborate that he has been present with a daughter, which clashes with the reality of Bob’s existence. The only way this could make sense is that they are actually sensing the past and the future, especially considering that the Boyle family seem to not be the first family this has happened to. Freudstein himself had a wife and daughter who all perished, as did Peterson, who additionally had a mistress in the mix. The subtle glances and unspoken tension between Norman and Anne could be interpreted that they are having an affair, which might explain Norman’s presence with a ‘daughter’, but if this is true, it seems that events really are doomed to repeat themselves indefinitely; Peterson also took a mistress prior to the death of his entire family and Norman is easily falling down the same rabbit hole. This theory is further supported by the scene at the graveyard, which suggests that Norman is not the first one to seek out Freudstein’s body and the ending, where Mrs. Freudstein’s cryptic comments about the ‘guests who are sure to come’ implies that Bob is not the first child who has been orphaned by Freudstein’s actions.

It may even be that the MacGuffin wormhole is nothing more than a child’s wild imagination; indeed, the film technically starts with the camera zooming out of a picture of Oak Mansion, panning over to Bob, who gazes longingly at it, his eyes wide with curiosity and wonder. Could it actually be that the film is just Bob’s infantile yet vivid musings about this picture of a house, perhaps a childhood home? Mae is by extension a figment of Bob’s dreamscape, potentially inspired by the mottled and tattered doll he finds. This would certainly explain Mae’s supernatural breadth of knowledge about Bob and his family, as well as the inexplicable decisions and attitudes displayed by the adults in Bob’s life. A child certainly wouldn’t understand the complexities of mature emotion and behavior, resulting in an oftentimes hysterical mother, unusually distant father and an almost entirely detached babysitter. Even further to this, the film could even be Bob’s phantasmagorical resolution for his parents’ marital problems and Freudstein’s victims could represent all of the obstacles and ideas that threaten Lucy and Norman’s idyllic relationship. The young couple in the opening are killed as Lucy and Norman’s honeymoon period of youth and freedom are gone. Mrs. Gittelson symbolizes their stress of housing and relocation from New York to New England, while Anne is representative of potential infidelity with her subtle connections to Norman. Even Norman and Lucy’s bloody fates can be attributed to Bob’s perception of their marriage self-destructing and collapsing into itself. And Dr Freudstein? Freudstein surely is Bob himself, a mishmash of classic monstrous imagery that a precocious child would be aware of, who not only slaughters his victims with excessive viciousness but there’s an element of childish curiosity as he groans and verbalizes in a juvenile babble. When Freudstein has his hand severed later in the film, he notably voices his pain and sounds exactly like several children sobbing. The youth Bob of course survives his own nightmare but becomes permanently stuck in his own imaginary world with the Freudstein family, which gives a lot more credence to the film’s final quote before the credits: “No one will ever know whether the children are monsters or the monsters are children.”

Like Fulci’s previous two films, House by the Cemetery also parallels many of the ideas present in H.P. Lovecraft’s bibliography. The most obvious of these is Herbert West- Reanimator from 1922, regarding a mad scientist who discovers the secret to reanimating bodies after the point of death in a similar style to Freudstein (of course, this was tackled more directly in Stuart Gordon’s 1985 comedy-horror Re-Animator). Another very similar tale is The Alchemist, about a young man who is anxious about his 32nd birthday since every person in his family has died on their 32nd birthday after an ancient curse was cast on them. He soon discovers that the rival who placed the curse is actually alive, surviving hundreds of years via magical purposes to return and murder each family member in turn. The cyclical nature of the murders and the supposed immortality of the assailant are purposely echoed in Fulci’s film. The Picture in the House (the title almost playfully referencing the film’s opening) depicts a mansion inhabited by a wizened old man, who is eventually revealed to be over a century old, extending his life supernaturally through immoral murders and ritualistic cannibalism (like Freudstein again). The interpretation of Bob as a mystical character who is exploring a dimension consisting of his own imagination and experiences is mirrored in several Lovecraft stories, the first of which is Celephaïs from 1922, about a depressed man who continually dreams long and hard about a non-existent city where he is king. As the dream continues and becomes more intense, the city slowly melts away and becomes more like his own childhood home, as the narrator becomes increasingly homesick. Another of these stories, The Quest of Iranon (1935) follows a young boy who seemingly doesn’t age, claiming that he is the prince of a city no one has heard of. After a long and painstaking journey, he comes to the realization that he has imagined the city entirely, immediately aging into an old man and dying in the vast expanses of desert. Like Bob, these characters are lost in a vivid world of their own thoughts, seemingly gaining supernatural benefits as a byproduct of their heartfelt desire to return to the safety of their childhood memories.

Beyond the Gates of Hell trilogy, H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction has also found its way into other Fulci films, with some of the more common elements like revival of the dead, events repeating themselves and invasion by other realities suggesting that an overall connected universe is in play. The works of Edgar Allan Poe are evident in Fulci’s version of The Black Cat in 1981, though it melds beautifully with the small village location and supernaturally empowered felines from Lovecraft’s The Cats of Ulthar in 1921. Alternate Egyptian dimensions and the vastness of suffocating dunes from The Quest of Iranon find themselves in Fulci’s somnolent Manhattan Baby, mixed with the plot point of a mystical talisman that attracts the malevolent supernatural forces, akin to the plot of Lovecraft’s The Hound in 1924, where a pair of grave robbers earn the ire of a spectral dog monster when they pilfer such an artifact from an unearthed body. Aenigma follows in the footsteps of Carrie and Patrick with a young comatose girl called Kathy using a form of astral projection to get revenge on her tormentors. To do so, she occupies the body of the mysterious Eva who mysteriously crumples to the floor dead as Kathy’s life support is turned off, revealing Eva to be nothing more than a puppet body. This is very similar to the ending of Lovecraft’s 1931 story, The Whisperer in Darkness, in which the narrator visits an isolated farmhouse to discuss the existence of extraterrestrial beings with the owner, who claims to have proof of the creatures’ existence and benevolence, indicating a method to extend life by keeping a human brain suspended in a jar. The next day, the narrator discovers the owner’s discarded hands and face, revealing that one of the extraterrestrials was impersonating him and that the owner was dead the entire time, a mere brain in the jar. Similarly, the plot of Fulci’s TV movie The House of Clocks is copied almost wholesale from 1921’s The Terrible Old Man, in which three young thieves decide to raid the house of an old man who has amassed a considerable stockpile of valuable artifacts, unaware of the man’s grotesque reputation among the locals. After an attempt to burgle the place, the three youths are found horribly dismembered and mutilated the next morning. Fulci’s variant simply adds an old woman to the mix, along with several elements from The Cats of Ulthar in the couple’s depiction.

With his non-linear signature and generally haphazard narrative structure, Fulci’s supernatural horror films may not gel perfectly with some of his earlier film releases, such as his more grounded thrillers or examples of westerns. Having said that, the fact that many of his works have this consistency of being purposely enigmatic and bewilderingly cavalier in their approach to continuity and cohesion suggests that Fulci may have just created his own unofficial extended universe. Almost all of his movies in this subgenre feature recurring themes of the dead, unnatural forces that frighten the protagonists, frequent ocular violence against those who gaze upon horrible images and bizarre worlds of dubious origins that defy conventional reality and the laws of physics. Coupled with the fact that H. P. Lovecraft has an incredible amount of influence over these horror films, Fulci fans can now experience a new layer of enjoyment with these curios, finding common elements and recurring motifs that indicate connections to each other in a grandiose universe of fear. Viva Fulci indeed!