Let me go ahead and show my hand here. Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (from 1981) is my favorite film of all time. It’s not just my favorite horror film. It’s my favorite film. Period. Exclamation mark. While The Beyond is a bigger spectacle and Don’t Torture a Duckling is a better film, the tale of Dr. Freudstein, for my money, represents the best of Fulci’s gory golden age. I’m also particularly attached to this film because it reminds me so much of autumn. You see, I live in Tampa and fall around here just means more summer so anything that can jumpstart my autumnal heart is essential. Think of this as Fulci’s It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown except the pumpkins are rotting corpses and Linus Van Pelt is Bob Doyle, the most irritatingly dubbed kid in the history of Italian horror cinema.
In the film, Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco of New York Ripper) is called to continue the work of Dr. Peterson, a colleague who killed himself while researching old houses in Boston. Norman, his wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl of City of the Living Dead) and their young son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) relocate to Boston for six months so that he can finish his work. Almost immediately, Bob meets and befriends a little ghost girl named Mae (Silvia Collatina) who warns him not to go into the house? What house? Why the Freudstein house, of course!
A crooked realtor named Laura Gittleson (Dagmar Lassander of The Frightened Woman) sets up the Boyle family for a whole mess of trouble by putting them in the former home of Dr. Freudstein, a place where people have been dying violently and/or disappearing. It turns out that Norman’s former colleague was so obsessed with Dr. Freudstein, a mad scientist who was exiled from the medical community 80 years prior, that he committed suicide. In walks Ann the babysitter (Ania Pieroni), apparently sent over by Laura to look after Bob. Lucy can’t help but notice Ann’s bizarre demeanor but Norman can’t be bothered.
Strange noises echo throughout the house and Lucy (who is already hopped up on mood stabilizers anyway) begins to lose her grip on her sanity. In order to help his wife keep her shit together, Norman agrees to go into the basement that has remain locked the entire time. While Lucy and he are down there, they are assaulted by a bat that looks like turds and fur with a pair of wings. The bat latches onto Norman’s hand; he then rushes upstairs and starts stabbing the thing with a kitchen knife. He appears to be taking great joy slaughtering the thing and flings blood all over the place including Bob (who looks just a tad shell-shocked by the spectacle).
That evening, while the Boyle fam is at the doctor, Laura the shitty realtor shows up when everyone is out and gets royally killed to death by an unseen Dr. Freudstein who drags her body down to the basement. The following morning, Ann is wiping up the blood but nobody notices because… um… the coffee is ready. As it starts to look like she may be in on the conspiracy of murders, Ann gets her friggin’ head chopped off which Bob sees rolling down the stairs. Of course, Lucy can’t find any evidence of the babysitter’s decapitation and convinces him it all just in his imagination.
To make sure that his college fund is a complete waste of time, Bob decides to head down to the basement that night and search for Ann (or at least her head). This time, Bob comes face to face with Dr. Freudstein and the charnel house that he has made of the basement. Norman, armed with proof that Freudstein is alive and using human remains to recharge his cells, and Lucy, armed with a mother’s love, rush to Bob’s rescue. But are they too late to save their irritating little boy? And more importantly, just who will save them?
Seems pretty straight forward, right? Well, it ain’t. There is so much more to this moody gorefest that every time I watch it, I have to wonder what planet it came from. Frequent Fulci collaborator, Sergio Salvati, is a fantastic cinematographer and doesn’t miss a beat here. The man knows how to pick up the minutest details and knows when to slap on the old fish eye lens to distort the truly terrifying sequences. Salvati is also complicit in feeding Fulci’s eye fetish and there are many, many close-ups of peepers. He also captures the amazing Freudstein house in all of its exterior Massachusetts glory (interiors filmed in Rome). It’s such an amazing house, I want to live there- oh fuck me, is that a tombstone built INSIDE the house? I still want to live there.
You’d think that child actors would get dubbed by child voice actors but no, that’s too expensive. Bob and Mae’s voices are provided by adults pretending to be children and they are both outrageously irritating. Bob wins out as the most annoying dubbing job in Italian horror history (his only rival is Marco in Mario Bava’s Shock). But screw the dubbing, all that matters is that Catriona MacColl’s trademark scream comes through loud and clear in this flick. Oh, I better mention the soundtrack by Walter Razatti. The House by the Cemetery has the quintessential early 80s horror score with a bevy of eerie synthesizer and piano pieces.
Lapses in logic and obtuse exchanges between characters make for a confounding viewing experience the first time around but after you let the magic set in, it all makes sense. Okay, maybe ‘sense’ is too strong of a word. The embodiment of incomprehensibility is Ann the babysitter. Ann is played by the captivating Ania Pieroni whom you may remember from Dario Argento’s Inferno where she played another weird role as the Mother of Tears. What the hell is the secret that Norman and Ann seem to share? Why does Norman deny that the Freudstein house looks exactly like the one in the photo hanging in his office? Why is Lucy on crazy pills? Can we trust her? Why doesn’t Bob get run over by a car in the first five minutes of the film and spare us the pain of listening to his ass-feather voice? The answer to all of these questions comes in the explanation of how Dr. Freudstein has stayed alive all these years: “He needs human victims to renew his cells.” Well, aren’t you satisfied?
As soon as we see down in that basement with all those chunks of people scattered all over the place, my eyes light up like it’s my 10th birthday forever. While I did pick this flick up in a bargain DVD bin for chump change back in 2003, the basement sequences feel so strangely familiar that I keep trying to convince myself I’ve seen this before. Some of my favorite childhood memories are fighting insomnia by catching horror movies in the small hours. Two of the most important were Joe D’Amato’s Rosso Sangue AKA Horrible and Girls Nite Out (the one where the killer wears a bear costume). Could it be that I tuned in just in time to see Bob and his mom desperately trying to evade the rotting grasp of Dr. Freudstein?
Well, if I first discovered this film when I was just a pup or not until my mid-20s makes very little difference. The House by the Cemetery has a zombified mad scientist, a grand old haunted house, a ghost with psychic abilities (is that special or do they all have them?), numerous gore setpieces, and a plethora of themes and hidden meanings to explore and dissect. Add all that up and you’ve got one seriously essential piece of Italian gore-art. The house awaits you; creaky doors, an inch of dust, cobwebs, intestines, and all. Come for the splatter but stay for the intangible horrors and the unmistakable Lucio Fulci-ness of it all. And I tell you, good people, that gory and bleak finale is one of the most satisfying in all of horror filmdom. If you call yourself a horror fan, then check this one out. Or else.