1981’s “The House By The Cemetery” Is a supernatural horror slasher from our good friend in gore and gross out Lucio Fulci. It’s also the concluding part of Fulci’s VERY loosely planned “Gates of Hell” Trilogy, and yes. I realise im doing this thing ass backwards, but when it comes to category 1 Video nasties (Which this VERY much is) sometimes we have to approach things the wrong way to get the results we need…hell if i’d have started with “The Beyond” then NO ONE would have been happy, so we’re gonna be working backwards through this sucker. And honestly; this one might end up a bit “Short and sweet”…

The film follows Norman, Lucy and their rambunctious little crotch goblin “Bob.” a fairly typical family living in New York who are soon to relocate. Y’see, Normans a researcher and he’s just been assigned a project to complete on behalf of his late colleague professor Peterson. Professor Peterson had a rather sudden and unfortunate demise in which it was discovered he was having an affair when his mistress was found brutally murdered and the professor was discovered a short time later hung in a nearby library.

So! Norman decides that this is the absolute perfect time to relocate his wife and kid RIGHT into Petersons former bloody abode “The House By A Cemetery” in Boston., with the aim of completing Petersons project and maybe finding out a bit more about how Petersons end came about. While all this is going on Bob starts receiving strange messages from a mysterious girl called May, who warns him to try to convince his family to avoid going to the house by ANY means necessary, this of course doesn’t really work out as the parents listen to what Bob has to say before pretty much immediately dismissing what he has to say because he’s like…8.

In any case they head over to the estate agents to get the keys and May tries once again to stress how important it is that Bob ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT GO ANYWHERE NEAR THE HOUSE. And Bob responds to this by getting out of his parents car and going to chill in a nearby patch of grass with some kind of strange doll he just…found. His parents find him in about 10 seconds (after the film gets an artificial tension scene out of the way because…y’know…runtime and all that) and with that, they make a quick jaunt to the house!

And in a tale as old as time, within minutes of landing and getting set up TWO key factors are brought up, one is that Lucy is off her medication because the side effects include “Hallucinations” and the other is the appearance of a mysterious, attractive and minimally spoken live in babysitter for Bob in the form of Anne, who has a weird fixation with the house and in particular the basement. Which is heavily boarded up in such a way that would imply that you probably shouldn’t open the thing, so you better believe that things getting opened up in the next 10-20 minutes.

After starting to get settled in we then cut to Norman, who’s up working late on Petersons research when he hears an unusual cry that sounds like a child. So he heads over to Bob’s room…but Bob’s fast asleep. Heading away he hears even louder commotion coming from the kitchen and on entering finds Anne by the basement door trying to pry the wooden bars off with the crying seemingly coming from within.

Nonplussed, The next day, Norman heads to a meeting at the library to catch up with one of the overseers of the project, who comments that it’s so nice to see him as it had been a while since he last saw him and he asks about Nomans daughter…which puzzles Norman as this is the first time he’s been here and he doesn’t have a daughter. While that’s going on Lucy begins to more properly clean up the house and while moving an old rug from the living room she stumbles on some kind of stone artefact. A stone artefact that’s a little too religious to REALLY just be a stone artefact…it is infact…a tomb. The tomb of one Dr. Freaudstein.

A short time after discovering the tomb, Lucy too begins to hear the noises, they get louder and louder to the point that she has a full blown breakdown and that night after returning from work, Norman finds Lucy behind a chair weeping and mumbling to herself quietly. After some time trying to bring her back down to earth, the pair discuss the tomb, but Norman dismisses it as “A culture thing” claiming that, in the winter it was so cold that the ground was too hard to dig up, and that, in Boston at least. Burying a family member inside your home was as much a tradition as Christmas or labour day. (Any Bostonians watching this care to confirm?)

After an extended sequence in which Norman and Lucy decide to investigate the basement and come a cropper with some bats leading a particularly gory stabbing scene, May telepaths Bob once again to tell him to get out of the house, Lucy and Bob head out to run errands and while they’re gone the estate agent for the property turns up for a chat. Realising they’re out, she starts to head out herself, but when she steps on Freudsteins tomb, it crumbles, causing her to fall through the gap, damage her ankle at which point, a mysterious figure with necrotic hands appears brandishing a poker, with which he stabs the estate agent repeatedly before dragging her off to god knows where.

Some time passes and Lucy becomes increasingly unsettled by Anne (the big weirdo) so she goes to talk to Norman about it, Norman doesn’t really say all that much about her, but uses the opportunity to fill Lucy in on his research (…I love it when men are there emotionally y’know?) It transpires that Dr Peterson’s research had led him to the work of one Dr. Freudstein. An early 20th century surgeon who was dabbling in genetics and experimental operations. Norman is convinced that Peterson was already going a bit goofy, but when he relocated to Freudsteins house where all of the experiments took place…it was enough to drive him fully over the edge. Which is confirmed the next day, when Norman has to head to New York to speak to his boss to get permission to look into the Peterson/Freudstein link where he finds a personal tape from Peterson in which he madly rambles on about Freudstein amongst many MANY other things. Norman promptly destroys the tape and races home.

As we enter a…rather confusing final act really in which Bob and Mays relationship continues to grow and the mysterious noises from the house continue to get evermore present. Will Norman finally discover what Peterson was up to?Will Anna find out what’s in the basement? and …Why DO so many people hate Bob? Like, I don’t exactly “like” him…but I don’t hate him NEARLY as much as most of the “horror community” profess too…I’ve seen much more annoying kid characters in horror beyond him…eh…Either way, most of these questions will be answered if you watch “The House By the Cemetery”.

And, honestly? Of the three “Gates of hell” movies, this ones probably the one that makes the least amount of sense (mild spoilers from here on out unfortunately, but it’s kind of necessary) So, the biggest problem the script has is purely around how wishy-washy it can get in places when it comes to what’s ACTUALLY important and real, and what’s just…not. They regularly focus on detail or information across the films runtime that just, isn’t really relevant. At one point when Norman and Lucy go to explore in the basement there’s a fleeting moment where the camera focuses on a ring. And you think “Ahh! That’s going to play into this somehow in some way!…” Never gets bought up again.

The point of Anne as a character in this is totally confusing and ultimately pointless…At first she’s introduced with the hint that she knows something that the family don’t when it comes to what’s going on in the basement. The film then ramps things up even MORE implying that Norman may be about to have an affair with Anne in the same way that Peterson cheated on his wife with a mistress at the house (giving some hint that the house has a malevolent presence) THEN the film kinda starts to imply that Anne may in some way be influencing Bob as she take him out to places fairly regularly but has inconsistent or vague recallings about what she ACTUALLY did with Bob for the hours that they were gone.

None of that matters. Because it transpires that, No. Anne doesnt know what’s going on in the basement (at most she might have a hint of an idea. But given her reaction when she actually SEES what’s going on down there, I don’t think she had a scooby) NO. She isn’t going to have an affair with Norman, in fact, apart from 2 scenes I don’t think the pair even directly talk to each other…and NO. she isn’t influencing Bob. Anne is a macguffin of a character, invented to artificially extend the runtime and very little else, she turns up, acts weird, then goes into the basement and gets decapitated. And the fact that the film invests so much time introducing and building her up only to do nothing with it upsets me.

There’s a LOT of just…totally random moments in this where you get shown something, or a character will say something in passing that makes you think. “Oh that’ll be important” and then it just…never is, or if it does come up again it’s for completely out of left field reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense.

I also kind of disliked the ending. (Skip to the “Who wrote this” chapter if you don’t want to be majorly spoiled from here) but…at the end of the film, it’s revealed that Dr. Freudstein has been living in the families basement and that he’d been working on an experiment to achieve immortality by draining people on a cellular level of their “energy” in order to revitalise himself. They all head down to the basement, where Freudsteins waiting for them, a scuffle ensues and Norman gets killed, Lucy and Bob try to escape, but the door won’t open, leading them to try and escape by busting out of the the tomb entrance in the living room (it turns out it’s actually a fake tomb entrance that Freudsteins been using to get in and out of the house)

There’s another scuffle, Fruedstein grabs Lucy and drags her down the stairs where she’s murdered off screen and in the final moments, Bob manages to just about bash through the rock where he’s rescued by May. But it turns out that, at some point in the rescue, Bobs been transported into a version of hell, where he’s to spend the rest of his days with May and (presumably) May’s mother. That’s the end of the movie.

And…while it’s refreshing to have a horror film from this time end with all our main characters dead (including the children…ESPECIALLY the children…) it did rather lead to a mute closing. I had a lot of questions, not a lot of answers and just felt fairly deflated. I mean, basic stuff here but…how has Freudstein managed to live from 1915 (his “death”) to 1981 when the only people we know who’ve lived in the house was Doctor Peterson and that HE only moved there to learn more about Feaudstein recently. How can the basement of the house be one of the “gates of hell” but also the tomb entrance/exit ACTUALLY be a different gate to hell, did Anne have some idea about all this or was she LITERALLY just a mcguffin.

I dunno…I just found it very underwhelming that Norman and Lucy both got killed (Lucy offscreen even! Which is a slap in the face honestly) and that the closing moments of the film are just “Well…everyones dead…g’night folks! Thanks for watching 3 of these!” I’d have just liked a bit more to the whole “Gates of hell” thing beyond “there are some gates to hell all around the world.” and that’s it. Because, as it stands…it’s a very underwhelming closure to what was otherwise an interesting idea.

Beyond that however, we have a relatively solid 3 act structure that has clearly indicated gear changes and, for what it’s worth, the pacing is pretty solid too, i’d say this is easily the best paced of the “Gates of hell” trilogy. It’s managed to massively slim down the padding and wordy exposition dumps while also keeping up the amount of violence, blood, guts and gore that anyone coming to a Fulci film expects.

I feel tonally after “City of the Living Dead” and “The Beyond” this film gets the balance between the cheesy and stereotypically generic Italian horror movies of that time and the more abstract and border absurd nightmare fuelled elements just about right. While “City” was decent, I found it WAY too cheesy and generic to be something I’d go out of my way to catch, especially given there are way more cheesy and entertaining movies out there from that time that do similar things, but more fully commit to the bit.

Equally; while I really liked “The Beyond” It did drag a bit in places because of the change in direction to something a little more serious and a bit more symbolic. This film is still fairly bedded into the abstract and subtextual world that “The Beyond” established. But it also isn’t afraid to embrace the guts, gore and gross out side of cinema that “City” pretty much lived and died by. It’s pretty central between those two movies, leaning ever so slightly towards “The Beyond” and I feel in doing that, it’s probably made the right move. It didn’t *fully* win me over. But I think of all three entries, from a script perspective at least, this was the one that most won me over, and it’s probably the film I’m most likely to put on on a whim out of the three.

In terms of dialogue? It’s…well it’s an Italian movie dubbed into English. It’s definitely not the worst i’ve seen, things are fairly fluid and make sense (for the most part) but don’t go into this expecting decently crafted, naturalistic and engaging dialogue. It’s messy, broken up, not as bad as something like say… “Bloody Moon” but not quite as “possible” as these things go. What I will say though (and I need to stress this because its important) is despite the lacklustre dialogue, despite the ropey ending and the total brick walls that the plot throws up randomly. This script is FUN. its daft, gory and *mostly* entertaining FUN. on a professional level, it deserves a drubbing. But as a movie going member of the public and schlub on the internet who’s been at this for over 6 years, I can’t deny I didn’t have a good time with this thing. Which means it’s pretty much halfway there to winning me over!

The script was written by Elisa Briganti, Dardano Sacchetti and Giourgiou Mariuzzo. Elisa has 15 credits in a career spanning over 23 years with highlights including “Zombie Flesh Eaters”, “1990: The Bronx Warriors” and “A Blade In The Dark”. Dardano has 96 writing credits across a 42 year career with hits including “A Bay of Blood” and “Cannibal Apocalypse”. His last credit was in 2013. And finally Georgiou has 52 writing credits, mainly for lots of dirty DIRTY erotica, but he also wrote “The Beyond” and “Aenigma” with his last credit being in 2012.

The film was directed by none other than a true Maestro of Italian Horror Lucio Fulci. The man was a powerhouse of the genre churning out pretty much all the tent poles that established the Italian slasher genre of the late 70’s and early to mid 80’s. Don’t believe me? *ahem* “Zombie Flesh Eaters”, “Cat in the Brain”, “The Devil’s Honey”, “The Beyond”, “City of the Living Dead”, “The New York Ripper” and the absolute STANDARD of horror cinema “Manhattan Baby”…okay i’m kidding with that last one, but Still..the guy knew his horror onions.

In fact he’s only one of TWO directors to have 3 or more pictures on the Section 1 Video Nasties list. With the only other person sharing such a title being none other than Jess Franco. He was a workhorse right through to the end, sadly passing away in 1996, but even then he still had several projects in active development with his final credit getting released a year later in 1997. The man WAS Italian horror. In the same way that Carpenter or Craven have come to define US horror of the 1980’s Fulci WAS one of the prominent horror directors on the scene at that time. And his body of work is as strong a case as you’ll find for that era.

On the direction front, What we have here is a much more subdued but focussed offering from Fulci. This isn’t “The Black Cat” or “Manhattan Baby” or “City of the living dead” where it’s constantly cutting to crash zooms, extreme gore or violence. It’s much more muted than that, but instead, it trades in atmosphere with the occasional bout of extreme violence to tide the viewer over. And I think it’s tight as a nut quite frankly. With this film, he’s managed to unite the cast and crew on a focussed goal that I feel has been achieved with a level of stylish zeal and relish. It’s by NO means a “showy” production, that’s not its function, but it IS a film that manages to build a wonderful sense of atmosphere that it maintains across its entire runtime, seldom faltering. I can honestly just really appreciate a well made rock solid production like this that DOESN’T feel the need to get up in my face, it knows it doesnt NEED to sell me anything, which means it can just crack on with what it’s trying to do.

Direction of the cast is fairly well handled too, they all seem highly animated and seem to have a good grasp of what they’re doing. A LOT of information is expressed through the occasional glance, the way props are utilised and the way the cast occupy the set space. In short, they do a good job. I can’t honestly fault them really beyond any of the general issues that plagued Italian horror of this era.

For me however, it’s the cine where the film probably has its weakest element. While the direction itself has created some wonderfully moody and atmospheric moments, I don’t feel it really properly translated that mood into the cinematography. This is a very flat, very dull looking production, predominantly shot in what looks like autumn or winter weather. It’s chronically grey and cold looking and given there are only really a very small handful of locations (the house, the basement, the graveyard and the library is about as varied as it gets) it means there just…isn’t a whole lot to look at.

While the occasional coloured gel shot comes out as a way to do “day for night” the lighting is flat and fairly uninteresting with most of the cine here that DID “wow” being undercut by the fact that it was “borrowed” from the previous 4 films that Fulci had worked on. You say Iconic, I say “stolen”. And if anyone wants to argue that Fulci cant steal cinematography off himself then ill shift from “Stolen” to “Lazy.” It’s all just a flat, dull and fairly bland affair, which is a shame because so much efforts gone into setting the moods on the locations and sets. I feel with just a bit more “oomph” behind the wheel on this front it really would have taken this film to the next level.

Performance wise? Well, Bob aside, it’s not a bad bunch really! Catriona MacColl as Lucy continues her wonderful stint in these films with a wonderful performance that is a tad melodramatic, but all the better for it! I’ve really enjoyed her across this run of films and it’s a shame she didn’t really do very much in Italian cinema after this, instead going into a career in television before recently returning to film in the last decade (I should really check some of those out…)

Paolo Malco is just about okay as Norman, if i’m being honest, I just feel like he doesn’t quite fit the bill for the role required. There’s no real fault with his performance, I just think he’s a little too *dreamy* for what is supposed to be a deeply involved researcher. They basically just shoved some glasses on a guy and went “He’s such a nerdy dork, check him out doing the science like a dork!” Like I say, I don’t think he’s BAD, I just don’t think he was the right fit here…He’s still fairly solid though, and manages to just about get through the movie without causing *Too* I’m very upset.

The rest of the cast…if i’m being honest are all fairly unmemorable. Most have only a handful of scenes and just about give good enough performances to get us through the runtime…there was no one here who I thought was particularly awful or of note for negative reasons. And where issues do arise I honestly think the problem lay more with the script than anything else…so yeh, on the whole…ehhhhhh…

And finally; the soundtrack! It suits the role of the film and nothing more, it’s synthy driven atmos tracks, similar to “The Beyonds” score, but because of that it’s much less innovative. If “City of the living deads” score felt like a rehash of “Zombi 2” and “The Beyonds” score felt like a breath of fresh air and a new step in the right direction for the works of Fulci, this? Feels a bit like panicked graspings to figure out what comes *after* you’ve reinvented yourself…like…it’s not offensive. I just felt by this point it had been done.

As for the ADR in this (or more specifically the English dub track) well…let’s just leave it at “It could have been better” eh?…let’s just leave it at that…

The House By The Cemetery was released on VHS in 1982 by Eagle films and in its debut it had a slight cut to a couple of the murders from the theatrical release bringing the runtime down to 84 minutes and 49 seconds. That seemingly wasn’t enough however to prevent it being put on the video nasties list in 1984 removing it from circulation for the best part of 4 years until, in 1988 it finally got re-released by Vipco, with just over 4 minutes of cuts made over the previous release. In 2001 it as released again on DVD this time with only 33 seconds of cuts before finally arriving on Bluray in 2009 courtesy of Arrow video fully uncut, the Arrow version is more than serviceable, but given the improvements in not only restoration technology but also home video tech in the last 15 years, it is starting to look a little choppy when compared to some of the more contemporary restoration releases, I don’t know if it’s an older encode, or a bit of a dodgy time with compression…but yeh, I reckon it could look nicer than it currently does. Still…at least it has Arrow’s signature “boat load” of extras to shore it up…

As for whether this should have been on the Video nasties list? No. no it shouldn’t have. While there are a couple of graphic murders dotted across this thing’s runtime, it’s otherwise nothing outside of your bog standard slasher fare. There’s nothing here that the original Friday the 13th or Halloween’s 1 and 2 were not doing WAY stronger around that time…frankly I think this is probably one of Fulci’s tamer efforts. But, that’s the nature of the video nasty game unfortunately…sometimes these films just wound up on here for LITERALLY no reason other than “it has a woman being menaced for a bit in it”…shocking really.

Ultimately; with ‘The House by the Cemetery’ I was left a bit conflicted, but ultimately won over. It’s just a quite well made fun little Italian slasher picture that showcases a slightly different tact from Fulci and while I don’t think it’s by any stretch a “Great” film, the fact that it acts a bit like a bridging point between “City of the Living Dead” and “The Beyond” in terms of it carrying some of the gross out elements and character development tropes from “City” and marrying them up to the suspense, ultra violence and stylistic choices of “The Beyond” was what ultimately won me over. It’s not one I’d come back to again and again. But of the three, this ones probably the one I’m most likely to pop on purely from its own merits. And it’s definitely one I’d recommend if you’re looking for a good entry point into Italian horror in general.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-house-by-the-cemetery/1/