Gut-munchers: the Italian zombie boom, 1979 to 1983

There is no Zombi 1. Nobody shot one. In 1979 Lucio Fulci released a film called Zombi 2 and sold it across Italy as the sequel to Zombi, which was Dario Argento's recut of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, an American film about four people trapped in a shopping mall, with no island and no sequel in it. Fulci built the follow-up anyway, set it on a Caribbean island Romero had never mentioned, and let the number on the poster do the lying. It worked. Zombi 2 was one of the biggest Italian box-office hits of its year and lit the fuse on four years of what British distributors would soon be calling gut-munchers.

The whole thing starts with a recut

Argento co-financed Dawn of the Dead in exchange for the right to distribute it across every non-English market except Latin America, and to cut his own version for those territories. Romero shot in a real Pennsylvania mall, Monroeville, on a budget usually put at about a million and a half dollars, and delivered a long, funny, argumentative film about consumerism. Argento took the footage back to Rome, threw out most of the comedy and Romero's stock library cues, trimmed it to 119 minutes against the American theatrical's 127, and laid a wall-to-wall Goblin score over what was left. It is faster and colder. Released across the Continent as Zombi, it was a phenomenon, and in an industry that ran on the unofficial sequel, the one you bolt onto somebody else's hit, a title with the word Zombi in it was suddenly worth money. Fulci and producer Fabrizio De Angelis took it.

Fulci was fifty-two and had already made everything else

The Fulci who directed Zombi 2 was not a young gorehound. He was born in Rome in 1927, abandoned a medical degree partway through, and talked his way into the Centro Sperimentale film school, graduating in 1948. He spent the next two decades as a working journeyman, entering the trade as a screenwriter and assistant director for the arch-farceur Steno (the Alberto Sordi vehicles, Un Americano a Roma among them) and for Riccardo Freda. He turned out Totò comedies, musicals, a bleak spaghetti western in Four of the Apocalypse, and a run of gialli, one of which, Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), he called his own best film. It is a frontal attack on the Catholic Church and rural superstition, and it cost him: blacklisted at home, it never got a theatrical release in the United States and sat effectively buried until Anchor Bay put it on a US disc in 2000, twenty-eight years after it was made. Fulci had a doctor's training and a career-long conviction that a horror film owed the audience no coherent plot whatsoever. The zombie picture was the first genre that asked him for exactly the things he was good at and almost none of the things he was not.

Two sequences from Zombi 2 outlived everything around them. The producers wanted a shark, having watched the Mexican creature feature Tintorera (1977), and Fulci reportedly wanted nothing to do with it. They shot it anyway, with a real tiger shark that had been fed and then dosed with tranquillisers to keep it sluggish. When the stuntman booked to wrestle the animal could not dive that day, the figure in grey clay makeup grappling it underwater turned out to be the shark's own trainer, the Mexican diver Ramón Bravo. Nothing in the plot calls for a zombie to fight a shark. It is the most famous thing in the film.

The other is the splinter. The script asked only, vaguely, for a woman's eye to be destroyed. The makeup artist Giannetto De Rossi supplied the mechanism, a long sliver of wood, and the camera holds without cutting while Olga Karlatos is drawn slowly backward onto it. De Rossi built the film's dead by caking red clay onto the extras in layers, which is why they rot from the inside and shed as they move, and why Fulci took to calling his cast of the risen "walking flower pots".

Fulci could not plot, and by 1980 he had stopped pretending

Over the next two years Fulci made a loose run of gateway pictures, films built on the idea that there are doorways in the world through which the dead come back. Fans bracket the best of them into a Gates of Hell trilogy; the two that carry the case are City of the Living Dead (1980) and The Beyond (1981). Nothing joins them but that premise, and Fulci treats the premise as a licence to stop explaining himself.

City of the Living Dead opens with a priest hanging himself in the cemetery of a town Fulci lifts from Lovecraft and names Dunwich, which cracks a gate to hell. From there the dead teleport, weep blood, drive a girl to vomit up her own intestines (sheep guts, fed to the actress Daniela Doria) and bore a man's skull through with a workshop drill. The Beyond puts its gateway under a Louisiana hotel and ends on a held shot of its two blinded leads standing in a grey, dead plain with no way out and no explanation offered. Read as a story it falls apart in your hands. Read as a nightmare you are trapped inside, it is one of the finest horror films of the decade.

The injuries are aimed square at the organ you are watching the film with: the splinter, the drill, the blinding that closes The Beyond. That is the tell for what Fulci actually was. He could not plot, and by 1980 he had given up pretending to, but he could hold dread across ninety minutes and stage a mutilation with the anatomical exactness of a man who had done his time in a dissection room. Fabio Frizzi's mournful synth scores carry as much of the atmosphere as the gore does. Shelve him under cheap splatter and you miss that these are mood films strung together by the logic of a bad dream, made by a director who was finally allowed to ignore plot entirely.

The makeup man has a fair claim on the authorship

Giannetto De Rossi is the thread through the good ones, and his decaying dead, wet and worm-ridden, sculpted rather than masked, are as much the signature of the cycle as anything Fulci framed. He also ran a second career that had nothing to do with Fulci. Dino De Laurentiis pulled him to Mexico to build practical effects for Dune and Conan the Destroyer, both shot in 1984: the fetus-shaped Spice Guild Navigator floating in its tank is De Rossi's work, and so is the Dagoth serpent suit that André the Giant wears in Conan. A few years later, on Rambo III, he engineered the moment where Stallone cauterises a stomach wound with lit gunpowder, rigging the charge so a jet of flame punched out of the actor's belly and his back at the same instant. The hands that rotted the zombies from the inside were the ones De Laurentiis trusted with his biggest productions. On a Fulci set the arrangement was simpler: De Rossi built the horror, and the director pointed the camera and refused to cut away.

The knock-offs got stranger the further down you dug

Beneath the Fulci pictures came a scrum of imitators competing on cheapness and nerve. Zombie Holocaust (1980) welded the cannibal film onto the zombie film and saved money by reusing the sets, the cast and even footage from Zombi 2, then sailed to America recut as Doctor Butcher M.D. Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City (1980) gave its ghouls the ability to run, aim rifles and think, a good twenty years before the rest of the genre decided fast zombies were allowed. Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead (1980) lifted Goblin's Dawn of the Dead score outright and padded its running time with nature-documentary stock footage. And Burial Ground (1981) reached a strangeness none of the others managed, chiefly through a subplot in which a grown man, the actor Peter Bark, plays a small boy with an unwholesome fixation on his mother, in a scene nobody who has sat through it forgets. The cleverest film in the whole heap actually predated the boom: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), a Spanish-Italian production shot in the English countryside with a real ecological argument and a class grudge working away under the gut-eating.

Britain ran the advertising campaign for free

The timing was almost too neat. These films reached Britain exactly as unregulated home video did, and the Director of Public Prosecutions started pulling them off the shelves. The DPP's list of titles deemed prosecutable under the Obscene Publications Act swelled to seventy-two, and a conspicuous share of it is Italian: Zombie Flesh Eaters (the British title for Zombi 2), Zombie Holocaust and Contamination all made the cut, tapes seized from shops and dealers hauled into court. This site has a fuller piece on that panic, so here it is enough to note the one durable effect of banning a lurid film in a country with ferries to France, which is to turn it into a thing everybody suddenly wants. The nasties list sold more Italian zombie tickets than any distributor's poster ever did.

It was over by about 1983

Nothing killed the cycle so efficiently as arithmetic. Everyone who could hold a camera had made one, the ideas ran dry, and the British market, the cycle's unlikely lifeline, was raided and prosecuted through 1983 and 1984 before the Video Recordings Act arrived to seal it shut for good. Under all of that sat the collapse of Italian cinemagoing itself, as private television arrived in every front room across the early 1980s and emptied the seats that had paid for cheap genre film by the dozen. The gore boom curdled into slicker, Argento-produced mid-decade fare, and then the money for this kind of thing was simply gone. Italy managed one last beautiful zombie film long after the fact, Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man (1994), by which point there was no cycle left for it to belong to.

Fulci went down with the trade. His budgets and his health both failed through the 1980s, the diabetes that would eventually kill him getting worse, and the New York Ripper end of his reputation, mean and hard to defend, set around him while the Gates of Hell films waited a decade for anyone to reappraise them. By the end he had lost his house. He died alone in a rented Rome apartment on 13 March 1996, aged sixty-eight and broke, before a foot of The Wax Mask had been shot, the first film he and Argento would ever have made together.