The Walking Dead – Blood and Porridge

October 23, 2024October 31, 2024

Dad of the dead

As Halloween approaches, here’s another entry with an appropriately creepy theme. This time it’s a piece about one of my all-time favourite filmmakers in the horror genre.

George A. Romero’s 1968 debut was Night of the Living Dead, a movie that’s been stupendously influential in at least three ways. Firstly, it was filmed during nights and weekends over a period of seven months for a paltry $114,000. The famous opening sequence took place in Pittsburgh’s out-of-town Evans City Cemetery for the simple reason that Romero figured he could film there for free, on the quiet, without getting hassled by the police. Its success became a lasting inspiration for low-budget filmmakers everywhere, showing that with enough ingenuity, determination and talent you could accomplish something out of next-to-nothing. No doubt when things were getting tough during the shoots of landmark but ultra-cheap horror films like the $300,000-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or the $350,000-budget Evil Dead (1981) or the $60,000-budget Blair Witch Project (1999), their respective directors Tobe Hooper, Sam Raimi and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez consoled themselves with the thought, “If old George could do it, so can I.”

Secondly, Night of the Living Dead wrestled horror movies away from the gothic costume dramas made by the likes of Hammer Films in Britain, Mario Bava in Italy and Roger Corman in the USA, which by the mid-1960s had become their comfort zone. It dragged the genre into the present day and made it visceral, nihilistic and properly frightening. The human characters having to cope with the horrible events in Night were ordinary Joes like those sitting watching them in the cinema audience. This could happen to you, it was telling them. And as none of those human characters got through the titular night alive, you really didn’t want it to happen to you.

Thirdly, Night introduced the world to zombies as it knows them today. And today popular culture is swarming with them, not only in blockbuster Hollywood movies like World War Z (2013) but in other media like TV shows, computer games, books and comics. Whereas before Night zombies had been depicted as poor, lost souls brought back to life by cruel, capitalist zombie-masters using the power of voodoo and put to work in flour-mills and tin-mines, as in Universal’s White Zombie (1932) and Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies (1966), after Night they had a new template. They became apocalyptic. They rose from the dead in hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, and fed on living humanity in scenes employing as much blood and gore as the movie-censors would allow. If they bit you, you got infected, died and became a zombie yourself. And the only way to stop the shambling, bite-y bastards was to “shoot ’em in the head”.

What I like about zombies of the Night of the Living Dead variety is that though they are mindless creatures, the movies themselves don’t have to be mindless. Those shambling zombies can be a metaphor for all sorts of things – for proletarian workers, consumers, oppressed peoples, whatever – giving filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment. Thus, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a modern Britain where anger is an increasingly common social phenomenon and terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ have entered the popular vocabulary; its sequel Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq; and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) satirises a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just pissed, hungover or stoned. And again, Romero set the agenda with Night, which channels the fears of late-1960s America. The country’s racial tensions are symbolised by the fate of the black hero (Duane Jones), who survives the zombie onslaught only to be mistaken for one himself and shot dead by a supposed rescue-posse of trigger-happy rednecks. Meanwhile, the rednecks’ zombie-shooting / burning activities are not unlike things going on in Vietnam at the time.

© Image Ten / Laurel Group

However, Night of the Living Dead wasn’t the first George A. Romero film I saw. That honour belongs to a movie he made five years later called The Crazies, which turned up on late-night British TV in the 1970s. The Crazies has similarities to Night but isn’t a zombie movie because it features people turning into murderous lunatics rather than into murderous walking corpses. The story of the US Army trying, and failing, to contain a virus that gradually infects the population of a small rural town and drives them insane, The Crazies sees Romero giving the military a kicking.

It’s the army who’ve secretly developed the virus as a potential biological weapon; who accidentally let it escape into the town’s water supply; and who prove useless in trying to maintain order – this is a rural American community and there are a lot of guns, and before long it isn’t just the infected townspeople who are violently resisting the gas-masked, biohazard-suited soldiers. The army also bring in scientists to try to develop a vaccine but give them hopeless facilities – the local school’s science lab – and when one of them accidentally does stumble across a vaccine, more military bungling leads to his death and the smashing of the vital test tubes. At the film’s end, they even fail to do an immunity test on the hero, who by now is the only uninfected person left in the town.

The Crazies isn’t perfect. Its low budget sometimes means there’s a visible gap between what Romero aspires to and what he achieves on screen. But to my 13-year-old mind its blend of anarchy, violence, rebelliousness and, yes, humour was astonishing. I’ve never forgotten scenes like the one where a soldier bursts into a rural homestead and encounters a sweet old granny doing some knitting, who then stabs him to death with a knitting needle. A remake appeared in 2010 and, while it has some good moments, it’s ultimately unsatisfying. This is largely because it focuses on the civilian characters and hardly shows anything of the military ones. It’s the soldiers and their half-comical, half-horrifying ineptitude that makes the original so effective and enjoyable.

© Cambist Films

In 1978, Romero returned to bona-fide zombie moviemaking with Dawn of the Dead. The shopping malls spreading across the American landscape at the time inspired him to revisit Night’s zombie apocalypse and film a more expensive and expansive sequel. This has four survivors, led by black actor Ken Foree, taking refuge in an abandoned mall and fortifying it against the living dead. Romero uses the setting to poke fun at the sterility of consumerism, with the foursome’s lives rapidly growing tedious despite their unlimited access to everything in the mall’s stores. He also shows its idiocy. When more survivors show up, the two groups fight for possession of the building, though it contains enough supplies for everybody. The zombies, meanwhile, become irrelevant.

The shots of zombies shuffling mindlessly through the mall’s aisles and thoroughfares, staring with glazed eyes at the goods on display, aren’t subtle. The satire is sledgehammering. But hey, Romero’s satire works. 45 years on, whenever I find myself in a shopping mall, I soon start imagining the shoppers around me not as human beings but as lumbering cadavers. Also, in keeping with its theme of excess, Dawn piles on the bloodletting, courtesy of Romero’s regular special-effects man Tom Savini. In the opening minutes, Romero and Savini treat us to a close-up of an exploding head and the gore rarely relents after that.

© Laurel Group Inc

Dawn has been remade too, with a Zack Snyder-directed Dawn of the Dead appearing in 2004. It’s a film I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, the first 25 minutes are terrific and I love the credits sequence, which shows a montage of clips and images of unfolding zombie carnage accompanied by Johnny Cash singing The Man Comes Around (2002). On the other hand, the film is devoid of satire. The living dead spend nearly all the film not being in the mall, so there’s no identification of shambling zombies with shambling shoppers, and you get a general impression of things being played safe. It’s a shame, as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalisation polemic No Logo (1999) had been published a few years earlier and a big gory horror movie poking fun at brainless brand-hungry consumerism and mindless corporate greed would have been just the ticket.

In 1986, Romero wrapped up his original zombie trilogy with Day of the Dead, which like The Crazies shows his utter contempt for the military – though by now his contempt for humanity generally seems intense too. Day has the world overrun with zombies and focuses on an elite band of scientists and soldiers holed up in an underground nuclear missile silo, desperately trying to find a solution for the mayhem happening above. Bitter arguments between the obsessed scientists and the brutish military eventually escalate into all-out warfare. When the zombies swarm in at the end, they seem the least mindless members of the cast.

Admittedly, Day has a couple of sympathetic humans, namely a philosophical Jamaican pilot played by Terry Alexander – Romero’s third black zombie-movie hero – and a somewhat alcohol-pickled Irish radio operator (Jarlath Conroy), both of whom realise the battle has already been lost. They just want to escape the silo, abandon the mainland and start afresh on a desert island. However, the film’s most likeable character is actually a zombie, one nicknamed Bub (Sherman Howard) who’s been captured by the scientists and domesticated… sort of. He can listen to music, pick up a phone and almost whisper a couple of words. He has vague memories of his former life, when he was a soldier, because he knows how to salute and hold a gun. He’s very fond of the scientist who looks after him (Richard Liberty) and when that scientist is murdered by the repellent Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), he’s genuinely upset and you feel genuinely sorry for him. And a climactic scene where Rhodes is torn apart by Bub’s zombie compadres while Bub looks on and gives him a farewell salute is one of the most satisfying moments in horror-film history.

© Laurel Entertainment Inc

On a more intimate scale than Dawn, with more talk and less action, Day was regarded as a disappointment by Romero enthusiasts when it was first released. However, over the years, its reputation has improved. It’s my favourite Romero movie and one of my favourite horror movies generally. Meanwhile – surprise! – a remake appeared in 2008. Unlike the other remakes I’ve mentioned, this one is absolute shite.

After Zack Snyder’s version of Dawn of the Dead made a lot of cash in 2004, Romero got the go-ahead, and considerable studio money, to make his first zombie picture in nearly 20 years. The result was 2005’s Land of the Dead which, although it received some decent reviews, was disdained by many hardcore horror-film fans who saw it as evidence that Romero had sold out or lost his touch. I think that’s unfair as, to me, Land is three-quarters of a good movie. Its opening sequence is superb, showing an abandoned (by humans) suburb whose zombie inhabitants now potter around in the way they did when they were alive. A zombie commuter lumbers out of his front door with a dusty briefcase, some zombie musicians pathetically try to play their old instruments at the local bandstand and a zombie gas-station attendant shuffles dutifully to his pumps whenever something sets off the motion-sensor bell in his hut.

I also like the movie’s set-up. Presumably taking place several years after Night, Dawn and Day, Land has Dennis Hopper as a megalomaniac who’s created a human sanctuary (bounded by a river and an electric fence) in the middle of a decaying city. There, the rich and powerful humans live in a luxury apartment block called Fiddler’s Green while the less well-off live in Dickensian squalor in the streets below. To keep his society going, Hopper regularly sends out a military force into the surrounding wasteland in a huge armoured vehicle called the Dead Reckoning, which is half-tank and half-truck, to scavenge for supplies. Trouble is, the zombies inhabiting the wasteland are developing rudimentary powers of thought and self-organisation and, miffed at getting splattered by Hopper’s military expeditions, they start to march towards his little enclave. Their leader is the afore-mentioned petrol pump attendant, played by black actor Eugene Clark. In a series where the hero has always been black, this suggests Romero has now totally sided with the zombies.

Parallels with America’s growing wealth inequalities, its oil-driven foreign adventures and rising anti-American sentiment in the Middle East during the noughties are no doubt fully intentional. I’d assumed that the Dennis Hopper character in Land represented George Bush Jr. However, as the critic Kim Newman pointed out in an obituary for Romero in Sight and Sound magazine, the character is actually a property developer. So maybe Romero had a premonition of who’d be sitting in the Oval Office at the start of 2017 (and quite likely again at the start of 2025).

© Atmosphere-Entertainment MM / Romero-Grunwald Productions

Land’s main problem is that it’s anti-climactic. The end scenes where the zombies penetrate the human enclave and then Fiddler’s Green are suitably gory and carnage-ridden. But you’re waiting for the military force in the Dead Reckoning, led by Simon Baker and Asia Argento, to ride to the rescue and start kicking serious zombie ass. When Baker, Argento and the gang finally arrive, though, all they do is blow up the electric fence to allow a few survivors to escape. And that’s it.

Still, Land is way better than the two zombie pictures Romero made subsequently. 2007’s Diary of the Dead has an interesting premise. It’s a found-footage movie about a group of young filmmakers who’re working far from home when a zombie apocalypse breaks out; and they decide to record their adventures on film, documentary-style, as they journey across an increasingly chaotic landscape. What’s particularly interesting is how they intercut their own story with clips that people around the world are simultaneously uploading to the Internet. This being Romero, those clips often show human beings taking advantage of the mayhem to act appallingly. However, after a gripping opening section, the middle of the film becomes predictable; and its final stretch is talky and ponderous to an extreme.

Survival of the Dead followed in 2009. Set on an island off America’s northwest coast where a feud between two families escalates while society breaks down around them, it resembles an especially scrappy episode of The Walking Dead TV show (2010-22) and is a sad final instalment in Romero’s zombie sextet.

In between zombies, Romero made other types of movies and a couple are very good indeed. That said, I’m not a fan of his two collaborations with Stephen King, Creepshow (1982), an anthology film scripted by King in the style of the old EC horror comics, and The Dark Half (1993), an adaptation of one of King’s novels. Creepshow has its admirers and features an excellent cast – Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, E.G. Marshall, Leslie Nielson and Fritz Weaver – but I find it unnecessarily hokey and slightly unworthy of Romero’s talents.

© Libra Films International

But Martin (1978) is excellent. It’s about a modern-day American teenager (John Amplas) who, clearly mentally disturbed, believes himself to be an 84-year-old vampire. He ends up living in the Pittsburgh suburbs with his great-uncle, an elderly Lithuanian immigrant. Steeped in the lore and superstitions of his old country, the great-uncle is only too happy to take him at his word. A disorientating mixture of blood-spilling, dreaminess, humour and melancholia, Martin is worth seeing as a tonic to those wimpy Twilight books (2005-20) and movies (2008-12) that have defined teenaged vampires in the 21^st century.

Also praiseworthy is Romero’s 1981 non-horror movie Knightriders, which has a young Ed Harris in charge of a travelling medieval-style fair where the central attraction is the re-enactment of knightly jousting tournaments. The gimmick is that there isn’t a horse in sight. The knights doing the jousting are bikers riding (and regularly falling off) motorcycles. Furthermore, Harris, who sees his fair not as a business but a community, tries to live according to a knightly code of virtue and honour. This does him few favours as the fair suffers money problems and attracts unwelcome attention from bloodsucking promoters and talent scouts, sensationalist journalists, crooked cops, rival motorcycle gangs and redneck crowds who just want to see motorbikes getting smashed. Knightriders is overlong and meandering, has about 15 characters too many and is sometimes sentimental, melodramatic and hippy-dippy. But it’s also endearingly high-minded and decent-hearted. It again shows Romero’s disdain for materialism and mindless conformism, though this time in human rather than metaphorical terms.

© Laurel Productions

And Harris’s struggles in Knightriders reflect Romero’s uncomfortable relationship with the wider moviemaking industry, an industry that was all-too-happy to ignore him, exploit him, mess him around and rip him off. It was still doing this to him near the end of his life. Indeed, during the years before his death in 2017, Romero’s work that saw the light of day was in computer games and comic books. None of his film projects came to fruition after 2009.

In closing, I’ll say this to the spirit of George A. Romero. Sir, you were responsible for half-a-dozen movies – the original Dead trilogy, The Crazies, Martin and Knightriders – that are special ones for me. I salute you.

© Laurel Entertainment Inc

March 1, 2024March 1, 2024

Who shot J.R.R.?

© George Allen & Unwin

I’ve never really liked J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55). There… I’ve said it.

When I was a teenager I had The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Return of the King within the covers of one weighty tome that ran to 1077 pages. I stumbled through about 800 pages of it. Sometimes I left it aside for months and when I returned I had to reread long tracts of it to remind myself what was going on. Eventually, I abandoned it forever at the bit where Frodo and Sam blunder into the lair of Shelob, the giant spider. Thus, for years afterwards, I wasn’t entirely sure if (a) Frodo got to complete his quest, and (b) he didn’t end up as giant-spider-food. Though, given the probability of a happy ending, I assumed that (a) he did, and (b) he didn’t. Finally, in 2003, I saw Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Return of the King and my assumptions were confirmed.

I found Tolkien’s writing style plodding at times, but what really defeated me was the dullness of the characters. The evil ones (Gollum, Saruman) were interesting, but as far as the good guys were concerned, the ones I was supposed to be rooting for… Dearie me. I had hopes for Aragorn early on, in his guise as the enigmatic Strider, but my curiosity soon waned. Boromir was agreeably conflicted, but he didn’t make it beyond the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. (In the 2001 movie version, he’s played by Sean Bean, so you know immediately what’s going to happen to him.) Meanwhile, the Hobbits of the Shire were insufferably bland. Their nicey-nicey, respectable, know-your-place-and-respect-your-betters manner so annoyed me that I suspected if the Shire had newspapers, the Daily Mail and Daily Express would dominate the market. Sam Gamgee, tending to Frodo like a batman serving a member of the officer class, was particularly irksome in his cap-doffing.

No wonder the fantasy and science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote sourly of Lord of the Rings: “If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob – mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence, the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom ‘good taste’ is synonymous with ‘restraint’… and ‘civilised’ behaviour means ‘conventional behaviour in all circumstances’.”

And though I was a teenager at the time, I don’t think it’s likely that if I read The Lord of the Rings now, I’d have an epiphany, revise my opinion of the trilogy and acclaim it as a masterpiece. For one thing, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy (1968, 70 & 72) and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946, 50 & 59) around the same time and thought they were brilliant. Indeed, the first two Gormenghast volumes are among my all-time favourite books. Also back then, I tried reading Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), which is sometimes credited with kickstarting the ‘grimdark’ movement in modern fantasy – more on that in a moment – and thought it was dreadful shite, an assessment shared by many people whose judgement I trust. So I doubt if my evaluation of Tolkien today would be any different.

© Penguin Books

I should add that I never had a problem with the Lord of the Rings movies. However, I generally see literature as a denser, more complicated and more profound medium than cinema. And though something might seem a bit staid when written on the page, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be ineffective in the less demanding medium of images and sounds that greets you when you enter a cinema or log into a movie-streaming service. For me, Lord of the Rings was perfectly palatable as a series of two-to-three-hour viewing experiences where you could enjoy the performances of some great actors and actresses (Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Viggo Mortensen, Christopher Lee et al), the stunning New Zealand scenery and Peter Jackson’s obvious flair for orchestrating action and spectacle. They contained too much CGI, of course, but that goes without saying these days.

So, why am I writing this? Well, last month saw the publication of an essay entitled Grimdull in the Critic, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘monthly British political and cultural magazine’ whose contributors ‘include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young’. The swivel-eyed loopiness of three of those four contributors should give you an idea of where the Critic stands on the political spectrum. The essay’s writer Sebastian Milbank – also The Critic’s executive editor – says this of the author of Lord of the Rings:

“Those who followed Tolkien, even from a commercial perspective, understood that modern fantasy was following in his wake; he gave a sense of moral and literary seriousness to the building of imaginary worlds, which would otherwise be absorbed into moralistic allegory or semi-comical whimsy. Tolkien’s world feels ‘real’ not only because of his attention to detail, but because he builds a sense of emotionally freighted history and recognisable moral stakes, set out in a language strange enough to be compelling, familiar enough to be taken seriously.”

Alas for Tolkien’s worthy legacy, Milbank argues, modern fantasy writing has been taken over and corrupted by grimdark, ‘a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings’, popularized by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence and the blockbusting, blood-tits-and-dragons-meister that is George R.R. Martin. “It’s a genre…” Milbank bellyaches, “generally in a mediaeval fantasy setting, but shorn of any romance. Characters are overwhelmingly cynical, and those few who exhibit nobility are treated as foolish or naive. Generally a chaotic war is happening, or about to happen. Religion features, but largely as a tool of social control, often portrayed… as even more cruel and cynical than the secular world around it. Dark observations about human nature substitute for any moral drama, with characters seeking to outwit, manipulate or overpower one another in a kind of Darwinian struggle for dominance.”

© Bantam Books

Even worse, laments Milbank, it’s all the fault of the liberal left. “It’s a script born of vaguely liberal, vaguely radical, vaguely anarchic sentiments common to most contemporary creative ‘industries’.”

Who shot J.R.R.? Those lefty grimdark degenerates did! Basically, Milbank’s trying to open another front in the culture wars. This time it’s evil, modern fantasy writers versus the decent, traditional, conservative values embodied by Tolkien.

So much is wrong in his analysis that I don’t have time to detail it all here. I’d direct you, though, to this recent riposte penned by the writer Cora Buhlert. Firstly, she takes Milbank to task for his many omissions, made either through ignorance of fantasy literature or through disingenuity. In presenting the field as a simple battleground between Tolkien and grimdark, he ignores Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany and the copious fantasy writing that went on in the old American pulp magazines, by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore, which helped popularize the sub-genre of sword and sorcery and gave us the character of Conan the Barbarian. Simultaneously, Buhlert notes, no mention is made of other trends in modern fantasy writing, such as hopepunk, cosy fantasy or romantasy.

Indeed, she points out how Milbank doesn’t so much move the goalposts in his definition of grimdark as go sprinting off with the goalposts over his shoulders. In the course of his tortured polemic, he refers to TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-22), Boardwalk Empire (2010-14) and Breaking Bad (2008-13) and superhero movies like Captain America: Civil War (2016). Two of those examples aren’t remotely classifiable as fantasy – unless I remember wrongly and Walter White was actually an Orc – while the other two have nothing to do with the literature, set in medieval fantasy worlds, that he’s allegedly writing about.

Milbank also takes potshots at Philip Pullman, even though, as Buhlert observes, books like Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) aren’t grimdark either. Presumably, Pullman gets a mention because, as a famous atheist, he’s a red flag to a bull as far as crazed Christian-morality-campaigners are concerned. (“Philip Pullman is a stupid, delusional, immoral, inhuman piece of garbage, while C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were geniuses, amazing authors, and great human beings,” declared one comment I read on an American fantasy website recently.) And predictably, he slates Michael Moorcock for being ‘terribly dated’ in his anti-establishment views. Strangely, considering how Moorcock’s fantasy stories have greatly influenced the modern fantasy genre too, Milbank attacks him using the example of his 1966 novella Behold the Man, which is actually a work of science fiction.

One other serious flaw that Buhlert identifies in Milbank’s essay is his implication that Tolkien popularised fantasy fiction in one fell swoop in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until the 1960s, when Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback in the USA, and possibly not until the 1970s, when imitators like Terry Brooks began to publish doorstop-sized ‘high-fantasy’ trilogies of their own, that Tolkien’s influence really began to be felt.

© Overlook Press

I’d add that when I was a teenager it wasn’t just me and Michael Moorcock who disliked Tolkien. I got the impression he wasn’t particularly valued by the literary establishment – whose posh, starchy gatekeepers at the time are probably the sort of chaps whom the young-fogeyish Milbank looks back on with great admiration. Indeed, Edmund Wilson famously dismissed Lord of the Rings as ‘a children’s book that somehow got out of hand’, ‘an overgrown fairy story’, ‘balderdash’ and ‘juvenile trash’. Anthony Burgess conspicuously failed to mention it in his volume Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, though he was broadminded enough to include science-fiction and fantasy books by and / or authors like Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Alasdair Gray, George Orwell, Keith Roberts, T.H. White and, yes, Mervyn Peake in his list.

Cora Buhlert complains that Milbank’s essay “feels as if it time-travelled here from the early 2010s… Honestly, has Sebastian Milbank read a single novel or watched a single TV show that came out in the last five years?” Actually, I get the impression he probably did write the thing about a decade ago, perhaps as a moan against the then astronomical popularity of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019) TV series. But, recognising the essay’s myriad shortcomings, he left it on the shelf – until now.

Because today we live in a time where Britain’s Conservative Party politicians, and their hordes of supporters who infest the mainly right-wing British media, are aware that, if the opinion polls and by-election results are to be believed, they’re in for a massive humping at the next general election. So dismal have the Conservatives’ 14 years in government been that their only strategy now is to try and ignite, and fight, a massive culture war on all fronts imaginable.

Thus, we’ve had ex-Tory-prime minister, and catastrophe, Liz Truss – her with the shelf-life of a lettuce – raving about her premiership being sabotaged by ‘trans-activists’ in the civil service. Former Deputy Conservative Party Chairman ‘30p’ Lee Anderson claiming that London’s Labour Party mayor is in the pocket of ‘Islamists’. Neil Oliver ranting about vaccines on far-right channel GB News. The Daily Mail dismissing young people’s mental health problems as ‘snowflakery’. The police, the universities, the judiciary, the National Trust, Net Zero, speed restrictions, the English football team, TV sitcoms, Doctor Who, James Bond, you name it, British right-wingers have tried to pick a fight with it, often for the sin of being ‘woke’.

It was just a matter of time before they got around to modern fantasy literature. Hence, Tolkien’s been weaponized.

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

October 28, 2023October 31, 2023

Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

© Duckworth Books

Another Halloween-inspired post…

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema. Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living. But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc. This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War. His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular. Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq. And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes. Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games. With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon. (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.) Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21^st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984). It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report. He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate… Too many opinions, too many feelings. That’s not what this report is about. We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.” So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework. The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc. It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their experiences of the conflict with the undead. The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched. Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense. For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A. I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics… We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.” But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work. And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though. An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly. To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too. It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro. Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener. He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him. Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction. But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism. Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long. I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes. Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London. There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II. She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland. Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’ Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.” That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones. Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis. Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada. They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake. Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food. Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours. “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore. A couple of times I stepped in human shit. Nobody was even bothering to bury it.” By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty. It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency. And the zombies aren’t even around. They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere. The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons. Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients. Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013. No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II. This gives it an oddly historical feel now. Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s. And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023. For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump. Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’. Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all. Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it. If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it. A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

From invaluable.com / © Motik One

March 13, 2021March 15, 2021

The full Fulci

From amiddleagedwitch.wordpress.com

Today, March 13^th, 2021, marks the 25^th anniversary of the passing of Italian director Lucio Fulci. Here’s a reposting of a lengthy treatise I wrote about the mighty Fulci back in 2014.

Nowadays, satellite television can beam any subject matter, however adult, into our living rooms. Thanks to this, the whole family, from grandma and grandpa down to the pre-school infants, can now sit together in front of the TV and enjoy, communally, such splendid sights as the bit in season three of The Walking Dead (2012-13) where Danai Gurira grabs a big jaggy chunk of glass and rams it in extreme close-up into David Morrissey’s eyeball. Even better, a few minutes later, they can enjoy the sight of David Morrissey, again in extreme close-up, pulling the jaggy glass out of his eyeball.

This wasn’t always the case. Audiences didn’t always have easy access to images of extreme eyeball abuse. Indeed, three decades ago, a scene where a person got a humongous wooden splint stuck in her eye while being dragged through a hole in a door by a mouldering zombie was enough to cause outrage amongst the powers who decided what British film-fans could and couldn’t watch. The scene belonged to the 1979 Italian horror movie Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by the inimitable Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci. And it was the gory content of this and movies like it that led to Britain’s Video Nasties scare of the early 1980s.

By 1983, the Department of Public Prosecutions, cheered on by the likes of public-morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the right-wing British tabloid press, had drawn up a list of 72 films deemed liable to ‘deprave and corrupt’ and thus open to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. 39 of the 72 were successfully prosecuted. The remaining 33 weren’t prosecuted or were subject to unsuccessful prosecutions, but at the time you had little chance of seeing them through legitimate means.

Now that the hysteria has long passed, the majority of these films are available in uncut versions in Britain. A couple of them, like Don’t Go into the Woods (1981) and Contamination (1980), have even suffered the ultimate humiliation. They’ve been awarded wussy ‘15’ certificates.

Among the movies Lucio Fulci directed, two, Zombie Flesh Eaters and 1981’s The House by the Cemetery ended up on the list of 39 prosecuted titles; while a third, 1981’s The Beyond, was on the list of 33 that escaped successful prosecution. A fourth, 1980’s City of the Living Dead, didn’t make the Nasties list, but British police seized videos of it nonetheless. A fifth, 1982’s The New York Ripper, wasn’t classified as a Nasty either but still got banned from British cinemas. For this achievement alone, I think Lucio Fulci deserves respect.

I have a complicated relationship with Fulci. I doubt if I’ve ever seen more than one or two things he’s directed that I’d classify as good films, but I have to admit that when I encounter a new Fulci title in a DVD store or see one scheduled for broadcast on the Horror Channel, my pulse speeds up. I get a prickly, sweaty sense of excitement. I tell myself, I have to see this. Although the end result is usually the same. After the damned thing has finished, I sit back and feel a strange combination of bemusement, queasiness and disappointment, while a voice nags at me: “What the hell was that about?” Although to be fair to Fulci, there’s usually been at least one sequence in the film that’s made me think: “Wow!”

Lucio Fulci didn’t find fame, or infamy, in the English-speaking world until the late 1970s, but he’d been a staple of Italian cinema for a long time before. He started as a scriptwriter, first of all working on the 1954 comedy Un Giorna in Pretura. In 1959, a dozen film-scripts later, he began directing. One of his earliest directorial efforts was Ragazzi del Juke-Box, a musical starring the soon-to-be 1960s pin-up Elke Sommer. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lucio beavered away making comedies and spaghetti westerns. He also tried his hand at directing giallo movies, those twisted, kinky, violent and macabre Italian variations on the thriller genre: 1969’s Unna Sull’atra, 1971’s A Woman in a Lizard’s Skin and 1972’s Don’t Torture a Duckling.

Of Fulci’s giallo films, I’ve only seen Don’t Torture a Duckling and it’s surely one of the best things he did. It has none of the excess and goofiness of his later horror films and it benefits from its distinctly un-giallo-like setting. While most examples of this sub-genre take place in an affluent urban world inhabited by high-fliers in the creative industries (photographers and fashion models are common), Duckling is set in a rural and backward south Italian village, its separation from modernity symbolised by the nearby highway where traffic rumbles past oblivious to its existence. While the setting allows Fulci to take pot-shots at the institutions of conservative, traditional Italy, his cameras film the countryside there sumptuously.

That said, viewers today will be troubled by some early scenes, seemingly played for humour, which show heroine Barbara Bouchet teasing the village’s young boys by brazenly exposing herself to them. Imagine if the film had had hero Tomas Milian exposing himself to the village’s young girls. It’s a clumsy foreshadowing of the film’s themes, which are the threat posed to childhood innocence by an immoral world, and a serial killer’s determination to preserve that innocence by any means necessary.

Some commentators have noted that Fulci’s sudden interest in giallo movies, and hence in darker, bloodier material, coincided with the death of his wife Maria, who in 1969 committed suicide after discovering she had cancer. But the director himself never mentioned a connection between this personal tragedy and the darkening tone of his films.

The release of Zombie Flesh Eaters in 1979 saw Fulci plant his flag both in horror-movie territory and in the consciousness of impressionable, sensation-hungry teenagers, as I was then. The film was a success despite critics slamming it as an inferior cash-in on George A. Romeo’s seminal zombie movie from the previous year, Dawn of the Dead.

Well, Zombie Flesh Eaters isn’t as good as Dawn of the Dead, but it has an undeniable something about it. The story kicks off with an un-crewed boat drifting towards New York Harbour while a ravenous zombie lurks in its hold. Then it shifts to the Caribbean island from which the boat originated, where a full-scale zombie epidemic, possibly scientifically induced, possibly supernatural, is underway. And at the very end it returns to New York, which has now succumbed to a zombie onslaught too. The stuff in New York is ropey but the scenes on the Caribbean island, depicted as a cursed, pestilent and windswept hellhole, are wonderfully atmospheric. A sequence where the protagonists stumble into a ‘conquistadors’ cemetery’ and the graves start disgorging some ancient cadavers is especially hard to forget.

But even that scene is surpassed by an earlier one where a female scuba diver flees from the predations of a large shark and hides behind a coral reef; only to discover that on the other side of the reef there lurks – eek! – a soggy underwater zombie. The shark and the zombie then proceed to fight, in a slow, balletic way. It’s typical of Fulci’s best sequences in that it manages to be simultaneously bizarre, haunting and totally bonkers.

The film is helped by the presence of two British performers, Ian McCulloch and Richard Johnson, who just ignore the absurdities of the situations and dialogue and get on with some proper acting. I read an interview with McCulloch a while back and he professed himself bemused by Fulci’s filming techniques in New York. These involved the cast and crew turning up at a spot, filming without any licence, and then clearing off as soon as the police appeared. This might explain the film’s curiously disjointed final image, which shows an army of zombies shuffling along an elevated bridge whilst below the New York rush-hour traffic trundles back and forth as if it’s just a normal evening.

The female lead, played by Tisa Farrow, is bloody awful, though. Tisa is the younger sister of Mia Farrow, and I’ve often wondered what the pair of them talked about when they met up during this period. “Oh hi, Tisa. I’m busy making A Wedding with Robert Altman and Death on the Nile with Peter Ustinov. What are you up to?” “Well, I’m fighting off a horde of flesh-eating zombies in a conquistadors’ cemetery with Lucio Fulci.” Mind you, considering what Mia had to endure with Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen, maybe she thought her kid sister had the better deal.

Zombie Flesh Eaters is one of my favourite Lucio Fulci movies because it has a story, one where things move from A to B and then to C. Unfortunately, for his next horror movies, Fulci decided that there’d be a common theme. Each would take place in a locality that, unknown to the inhabitants, rests on top of a portal to hell. And if you’re on top of a portal to hell, the laws of physics, of cause and effect, of A leading to B and to C, will be suspended. All sorts of crazy things will happen. The dead will rise, furniture will levitate, dogs will go mad, eyeballs will bleed, the sky will rain maggots, demonic winds will blow in your windows and satanic spiders will chew your face off. But there won’t be anything like a logically sequenced plot.

Many film fans have applauded Fulci for doing away with such outdated, bourgeoisie concepts as ‘plots’ in his films, but I have to say I find it a cop-out. This ‘portal to hell’ stuff was just an excuse for him to make things up as he went along.

First in this series was 1980’s City of the Living Dead, which centres on strange goings-on in a remote American town that, by bad luck, is built on one of those afore-mentioned portals to hell. The townspeople are soon falling victim to various forms of supernatural mayhem, which are orchestrated by a ghostly priest and a clutch of zombies who apparently have the power to teleport from one place to another. City is a shambolic film. Well, what else can you expect when there’s teleporting zombies in it? But as usual with Fulci there are scenes that really stick in the memory. I particularly like one where the protagonists explore some catacombs under the local graveyard, unaware that the cobwebby old cadavers there are stirring into life the moment they pass by.

A sequence that all viewers of City remember is one where a girl sits paralysed in a car while the ghostly priest leers in at her and, under his malevolent influence, she starts to vomit up her own entrails. Lovingly captured on Fulci’s camera, those entrails ooze from her mouth in a slow, slimy mass. The actress who had the honour of playing this scene was starlet Daniella Doria. She had to sit before the camera with her mouth crammed full of sheep’s offal, which she then slobbered down her front. People go on about the pain that Christian Bale inflicts upon himself in his quest for cinematic perfection, starving himself to a skeletal husk for The Machinist (2004) or making his weight balloon to play the slobby hero of American Hustle (2013); but I bet even Bale would draw the line at spewing mouthfuls of cold sheep-guts over himself in a Lucio Fulci movie.

Daniella Doria made three subsequent films with Fulci and she died horribly in all of them, via asphyxiation, stabbing and slashing. “She was one of my favourite actresses,” Fulci reminisced later. “I killed her so many times.”

Many rate the following year’s The Beyond as Fulci’s masterpiece and, indeed, its champions include Quentin Tarantino. But I have the same problems with it that I have with City of the Living Dead. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, because the action takes place on top of another of those pesky portals to hell. Again, though, there are some striking scenes, notably, one where heroine Catriona McColl encounters a spectral figure standing in the middle of a straight, seemingly endless causeway. The figure is that of a blind woman, played by Cinzia Monreale, who turns out to be a ghost. Later, though, the blind woman dies when her throat is torn out. Predictably, Fulci never explains how a ghost, someone who’s already dead, can be killed.

The Beyond also contains the barmy ‘spiders from hell’ scene, during which a lightning bolt knocks a character off a ladder. He breaks his back and then lies helplessly while giant spiders emerge from the ether around him, converge and start munching on his face. The spiders – real tarantulas – look creepy enough as they approach during the long shots; but for the face-nibbling close-ups they become phoney bundles of pipe cleaners that Fulci’s special-effects team probably threw together during the mid-morning tea-break.

Another problem is the ending. It seems that Fulci had intended The Beyond, which takes place in a dilapidated Louisiana hotel, to be a haunted-house movie. However, his financial backers expected him to make them another money-spinning zombie movie. I can imagine Fulci’s producer grabbing him one day on the set, after looking at what was already in the can, and waving his arms and ranting in a stereotypical Italian way: “Lucio! Hey Lucio! Where-za hell-za zombies?!” So, although he didn’t want to, poor old Fulci had to insert an incongruous climax into the film where McColl and hero David Warbeck have a shoot-out with a sudden and unexpected bunch of zombies.

The final instalment in Fulci’s ‘portals to hell’ series was 1982’s The House by the Cemetery, which has a young family moving into the titular house by the titular cemetery and discovering that they’re sharing it with, down in the basement, something horrible. But sadly, the film lacks those moments of demented flamboyance that distinguished its two predecessors.

Meanwhile, between City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, Fulci tried to do something different. This was filming a contemporary update of the Edgar Allan Poe story The Black Cat and setting it in England. I’d hoped that the subject matter would reign in the director’s excesses and impose a little discipline on him. The focus, after all, isn’t on a portal to hell that makes all things possible, but on a cat. A pretty evil cat, right enough, but at the end of the day just a cat.

Unfortunately, like Fulci’s other films of the period, The Black Cat (1981) suffers from having everything thrown into it bar the kitchen sink. The cat has somehow picked up subconscious psychic emanations from its owner, who’s a paranormal investigator obsessed with contacting the dead and who’s played by the distinguished Irish actor Patrick Magee. Imbued with the hatred Magee feels deep down for the untrustworthy yokels who live around him in a rural English village, the cat starts acting out Magee’s suppressed fantasies and starts killing the villagers.

But the cat seems to have picked up some other things, including super-intelligence and super-strength, for it can hypnotise its victims, sabotage ventilation systems, set furniture on fire, come back from the dead and even, like those silly zombies in City of the Living Dead, teleport. You wonder why with all these talents the cat ever bothers to scratch anyone, but it does that too. Still, the film has a few impressively eerie sequences, such as when Magee totters down to the village graveyard after dark and tests out his new contacting-the-dead wireless equipment.

Fulci is remembered for one more ‘major’ horror film, 1982’s The New York Ripper. A serial killer / slasher effort with a self-explanatory title, this was controversial to say the least and led to him being accused of misogyny. Even if Britain hadn’t been so jittery at the time about Video Nasties, the fact that it appeared soon after the real-life Yorkshire Ripper killings in northern England probably meant it was never going to get a British cinematic release. The New York Ripper is a gruelling film and, frankly, a pretty bad one. The killer’s quirk of performing Donald Duck impersonations during the murders isn’t so much deeply disturbing as deeply stupid. If nothing else, the film serves as a record of the sleaze and dodginess associated with New York in the 1970s and 1980s. This, of course, was before the city was cleaned up in the 1990s by its mayor, the totally non-sleazy, non-dodgy Rudy Giuliani

Thereafter, Fulci’s output tailed off in both prominence and quality due to a series of misfortunes that included a fall-out with his long-term scriptwriting collaborator Dardano Sacchetti and some serious health problems like hepatitis, cirrhosis and diabetes. Although ‘quality’ is a subjective concept when you’re discussing his movies anyway. He soldiered on into the early 1990s, his last directorial effort being the poorly received psychological thriller Door to Silence in 1991. I’ve watched a single movie from his later years, a 1987 teen-orientated horror film called Aenigma that was apparently filmed in the then-Yugoslavia and is a weak rip-off of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Richard Franklin’s telekinesis thriller Patrick (1978). One thing I’ll say about Aenigma is that its death-by-snails sequence has to be seen to be believed.

Lucio Fulci died impoverished, sick and alone in Rome in 1996. At least he had the satisfaction of attending, two months prior to his death, a convention in New York organised by the American horror-movie magazine Fangoria. Much to his astonishment, since he didn’t appreciate his popularity beyond the shores of Italy, he was mobbed at the convention by thousands of American fans.

Funnily enough, Fulci’s films make me think of Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi-puppet TV show from 1964, Stingray. Each episode of Stingray would open with a voice intoning, “Anything can happen in the next half-hour!” That line would make a suitable opening for a typical Lucio Fulci movie too: “Anything can happen in the next hour-and-a-half!” Especially if the film takes place on top of a portal to hell.