Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (Quella villa accanto al cimitero) was released near the end of a particularly prolific period for the Italian director, who had, after several decades of directing projects in a wide variety of genres including comedies, Westerns, and thrillers, found his true calling with gory supernatural horror films, of which he made five in the two years between 1979 and 1981. Fulci proved to be particularly attuned to the art of the gratuitous gross-out, and his most popular films are the ones that threaten to show you something gruesome and then show it, and show it some more, and then show it some more. The attention he lavishes on the grisliest of images has endeared him to gorehounds around the world while also making him a pariah among more discerning horror fans, who consider him a hack, and a target for censor groups, particularly the British Director of Public Prosecutions, which included several of his films on their various “video nasty” lists in the early 1980s (a distinction that I imagine Fulci viewed as an honor).

Not surprisingly, The House by the Cemetery was included on those lists, although the violence inflicted on the various characters throughout the film (which includes gouging, stabbing, throat ripping, dismemberment, and decapitation) is nothing compared to the violence that Fulci inflicts on storytelling and logic. Even for someone who understands and appreciates that horror films, especially of the Italian variety, often subvert logic and reason in favor of shock tactics and a nightmarish aura that by its very nature refuses to play by classical narrative standards, The House by the Cemetery is a frequently frustrating morass that sets up potential situations and fails to follow through, presents otherwise normal characters behaving with a complete lack of rationality, and leaves gaping plot holes. Despite having three credited screenwriters (Fulci, Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Dardano Sacchetti, working from a story by Zombie scribe Elisa Briganti), literally nothing adds up; it is as if the writers divvied up the story and then wrote their parts in isolation, not knowing what anyone else was doing, and then tried to paste them together.

The plot involves a young family moving from Boston to a remote corner of New England. The father, Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco), is a professor who is taking a six-month research trip to finish the work started by his mentor, who apparently killed his mistress and then committed suicide. Norman’s wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl, who appeared in three of Fulci’s horror films during this period), is a fragile sort who takes pills to calm her nerves. Their 8-year-old son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza), is a precocious kid who might be either psychic or psychotic since he sees and hears a little girl named Mae (Silvia Collatina) who no one else can see. Bob first sees Mae in a picture of the titular house, which is hanging in the family’s Boston apartment (why that picture is there is never explained). Mae warns Bob not to come, thus reinforcing our assumption that old, rambling, Victorian houses in desolate woods next to ancient cemeteries are usually bad news.

Fulci makes this clear in the film’s opening scene, where two young lovers are slaughtered in the house by an unseen assailant who apparently resides in the cellar. When the Boyles arrive and move in, there are intimations that something is not right, including the repeated, but indistinct sound of children crying and the arrival of Ann (Ania Pieroni), a babysitter with striking eyes and an unusual demeanor who is constantly looking at Norman with mysterious stares (Fulci cuts back and forth between extreme close-ups of their eyes with such regularity that an optometrist could probably perform an exam on them). After a half hour of atmospherics involving locked cellar doors, a tombstone being discovered under a rug in the front hallway, and insinuations of supernatural mystery that never add up to anything (repeated suggestions that people around town have seen Norman before are quickly forgotten), Fulci gets down to the business of killing as many characters as possible, winding his way to a climactic (and claustrophobic) stand-off in the basement between the Boyle family and the house’s murderous occupant.

The climax is one of the film’s better sequences, as it combines Fulci’s penchant for the gross with genuine suspense and tension that is often lacking in other parts of the film. He also manages to pull together an ambiguous coda that intrigues, rather than frustrates, with its open-endedness. Much of the rest of the film, however, simply rambles through the motions and gives the impression of a project that was never quite finished. One might expect some dangling questions, but not for virtually every plot point; similarly, a bit of bizarre character behavior is certainly part of the terrain, but not inexplicable scenes like the one in which Lucy comes downstairs and finds Ann mopping up massive smears and puddles of blood in the kitchen and doesn’t think to ask what happened (she is easily distracted by Ann’s declaration that she has made coffee).

Some of the film’s weakness also derives from the technical qualities of the production, specifically the starkly artificial English-language dubbing of Bob and Mae’s voices, which were done by an adult mimicking (badly) a child’s voice. This has the effect of estranging both characters (but particularly Bob, who is already an almost alien-like child actor) when they should be the emotional center of the film. The fact that Fulci ends with a made-up quote attributed to Henry James (whose The Turn of the Screw clearly had some influence here) questioning whether children are monsters or monsters children suggests that perhaps it wasn’t so much a technical failing as it was an intentional form of audience alienation. Either way, it makes for a generally unpleasant experience, even for those who appreciate the darker corners of European horror.

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