Lucio Fulci

Lucio Fulci

Lucio Fulci, c. 1990
Born June 17, 1927 (1927-06-17)
Rome, Italy
Died March 13, 1996 (1996-03-14) (aged 68)
Rome, Italy
Occupation Film director, Screenwriter, Actor
Children Camila Fulci and Antonia Fulci

Lucio Fulci (June 17, 1927 – March 13, 1996) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is perhaps best known for his directorial work on gore films, including Zombi 2 (1979) and The Beyond (1981), although he made films in genres as diverse as giallo, western, and comedy.[1] Fulci is known as the "Godfather of Gore"[2] a title also given to Herschell Gordon Lewis.[3]

Contents

Life and career

Fulci was born in Rome in 1927. After studying medicine in college and being employed for a time as an art critic[4] Fulci opted for a film career first as a screenwriter, then later as a director, working mainly in the comedy field. In the early to mid 1960's, Fulci directed more than a dozen comedies, many starring the famed Italian comedy team of Francho and Ciccio.

In 1969, he moved into the thriller arena, directing giallos (such as Lizard in a Woman's Skin and The Psychic) and action films (such as White Fang and The Four of the Apocalypse) that were both commercially successful and controversial in their depiction of violence and religion. Some of the special effects in "Lizard" involving mutilated dogs in a vivisection room were so realistic, Fulci was dragged into court and charged with animal cruelty, until he showed the artificial canine puppets (created by spfx maestro Carlo Rambaldi) to the judge and explained they weren't real animals.

The first film to gain him actual notoriety in his native country, Don't Torture A Duckling, combined scathing social commentary with the director's soon-to-be-trademark graphic violence. Fulci had a Catholic upbringing and referred to himself as a Catholic.[5] Despite this, Fulci is thought to have been a Marxist and some of his movies (such as his "Beatrice Cenci" and "Don't Torture A Duckling") have been viewed as severely anti-Catholic.[6] In one of his films, a priest was depicted as a homicidal child killer, and in another a priest commits suicide by hanging and is reincarnated as a demon.

In 1979, he achieved his international breakthrough with Zombi II, a violent zombie film that was marketed in European territories as a sequel to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). He quickly followed it up with several other tales of horror and the supernatural, many also featuring shambling, maggot-infested zombies which were all the rage at the time. His features released during the 1979 to 1983 period (most of them written by famed Italian screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti) were described by some critics as being among the most violent and gory films ever made. City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), The House by the Cemetery (1981), The Black Cat (1981), and The New York Ripper (1982) were some of his biggest hits, all of which featured extreme levels of on-screen blood and cruelty.

Several of Fulci's movies were censored by the film distributor to ensure an R rating (such as The Beyond, which was originally released in edited form as Seven Doors of Death) or were released unrated in order to avoid an X-rating (as with Zombi II and The House by the Cemetery), which would have greatly restricted the films' target audience to adults only. The unrated films often played worldwide in drive-ins and grindhouses to hordes of delighted teenagers and horror fanatics. Many of Fulci's horror films tend to contain "injury to the eye" sequences, in which a character's eye is either pierced or pulled out of its socket, usually in lingering, close-up detail.

Many of Fulci's movies were banned in Europe or were released in heavily cut versions. Of the original 74 films on the infamous video nasty list in the United Kingdom, 3 belonged to Fulci: Zombi 2 (1979), The Beyond (1981), and The House by the Cemetery (1981).[7] After viewing Fulci's New York Ripper, the British Board of Film classification not only refused the film a certificate but also ordered that all copies of the offending film be removed from the country.[8]

German gore director Andreas Schnaas (left) and the late Lucio Fulci (right) at the 1994 Eurofest, London, England.

Fulci became deathly ill from hepatitis in 1984 (right after he finished directing Murder Rock in NY City) and had to be hospitalized for many months, eventually getting well enough to be released. Fulci spent most of 1984 hospitalized with cirrhossis, and much of 1985 recuperating at home. After 1986, with his diabetes plaguing him and the departure of screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti from Fulci's circle of friends (see "Fulci vs Sacchetti" below), Fulci was far less successful. Most of Fulci's films after 1986 were badly written and very cheaply produced, with the possble exception of Aenigma (1987) and Voices From Beyond (1991). In 1988, he directed only 60% of Zombi 3 in the Phillipines and had to return abruptly to Italy due to a life-threatening illness, and the film was later finished by an uncredited Bruno Mattei. Fulci hated the finished product and tried unsuccessfully to get his name removed from the credits.

In 1989, he moved on to do a pair of made-for-Italian TV horror movies, neither of which aired in Italy due to the high amount of gore and violence (they were however later released on DVD outside of Italy). Fulci's intended comeback films Demonia and Cat In The Brain (both 1990) were big disappointments to his fans in terms of overall quality. His final project, the 1991 Door To Silence, received terrible reviews and pretty much terminated his career[9]

For the last decade of his life, Fulci suffered from personal and health problems, somewhat reflected in a marked decline in the quality of his work. His wife's suicide back in 1969 and his daughter's fatal car accident several years later always weighed heavily on him, and his hyper-violent films such as The New York Ripper caused him to be branded a misogynist by the critics, although he always claimed that he loved women. He suffered from severe problems with his feet caused by diabetes, but tried to hide the severity of his illness from his friends and associates so that he wouldn't be deemed unemployable.

During this time, from 1987 to 1990, Fulci began lending his name to the credits of some very low-budget horror films that he hadn't even directed, simply to make the films more distributable outside of Italy. Although he did appear to have supervised the gore effects in both The Curse and The Murder Secret, he was hardly involved at all with some of the other projects that nonetheless bore the Lucio Fulci Presents banner on their advertising material. (See section "Films Presented by Lucio Fulci" below). Fulci tried unsuccessfully to have his name removed from the credits of one film in particular (Gianni Martucci's Red Monks), since he swore he had had absolutely no involvement with making that film. The following year, in reciprocation for the use of his name, Fulci was permitted to use gore footage culled from these films to make his notorious autobiographical Cat In The Brain, in which he played a mentally tormented horror film director named Lucio Fulci !

Some of Fulci's fans have retroactively argued that at his peak, Fulci's fame and popularity were on a par with that of Dario Argento, another famous Italian horror film director with whom Fulci had avoided working and whom Fulci had openly badmouthed from time to time. Fulci was most likely resentful of Argento, since Argento had always received critical acclaim and recognition in (and outside of) Italy, and Fulci had been regarded there as something of a "horror film hack". (Fulci told friends that when he died, the Italian newspapers would all misspell his name, if they even mentioned him at all).

Fulci and Argento finally agreed to collaborate in 1995 on a horror film called Wax Mask (a remake of the 1953 horror classic "House of Wax"), based on a story by Gaston Leroux. Argento claims he had heard about Fulci's miserable circumstances at the time and wanted to offer him a chance for a comeback. Fulci wrote a plot synopsis and a screenplay for Argento and thought that he was going to direct the film as well, but he died before filming could begin (due to a series of delays caused by Argento's involvement with his Stendahl Syndrome project at the time). Fulci was furious that the filming was delayed so many times, as he knew he was running out of time and wanted desperately to make one last, big-budget film before he died. The film was eventually directed by former special effects artist Sergio Stivaletti. Reportedly the screenplay was entirely reworked by screenwriter Daniele Stroppa after Fulci's death, so the finished film sadly bears little resemblance to Fulci's original screenplay. (Stroppa had co-written two of Fulci's earlierfilms, House of Clocks and Voices From Beyond)

Fulci died alone in his home in Rome on the afternoon of March 13, 1996 of complications from diabetes. There was some controversy regarding his death since Fulci had been so sickly and despondent in his later years, it was thought perhaps that he had intentionally allowed himself to die by not taking his medications, but no one really knows as he was alone at the time of his death.

Fulci's films remained generally ignored and/or dismissed by the mainstream critical establishment, who regarded his work as pure exploitation. However, genre fans appreciated his films as being stylish exercises in extreme gore, and at least one of his splatter films, The Beyond, has "amassed a large and dedicated following".[10] In 1998, Fulci's The Beyond was re-released to theaters by Quentin Tarantino,[11] who has often cited the film, and Fulci himself, as a major source of inspiration. His earlier, lesser-known giallo Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), starring Barbara Bouchet, received some critical acclaim.[12] Fulci himself highly regarded two of his films, Don't Torture A Duckling and Beatrice Cenci (which he said his wife had liked the best of all his films), and had to have considered both Zombi II and The Beyond as the films that forever catapulted him to cult film stardom.

Fulci was feted like royalty at the January 1996 Fangoria Horror Convention in New York City, just two months before his death. He told attendees that he had had no idea his films were so popular outside of his native Italy, as literally thousands of starstruck fans braved blizzard conditions all that weekend to meet him.

Fulci vs. Sacchetti

Fulci and screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti share many screen credits from 1977 to 1983. Indeed, most of Fulci's most celebrated horror films were written by Sacchetti. After collaborating with Sacchetti for 6 years, Fulci went off on his own in 1983 to direct the movie "Conquest" (a Conan-like barbarian fantasy) in Mexico, failing to involve Sacchetti in the deal. The film was supposed to be a very big budget "A" picture, and Sacchetti allegedly resented the fact that Fulci had not thought to involve him in the project. The film actually wound up doing quite poorly upon its release, and afterwards, Fulci had trouble jump-starting his working relationship with Sacchetti, who by this time had gone his own way. Most Fulci fans agree that the films Fulci made without Sacchetti after 1983 were not nearly as good as their previous collaborative efforts.

Several years later, Fulci accused Sachetti of stealing a story idea of his (a project they were supposed to work on together in 1983) and allowing director Lamberto Bava to direct it in 1987 without Fulci's knowledge that the film was even being made. Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta's book Spaghetti Nightmares, publishes two full interviews, one with Fulci and one with Sacchetti, explaining the reasons for the fallout.

Fulci's version is as follows: "One day I told Dardano the plot of my Evil Comes Back (later retitled Per Sempre/ After Death), a sequel on a fantastic note to The Postman Always Rings Twice, and he proposed it to several producers with my name on it as the director. Then, one day, he registered it with his name on it! (laughs) I later found out that he'd sold the story idea to a producer friend of mine named Sergio Martino, but, in view of our past friendship, I decided not to sue him. I just broke off all relations with him. He is, indeed, a very good scriptwriter though."

Sacchetti's version differs: "When I proposed to Lucio the original treatment for "Until Death", which was nothing more than a sequel in fantasy style to The Postman Always Rings Twice in which a dead man returns to life, he became really enthusiastic and had my story read by a producer who then commissioned me to write the script. At that time, Fulci assumed that he would direct it. Later, for various reasons, problems arose and the film was never made. Four years later, Bava used the script to make Per Sempre/ Until Death and Fulci, who wasn't working much at the time, got angry with me and started hurling these accusations. It's one thing for him to say that we were originally supposed to make that film together, but to claim that he originated the story and that I stole it from him is pure science-fiction".

Complete Filmography (as director)

Films "Presented" by Lucio Fulci

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ "Lucio Fulci". IMDb. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002086/. Retrieved 2009-02-18. 
  2. ↑ House of Horrors - Lucio Fulci: Godfather of Gore
  3. ↑ X-Entertainment - Herschell Gordon Lewis - "Godfather of Gore"
  4. ↑ Patricia MacCormack - "Lucio Fulci"
  5. ↑ Lucio Fulci interview
  6. ↑ landmarkafterdark.com - "Atmosfear – 20 Must-see Italian Horror films (1957-1987) PART III "
  7. ↑ "Video Nasties - A review of all 74 films that made the DPP hitlist."
  8. ↑ IMDb - Lo squartatore di New York (1982) - Trivia
  9. ↑ Esplatter.com - Horror Movie Review of Zombi 3
  10. ↑ Glenn Kay, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide, (Chicago Review Press, 2008), pg. 113, ISBN 1-5565-2770-5.
  11. ↑ DVD Drive-In - "Grindhouse Releasing Presents '80s Horror Classics Pieces and The Beyond
  12. ↑ Retro Slashers - SPAGHETTI SLASHERS - Don’t Torture a Duckling

External links