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While it would be a gross oversimplification of an entire genre, I think you can break horror down into two opposing poles: the implicit and the explicit. The former is the horror of suggestion, what you don’t see but is implied through atmosphere and deliberation. The latter is the horror of what you do see, invoking disgust, repulsion and fear at whatever horrific imagery the film conjures. Really horror exists on the spectrum and films have a bit of both, but most of the time they’ll fall much closer to one side than the other. Val Lewton productions are obvious representatives of the former, with nary a cat person to be spied clearly onscreen in Cat People. The splatter epics of Lucio Fulci lean heavily towards the latter, yet what I find most striking about City of the Living Dead over repeat viewings is how evokes both sides of the spectrum, presenting a most unusual synthesis of competing approaches. (Unsurprisingly, Fulci cited Lewton as an influence on his work.)
Anyone who’s seen a Fulci film knows that he believes in the horror of the explicit, taking relish in serving up scenes of grisly violence in nauseating, horrific detail, which in this film include the vomiting of intestines, heads being drilled and brains being gouged. His films are known some of the most violent ever made, yet that reputation might undersell the power of their delivery, as they derive their impact not just from their gruesomeness but from the strength of the filmmaking both during and around these scenes. The film opens with the foreboding image of a priest hanging himself, an act which has opened the gates of hell and within days will result in some kind of apocalyptic event. A character dies of sheer fright when seeing this in a vision, which can be interpreted as a dare to the audience, yet Fulci understands the power of that opening imagery and returns to it often, weaving that and other motifs, like fog and weeping blood, into the tapestry of ultraviolence that follows.
The gore scenes arrive with little warning, grisly non-sequiturs whose raw power is compounded by the lack of explanation that accompanies them, and the film uses the space between these sequences to build an oppressive sense of dread. This is a horror of which we’ve seen the effects (in disturbingly explicit detail) but grasp little of the ways in which it operates, unsettling us not just with what it can do, but by its refusal to adhere to our logic. Fulci’s films are sometimes described as nightmares, and I think this one best captures the subconscious, free-associative illogic that implies. Coming after Zombie and before The Black Cat and The Beyond, City of the Living Dead feels less lavish in comparison, with its non-scope aspect ratio and smaller-scaled proceedings. (The relatively marginal quality of the production likely explains some of the shortcuts taken, like the abrupt yet effectively uneasy ending, and the score by Fabio Frizzi that feels derivative of Goblin’s Dawn of the Dead score and Frizzi’s own work in Zombie.) Yet it uses that sparseness as a sort of narrative negative space, turning what’s really a handful of characters, some unbelievably graphic gore scenes and a whole lot of fog into sheer apocalyptic terror.
City of the Living Dead (Fulci, 1980)
While it would be a gross oversimplification of an entire genre, I think you can break horror down into two opposing poles: the implicit and the explicit. The former is the horror of suggestion, what you don’t see but is implied through atmosphere and deliberation. The latter is the horror of what you do see, invoking disgust, repulsion and fear at whatever horrific imagery the film conjures. Really horror exists on the spectrum and films have a bit of both, but most of the time they’ll fall much closer to one side than the other. Val Lewton productions are obvious representatives of the former, with nary a cat person to be spied clearly onscreen in Cat People. The splatter epics of Lucio Fulci lean heavily towards the latter, yet what I find most striking about City of the Living Dead over repeat viewings is how evokes both sides of the spectrum, presenting a most unusual synthesis of competing approaches. (Unsurprisingly, Fulci cited Lewton as an influence on his work.)
Anyone who’s seen a Fulci film knows that he believes in the horror of the explicit, taking relish in serving up scenes of grisly violence in nauseating, horrific detail, which in this film include the vomiting of intestines, heads being drilled and brains being gouged. His films are known some of the most violent ever made, yet that reputation might undersell the power of their delivery, as they derive their impact not just from their gruesomeness but from the strength of the filmmaking both during and around these scenes. The film opens with the foreboding image of a priest hanging himself, an act which has opened the gates of hell and within days will result in some kind of apocalyptic event. A character dies of sheer fright when seeing this in a vision, which can be interpreted as a dare to the audience, yet Fulci understands the power of that opening imagery and returns to it often, weaving that and other motifs, like fog and weeping blood, into the tapestry of ultraviolence that follows.
The gore scenes arrive with little warning, grisly non-sequiturs whose raw power is compounded by the lack of explanation that accompanies them, and the film uses the space between these sequences to build an oppressive sense of dread. This is a horror of which we’ve seen the effects (in disturbingly explicit detail) but grasp little of the ways in which it operates, unsettling us not just with what it can do, but by its refusal to adhere to our logic. Fulci’s films are sometimes described as nightmares, and I think this one best captures the subconscious, free-associative illogic that implies. Coming after Zombie and before The Black Cat and The Beyond, City of the Living Dead feels less lavish in comparison, with its non-scope aspect ratio and smaller-scaled proceedings. (The relatively marginal quality of the production likely explains some of the shortcuts taken, like the abrupt yet effectively uneasy ending, and the score by Fabio Frizzi that feels derivative of Goblin’s Dawn of the Dead score and Frizzi’s own work in Zombie.) Yet it uses that sparseness as a sort of narrative negative space, turning what’s really a handful of characters, some unbelievably graphic gore scenes and a whole lot of fog into sheer apocalyptic terror.