“The House by the Cemetery” is a viscous stew of entrails and broken dreams, a film that squats in your brain like a moldy giallo paperback you found in a puddle, defecating on your psyche. Lucio Fulci, that mad connoisseur of rotting faces and eye trauma, isn’t making films – he’s excavating wounds.
Fulci doesn’t tell stories. Stories are boring. And plot just gets in the way. Fulci, like Argento, gives life to nightmares. He drags you by the hair through maggot-paved corridors of anti-story. No logic? Wrong. There’s logic. Non-euclidian logic. Nightmare logic.
Speaking of plot. There’s a family, a house by the cemetery, some kind of professor dad with a permanent migraine and a kid named Bob (dubbed like a helium balloon possessed by the devil’s answering machine)…..I fucking hate Bob. Mom is always on the verge of tears, and everyone just keeps opening doors they shouldn’t. And down in the basement? Dr. Freudstein – yeah, that’s his name – he’s a melted man-beast with a head that looks like someone sucked a grey alien dry, who stitches himself together from fresh kills. Like if your grandpa was Leatherface but also needed your pancreas to keep his arthritis in check.
This film sings like a bone saw through a cello. The camera lingers on corpses like it’s in love. Blood bubbles, eyes explode, necks become gurgling geysers of arterial poetry. It’s art by attrition. The whole film is a fever with no sweat, a dream where your legs don’t work and every room smells like wet meat and 19th-century wallpaper glue.Trust me, its nasty.
“The House by the Cemetery” is the kind of flick that rots in your subconscious like a bad tooth. It’s New England by way of necrophiliac Naples. Fulci takes Lovecraft, takes Poe, takes every creepy-child horror trope, crams them in a blender with a few pints of pig blood and says, “Mangia!”
Is it good? Hell no. Is it great? Abso-fucking-lutely. It’s cinematic gangrene. It doesn’t heal, it festers. It itches so good. You scratch it so nice. No, I don’t know WTF that means. Just go with it.
File this one under: Itchy, twitchy, glorious rot. Where the screams are muffled by mold, and every creaking floorboard is another step closer to the godless butcher who lives below.
Welcome to Fulci’s house by the cemetery. Its been expecting you.