The House by the Cemetery: Fulci's Freudian Haunted House

The monster in Lucio Fulci’s Quella villa accanto al cimitero is a nineteenth-century surgeon who has kept himself alive for over a century by harvesting the tissue of anyone who comes into his house. He is a patchwork of other people’s parts, held together by maggots, and he lives under the floor. His name is Dr Freudstein.

Say it out loud. Freud plus Frankenstein, delivered without a wink by actors doing their level best, in a film that then proceeds to take the gag entirely seriously for eighty-six minutes. That single naming decision is the key to The House by the Cemetery (1981), the third and least-loved panel of Fulci’s loose Gates of Hell trilogy, and the reason it is a much cleverer film than its reputation as the runt of the litter allows.

The trilogy’s odd one out

Fulci made three pictures in three years that share a producer, a cinematographer in Sergio Salvati, a leading lady in Catriona MacColl, and a conviction that narrative sense is optional: City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), and this. The first two are apocalyptic — gates open, hell arrives, the world ends. The House by the Cemetery shrinks the canvas to one building and one family, which is why it looks lesser and why it is actually the most disciplined thing in the set.

The script is by Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Fulci, and the setup is the most conventional the director ever attempted. Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco) takes his wife Lucy (MacColl) and small son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) to New Whitby, outside Boston, to complete the research of a predecessor who killed his mistress and then himself. They move into the Freudstein house. Bob starts seeing a girl at the window whom nobody else can see. A babysitter (Ania Pieroni) arrives without being hired and spends her time mopping a bloodstain that keeps coming back. The cellar door is nailed shut, and the film’s entire architecture is about how long it takes to get it open.

Fulci shot exteriors in New England and interiors on Italian sound stages, and the seam shows in a way that helps — the house’s outside is a real, sunlit, ordinary clapboard building, and its inside is a stage set with no plausible relationship to it. The geography never quite closes, and the film exploits that: you cannot map this house, so you can never be sure how far the cellar is from where you are standing.

The name is the reading

Once you clock what “Freudstein” is doing, the film stops looking like a haunted-house cash-in and starts looking like an argument. Everything wrong in the Boyle family lives in the basement. Norman has a history in the house he will not discuss and a woman in his past whom Lucy is not told about. Lucy is medicated and unravelling. Bob is the only one who can see the truth, and the adults treat his perception as a nuisance to be managed. The thing under the floor is fed by the family standing on it, and the family cannot go down there because Dad has nailed it shut. Fulci’s monster is repressed material, drawn with a shovel rather than a scalpel, and the film knows it well enough to sign the joke in the credits.

The Frankenstein half is equally deliberate. Freudstein is a doctor who made himself his own creature — the scientist and the monster collapsed into one body, which is the reading of Mary Shelley that every undergraduate arrives at and that almost no film adaptation has ever had the nerve to literalise. Fulci literalises it and then puts maggots in it.

Why the cellar works

The craft in this film is all suspense mechanics, and they are better than the film’s reputation.

The trapdoor sequence is the best thing Fulci ever staged. Bob is in the cellar; the trapdoor above him falls shut; the adults upstairs cannot hear him. Fulci runs the scene almost in real time, cutting between a child battering at a door and a monster taking its time, and the horror is generated entirely by the fact that we can see both spaces and the characters can see only one. That is pure Hitchcockian information asymmetry, deployed by a director who is usually accused of not knowing what a plot is.

He also understands that a haunted house is a sound design problem. The film’s dread comes from a floor that creaks in a room where nobody is standing, and from Walter Rizzati’s score, which alternates a genuinely lovely, melancholy piano theme with synth stabs that feel like a nervous system misfiring. Fulci withholds Freudstein almost entirely, which is the correct call — the film’s most frightening reel is the one where the monster is a noise. The thinking behind that restraint runs through the whole genre; see the haunted house film and the architecture of fear for the longer version of the argument.

The case against, honestly stated

You will meet three objections and two of them are correct.

Bob’s English dub is a war crime. Frezza was dubbed by an adult, and the voice — shrill, adenoidal, wrong — punctures scenes that were working. It has become a fan in-joke, which is a mercy, and it is the single largest obstacle to anyone watching this film cold.

The bat is indefensible. Norman is attacked in the hallway by a bat that is visibly a rubber toy on a wire, and he stabs it for what feels like a fortnight while blood arcs across the wallpaper. The scene runs on for so long that it curdles from bad into strange and then, arguably, back into effective, but nobody should pretend it is anything other than a director shooting a puppet.

The third objection — that the plot makes no sense — is where I part company with the consensus. The film’s loose ends are of a piece with the dream logic Fulci was pursuing across all three pictures, and here the incoherence is far more contained than in The Beyond. The film knows exactly what it wants: a boy, a cellar, and an adult world that will not listen.

The real ancestor

Everyone files this next to The Amityville Horror (1979), and the surface case is fair — the family, the New England house, the malevolent basement, the estate agent. The genuine ancestor is elsewhere. H.P. Lovecraft published “The Shunned House” in 1937, a story about an unremarkable Providence property with an entity beneath the cellar floor that has been quietly consuming the health of the household above it for generations. That is this film’s plot, transplanted to Massachusetts and given a punning name.

Fulci was a serious reader of the pulps — he had already borrowed the Book of Eibon for The Beyond and named the town in City of the Living Dead after Lovecraft’s Dunwich — and The House by the Cemetery completes his run at cosmic horror by domesticating it. The larger problem of getting Lovecraft onto film is a genre-wide one, sketched in cosmic dread: adapting the unadaptable Lovecraft. Fulci’s answer was to stop trying to film the cosmos and film a basement.

There is a second lineage worth naming. Norman is a researcher completing the work of a predecessor who lost his mind in the same building, which is Kubrick’s structure from The Shining a year earlier — the man who has always been the caretaker. Fulci swaps Kubrick’s rearranging hotel for a house whose only secret is downstairs. Both films are about a father leading his family into a building that has already decided what it wants from them.

The British Board of Film Classification took a dim view, and The House by the Cemetery joined the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list of prosecutable video nasties. It was cut, traded, and mythologised accordingly.

Spoilers below

Freudstein takes the family apart in the last twenty minutes, and the film’s cruelty is at its most precise here. The babysitter is decapitated on the cellar stairs and her head bounces down into Bob’s line of sight. Norman goes down to look for his son and has his throat torn out. Lucy makes it as far as the trapdoor and dies there, above her child, which is the film’s neatest and nastiest structural rhyme: the boy has spent the entire picture on the wrong side of a door from the adults who could save him, and now his mother dies on the other side of one.

Then Bob is alone in the cellar with the thing, and Fulci does something genuinely peculiar. Mae Freudstein — the girl from the window, the doctor’s daughter, dead for a century — reaches down through the trapdoor and pulls Bob up and out. The film’s ghost rescues the living child from the film’s monster.

The last scene is Bob walking away through the cemetery mist, hand in hand with Mae and Mae’s mother, into a place the film declines to name. He has been saved from Freudstein by leaving the living entirely. It plays like an escape and reads like an adoption, and the ambiguity is the point: the boy who spent the film being disbelieved by his parents is taken in by a family who can actually see him.

Fulci then puts a title card on screen attributing a line about children and monsters to Henry James. The quotation is nowhere in James. It appears to have been invented for the film, and I find that funnier and more revealing than anything else in it — a picture that names its monster after Freud closing with a fake literary citation, wearing borrowed respectability the way Freudstein wears borrowed skin.

Where to watch: any restored transfer, in the Italian dub if you can bear to lose the Bob voice or in English if you want the full disreputable experience. Follow it with City of the Living Dead to see how much wilder Fulci was willing to get when he had a whole town to ruin.