The Spaghetti Horror Boom After Dawn of the Dead

The Italian zombie cycle begins with a co-production deal, which is the least atmospheric origin story in horror and also the most revealing one.

George Romero had spent most of the 1970s unable to finance a sequel to Night of the Living Dead. Dario Argento — then the biggest name in Italian genre cinema — admired him, invited him to Rome to write, and helped assemble European money in exchange for the international rights. Romero delivered Dawn of the Dead in 1978. Argento then took the footage and cut his own version for European release, shorter, faster, and scored much more heavily with Goblin. It went out across Italy under the title Zombi.

Two versions of one film, made by two directors with different ideas about what the film was for. Everything that followed for the next five years descends from the version Argento made, and the difference between the two cuts explains the entire boom.

What Argento’s cut removed

Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a satire with a thesis, and the thesis is delivered at the pace of an argument. The mall is the point. The survivors’ slow rot into consumers who have won and cannot leave is the point. The film has room to be funny, and its longueurs are load-bearing — the boredom of the characters is the subject.

The European Zombi is a horror film. Argento tightened the middle, leaned on Goblin’s cues, and produced something that moves like a nightmare and argues like nothing at all. He was making the version that would sell in the territory he had bought. He was correct about the territory. Zombi was an enormous hit in Italy.

And the Italian industry, which ran on cycles, read the receipts and drew the obvious conclusion: audiences will pay for the eating. Nobody in Rome concluded that audiences would pay for a social mirror.

The sequel that came first

Fulci’s Zombi 2 arrived in 1979, sold in Italy as a sequel to a film it had nothing to do with, and titled abroad as Zombie Flesh Eaters or simply Zombie depending on the distributor’s nerve. Its script had reportedly been in development before Zombi opened. The sequel numbering was pure commerce, applied afterwards.

The film that resulted is where the cycle’s character is set. Fulci and screenwriter Elisa Briganti go back past Romero entirely, to the Caribbean voodoo tradition of the 1930s and 40s — the island, the doctor, the plantation — and then apply 1979 special effects to it. The result has a foot in I Walked with a Zombie and a foot in an abattoir.

It also contains the underwater sequence in which a zombie fights a shark, staged with a real shark and a stuntman, which is the sort of production decision that gets a film remembered for forty years. And it contains the eye splinter.

The craft of the thing everyone remembers

The eye scene is the cycle’s technical signature and it repays a close look, because it demonstrates what Fulci and his effects artist Giannetto De Rossi actually understood.

The mechanics are simple. De Rossi built a prosthetic head with a foam eye, mounted the actress’s real face into a false wall, and the splinter is driven onto a fixed point while the camera sits still. The trick is Fulci’s editing: he refuses to cut away, holds the shot past every convention of coverage, and forces you to watch the approach in real time. Nothing is obscured by fast cutting or a musical sting. Fabio Frizzi’s score drops out. The horror lives entirely in duration.

That is a technique, and it is the opposite of Romero’s. Tom Savini’s gore in Dawn is punctuation inside a comedy of consumption. De Rossi’s gore in Zombi 2 is the film’s argument, its aesthetic and its reason to exist. The effects maestros of the period were being asked to carry meaning that the script was not supplying, and the ones who could do it — De Rossi above all — became the real authors.

Fulci’s accident

Here is the part that turns a cash-in cycle into a body of work.

Having discarded Romero’s sociology, Fulci had nothing to structure his films around, and he possessed neither the interest nor the budget to build conventional plots. So between 1980 and 1981 he made three films — City of the Living Dead, The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery — in which cause and effect simply stop working.

Characters go to places for reasons that are never established. Geography contradicts itself between shots. A door leads somewhere it cannot lead. Scenes of extraordinary violence arrive without setup and are never mentioned again. Contemporary reviewers called this incompetence, and some of it demonstrably was: these were fast, cheap productions with scripts written around available locations and effects gags booked before the story existed.

What Fulci did with the incoherence is the interesting part. He stopped fighting it and started composing for it. Sergio Salvati’s camera begins to hold on faces and empty rooms for a beat too long. Frizzi’s scores go from underscore to incantation. By The Beyond, the film has given up narrative altogether: it is a sequence of dread images arranged by a logic that only makes sense on the way out of sleep. It is a genuinely avant-garde film funded by people who wanted more of the eye scene.

You cannot separate the achievement from the conditions. Fulci arrived at dream logic because the filone system would not pay for the alternative.

How the machine actually ran

The mechanics of Roman production in 1980 explain more about these films than any auteur reading does.

A picture was greenlit on a title and a poster. The poster went to a sales market, foreign distributors put money down against territories, and that pre-sale money financed the shoot. The consequence is that the marketing existed before the script, which is why Zombi 2 is a sequel to a film it has no connection with, and why Zombi Holocaust is a title assembled from two other people’s hits. The film’s job was to deliver whatever the poster had promised. Everything between the promised images was filler to be got through cheaply.

So Zombi 2 shot in Santo Domingo, in New York for a few guerrilla days, and on soundstages in Rome, and the three locations are stitched together with a confidence that borders on contempt. Casts were assembled from whoever the co-production treaty required — an English-speaking lead for the American sale, an Italian for the domestic quota, a German for Munich. Nobody shared a language on set, and it did not matter, because nothing was recorded live.

That last fact is the one that shaped the cycle’s texture. Italian films of the period were shot silent and dubbed entirely in post, and what the English tracks did to eurohorror is a permanent, unfixable alteration: flat line readings, voices that sit slightly outside the image, dialogue written after the fact to explain shots that made no sense. British and American audiences who met these films on tape received the dislocated version and read the dislocation as atmosphere. They were responding to a real quality. It was manufactured by an accountant.

Why the gore aged and the plots did not

One more thing the cycle got right by accident.

Everything De Rossi built is physically present. The prosthetics were lit by the same lamps as the actors, photographed by the same lens, and degraded by the same film stock, so they sit inside the image at the same level of reality as everything else. Forty-five years on, practical gore still holds where digital blood does not, because a foam appliance in 1979 and a face in 1979 were subject to identical optics.

There is a limit to the effect, and the cycle’s worst films demonstrate it. A gag only survives if the direction gives it duration and silence. Mattei points a camera at good makeup and cuts away in two seconds, and the shot dies. Fulci points a camera at the same quality of makeup and refuses to move for fifteen, and it becomes unbearable. The material is identical. The nerve is not.

The floor, and it is a long way down

The case against the cycle is that it is mostly rubbish, and the case is strong.

Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980) has running infected decades before the idea became fashionable and cannot stage a single sequence around it. Marino Girolami’s Zombi Holocaust (1980) exists to combine two hits, shot on Fulci’s leftover sets with several of his cast. Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground (1981) is a film of remarkable stupidity. Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead (1980) padded itself with wildlife stock footage and lifted Goblin’s Dawn of the Dead cues wholesale, which is copying at a level of literalism that becomes almost admirable.

Something like fifty Italian zombie and gore pictures were made in the boom’s five-year window. A generous canon reaches eight. The economics that produced The Beyond also produced everything else, and pretending otherwise is how cult criticism loses the argument.

What the boom bought

Britain settled the matter with a scissors. Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Beyond, Burial Ground and House by the Cemetery all landed on the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list during the video nasties panic of the early 1980s, and the cuts made them more notorious than the films could ever have managed on their own merits. A generation of British viewers met Fulci as contraband.

The cycle’s own ending is elegant. Argento produced Lamberto Bava’s Demons in 1985, a film set in a cinema in which the audience is infected by the film they are watching, which is the boom describing itself. And in 1994, Michele Soavi — who had worked for Argento, Bava and Fulci — made Cemetery Man, a zombie picture about the futility of the job, and closed the door.

Watch Zombi 2 and The Beyond, in that order, and stop there unless you are enjoying yourself. Then go back to Romero’s cut of Dawn and notice what Argento left on the floor. Both men were right. Only one of them was making an argument, and the other one, working without an argument and without a budget, ended up somewhere stranger.