Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2): Fulci's Shark-Versus-Zombie Landmark

A yacht drifts into New York harbour with nobody at the wheel. The coastguard boards it, finds a bloated, mould-caked thing below decks, and loses a man to it in about ninety seconds. Then the film leaves New York for a Caribbean island called Matul, where a doctor is shooting corpses in the head and refusing to explain why, and it does not come back to the city until the last shot. That is the opening bargain of Zombi 2, and it is a good one: Lucio Fulci tells you within five minutes that this film has no interest in being sensible and every interest in being upsetting.

It is also, in the strictest legal sense, a lie. Zombi 2 is a sequel to nothing. In 1978 George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead had gone out across Europe in a shorter, Goblin-scored cut supervised by Dario Argento, retitled Zombi, and it had been a substantial hit. Producer Fabrizio De Angelis wanted the next one. Fulci — fifty-two years old, a genre journeyman with westerns, comedies and gialli behind him and no particular reputation for gore — was handed a script and a number, and the number was 2. The film he made from it has almost nothing in common with Romero’s. It went on to outlive most of the decade’s respectable horror and to define what an Italian zombie looked like for the next ten years.

A screenplay with a paternity dispute

The credited writer is Elisa Briganti; her husband Dardano Sacchetti has said for decades that the script is substantially his, an authorship argument that has never been fully settled and which anyone reading the Italian horror literature runs into within about an hour. What is beyond dispute is the shape of the thing. Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, Mia’s sister, in the last stretch of a short film career) goes looking for her missing father. Journalist Peter West (Ian McCulloch, on loan from British television) tags along. They hitch a ride to Matul with a holidaying couple, Brian (Al Cliver) and Susan (Auretta Gay), and find Dr Menard (Richard Johnson, a genuinely distinguished actor who had been in The Haunting fifteen years earlier) presiding over an island where the dead are getting up.

Johnson is the film’s secret weapon. He plays Menard with the flat, exhausted seriousness of a man who has been losing an argument with reality for months, and his refusal to camp it up gives the picture a spine that a lesser cast would have snapped. Fulci understood something that the cheaper imitators who followed him never did — the more absurd your premise, the straighter your actors have to play it.

The shark

You know the scene even if you have never seen the film. Susan dives off the boat to take underwater photographs. A tiger shark cruises past her. Then a zombie, waterlogged and clay-grey, drifts up out of the reef, and the shark and the corpse fight each other.

The sequence works for a reason that has nothing to do with the gag. It is shot almost entirely without cutting to a reaction — the camera simply holds, underwater, in silence apart from Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Tucci’s throbbing score, while two things that cannot possibly be in the same frame occupy the same frame. There is no build-up and no punchline. The horror-comedy of the idea never gets acknowledged, so the image stays weirdly dreamlike rather than becoming a joke. Second unit shot it in open water with a real, heavily fed tiger shark and a professional shark handler, Ramón Bravo, wearing the zombie make-up. Every subsequent film that has tried to buy the same lunacy with digital compositing has bought only the idea. Fulci bought the fact, and the fact is what unnerves you.

That sequence is also the clearest statement of the film’s method. Fulci’s set pieces are slow. They dwell. They are staged like ceremonies rather than shocks, which is the same instinct that would later produce the mutating hospital corridors of The Beyond.

The eye

The other scene everybody knows is Olga Karlatos’s. Menard’s wife, alone in the house, is attacked; a hand comes through a splintered door and drags her head, very slowly, toward a long spike of wood.

Watch what Fulci does with the editing. The shot is a slow, continuous push — the camera creeps in as the splinter creeps closer, and the film gives you an enormous amount of time to understand exactly what is about to happen and no way to stop it. Giannetto De Rossi’s effects work (with Maurizio Trani) is a dummy head and a prosthetic, and it would not survive a freeze-frame, which is precisely why Fulci never freezes it. The dread is manufactured entirely by duration. Compare almost any modern equivalent, which cuts to the aftermath in a twelfth of a second because the effect cannot bear scrutiny; Fulci makes the anticipation do the work, and the anticipation is free.

De Rossi’s zombie design deserves its own paragraph. Tom Savini’s Pittsburgh dead in Dawn were blue-grey and cartoonish by intent, a satire wearing a corpse’s face. De Rossi went the other way: earth-caked, worm-riddled, less “reanimated person” than “exhumed soil with a face in it”. The conquistador zombies clawing out of a colonial graveyard, dirt pouring from their eye sockets, are the most beautiful thing in the film and the single most copied image in European horror of the 1980s.

Fulci sends the zombie back where it came from

Here is the argument for taking Zombi 2 seriously as more than a knock-off. Romero had secularised the zombie in 1968 — no voodoo, no master, no explanation, just an unexplained plague and a social diagnosis. Fulci, pretending to make a Romero sequel, quietly reversed the whole thing and put the zombie back on a Caribbean island with a drumming soundtrack, a colonial doctor, and a local population who understand what is happening better than the white visitors do.

That is a return to the genre’s actual origins, and Fulci plainly knew it. The lineage runs straight back through Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie — the island, the drums, the sleepwalking dead as an inheritance of the plantation — to White Zombie and Bela Lugosi’s sugar mill in 1932. Fulci’s version keeps the Caribbean setting and the colonial guilt and then removes the restraint, so the atmosphere Tourneur built out of shadow and suggestion gets rebuilt out of maggots and offal. The politics are muddier than Romero’s and the film is entirely uninterested in interrogating its own colonial framing, which is a real and fair criticism. It is nonetheless doing something more historically literate than its reputation suggests, and doing it in a genre everyone had assumed Romero owned outright.

The nasty

In Britain the film arrived as Zombie Flesh Eaters, went out on tape into an unregulated market, and landed on the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list of titles liable to prosecution — the video nasties. It was cut, repeatedly. Generations of British viewers met it as a smeary nth-generation dub with the good bits missing, which did roughly what censorship always does and made it legendary. Fully restored versions took decades to reach the UK, by which point the film’s mythology had comfortably outgrown the film. The whole grim, funny episode is worth reading about in full: see the video nasties panic and what the BBFC was really afraid of.

The commercial verdict was never in doubt. Zombi 2 made money everywhere, resurrected Fulci’s career in his fifties, and set off an Italian zombie cycle that ran for years and produced almost nothing as good. It also gave Fulci the standing to make the Gates of Hell trilogy, which is where his real strangeness came out. If you want the full arc, Lucio Fulci: the poet of gore traces it from the gialli forward.

Spoilers below

The last five minutes are the best joke Fulci ever told, and he tells it with a completely straight face.

Menard dies. His wife dies. The island falls. Brian is bitten and turns aboard the boat, and Peter and Anne shoot him and sail for New York, having survived a night in a church-turned-charnel-house that Fulci stages with real conviction. It plays as a conventional escape. The survivors get out, the horror stays behind on Matul, the credits are surely thirty seconds away.

Then Peter switches on the radio. The broadcast reports that the dead have overrun New York City, that the situation is beyond containment, that the station itself is being attacked — the transmission degrades into screaming while the boat sails on toward a city that has already fallen. The final shot is the payoff: a column of zombies shambling across the Brooklyn Bridge in daylight, traffic backed up behind them, shot with a hidden camera and no permits.

The construction is deft. Everything the film has spent ninety minutes coding as remote — the island, the drums, the colonial doctor’s private catastrophe — walks calmly into Manhattan in the last thirty seconds, and the escape the protagonists have just earned is revealed as a return trip into something worse. That reversal is also the film’s cheekiest structural move, because it means Zombi 2 ends exactly where Dawn of the Dead began. Fulci made a prequel to the film he was pretending to sequelise, and stitched the whole absurd package shut with one shot of a bridge.

Where to watch: seek out a properly restored transfer — the underwater sequence and De Rossi’s earth-caked make-up are unwatchable murk on the old tapes and startling in a good scan. Watch it after I Walked with a Zombie for the full circuit, and mind the shark.