Lucio Fulci: The Poet of Gore

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

The nickname arrived as an insult and became a verdict. “The Godfather of Gore,” the fanzines called Lucio Fulci, and for years that was the whole reputation — a man who filmed eyeballs being punctured and maggots raining from ceilings, a schlockmeister trading in the wet and the vile. Look closer and a stranger artist appears: a former medical student and film critic, prickly and depressive, who at his best made horror films that abandon plot the way dreams do and run instead on pure associative dread. The gore is real and it is extreme. It is also, in the four or five films that matter, the surface of something closer to poetry.

Practical Gore and the Artistry of the Effects Maestros

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 13:00:00 +0000

There is a moment in Dawn of the Dead (1978) where a helicopter blade takes the top off a zombie’s head, and the thing you are watching is a dummy skull packed by Tom Savini with a mixture that had to read as bone and brain in one frame. It is a gag in the old carnival sense: a trick built by hand, timed to the shutter, gone before your eye catches the seam. Savini had been a combat photographer in Vietnam, and he brought back a photographer’s memory of what damaged bodies actually looked like. That is the uncomfortable root of the whole craft. The people who made horror bleed convincingly were, for the most part, students of real injury, working with foam latex, dental acrylic and corn syrup to earn a flinch honestly.

Gore - vo.rs

Lucio Fulci: The Poet of Gore

Practical Gore and the Artistry of the Effects Maestros