August 23 2026, 21:01

City of the Living Dead

Director: Lucio Fulci

Release year: 1980

Mary is a psychic, and at a New York séance she has a vision of a priest hanging himself in a church graveyard. She breaks the circle and dies, causing journalist Peter to investigate. Visiting her grave as her body is being buried, Peter hears her screams and pulls her out of the ground still alive. She tells him the priest’s death has opened one of the gates of hell in Dunwich, where he died, and they only have a few days to close it otherwise the world will end.

In Dunwich, the townspeople are dying one by one, each seeing the dead priest before being killed in gruesome, violent ways. Local psychiatrist Gerry is pulled in via the death of his girlfriend, and then a cry for help from a patient, Sandra. Meanwhile the dead are disappearing from the mortuary and appearing in the streets and houses of Dunwich to mercilessly kill the residents.

One of the many details I enjoyed was Sandra’s artist studio, a gloriously arcane mix of sculptures, drawings and paintings, including her work-in-progress, a dual-horned rhinoscerous creature floating over the sea. On the wall is a detailed giant charcoal drawing of a single eyeball. She is seeing a psychiatrist because she hates men, something Gerry dismisses later as being a common neurosis shared by seventy percent of all women. The seventies were a different time.

The “gates of hell” trilogy, of which this is the first film, are famously illogical and difficult to follow narratively, and Fulci is known for basing his rather flimsy stories around vivid horror set pieces. The ending is plain confusing. I have my take on it, after a brief review of Reddit theories–there is a background howl of wind and when the screen zooms in on the boy’s joyful face, reality cracks and the dead take over. Personally, I think it should have been ended on the high of a minute earlier. But I’m not Fulci.

I reviewed this film as part of my #31DaysofHorror 2020 challenge, and I purposefully didn’t read it before writing this. I had less fun in 2020! But I like my writing style.

All films in #ShadesofAutumn2026...

Previous: Insignificance