THE GATES OF HELL TRILOGY (1980-81)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair* (2,3) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*                                                                                                                                                 I saw all three of these haunted-house/zombie films separately but this was the first time I watched them together, to see if they justified their alleged connections to the Lovecraftian cosmos. While it's true that director/co-writer Lucio Fulci worked in some references to HPL, Fulci's emphasis on gore and the walking dead doesn't resemble much in that author's work. I didn't get a very favorable impression of this trilogy the first time around, and I didn't find too much more worth commentary this time either.                               

 CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD is the strongest offering, and the most Lovecraftian. In HPL's story THE DUNWICH HORROR, the residents of the fictional Massachusetts town of Dunwich are besieged by various evil phenomena, brought about by foul humans who open a gate to the world of the elder god Yog-Sothoth. In CITY, an evil priest in Dunwich sacrifices his own life in order to open the gates of hell and allow the living dead to enter the earth-realm. While the rural residents are suffering various weird phenomena, in New York a psychic named Mary (Catriona MacColl, who stars in all three of these movies) perceives the threat but is so overwhelmed that she's paralyzed and is believed to be dead. Fulci later follows up on this bravura opening scene by having Mary revive just after having been partly buried in a coffin. By dumb luck, reporter Peter (Christopher George) became interested in Mary's peculiar demise and happens to be at the cemetery when Mary revives, so that he's able to free her. She then dragoons him into helping her travel to Dunwich (supposedly built over what used to be Salem!) so that they can prevent the evil priest's handiwork. Fulci throws a variety of other characters, none of whom are as sympathetic as Mary and Peter, though I wondered where Fulci was going when he has a mental patient named Sandra confess to incest fantasies. But pretty much everyone is set up to be the victim of various gory deaths. They're well enough done but the only involving aspect of the story is the quest of Mary and Peter to stop a catastrophe. It helps that George and MacColl have better chemistry than MacColl has with her other co-stars.                                                                                   

  THE BEYOND recapitulates roughly the same scheme. In 1927, a diabolical painter creating a door to hell within a room in a New Orleans hotel (one of seven, though the characters all talk as though one is enough to unleash the living dead onto earth). A vigilante group kills the demon-worshipper but of course he's managed to set the wheels in motion. In 1981 ownership of the hotel is bequeathed to Liza (MacColl) and she attempts to fix up the building to make it a going concern. A woman with white eyes, seen in 1927 reading an occult book, appears in the hotel and workers start getting injured or killed. Then Liza meets Emily, a white-eyed woman with a guide dog. Is she the descendant of the 1927 woman? Who knows? In the end everyone's just being set up for a gory execution, and the only Lovecraftian element is the name of the aforementioned occult book-- which I'll come back to later.                                                                

Despite Fulci's public statement that he meant to give HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY a Lovecraftian vibe, I saw nothing reminiscent of HPL or of Henry James, whose TURN OF THE SCREW gets quoted at the film's conclusion. HOUSE is the most like a standard haunted-house tale, though I must admit that the "haunt" is not anything like your typical ghost. Lucy (MacColl) moves, along with husband Norman and small son Bob, to a Massachusetts mansion without knowing anything of its heinous history. The "rise of the dead" is limited to a strange girl-ghost-child who befriends Bob, and whom no one else sees. However, the killer lurking in the mansion and intermittently offing victims isn't precisely the walking dead. He's the former occupant of the house, the comically named Doctor Freudstein, and he has kept himself alive by harvesting blood cells from his prey. (He has a no-face look thar might remind one of the then-current slasher-killers, one of whom Fulci would essay in his 1982 NEW YORK RIPPER.) The victims this time are more sympathetic than those of THE BEYOND but their awful fates seem a fait accompli.                                                                                                                                                                                                    As for the occult book mentioned in THE BEYOND, it's named "Eibon," and I have no doubt that Fulci or a co-writer got the name from some HPL story. However, there's a slight irony in Fulci's use of the name, because the book was invented by HPL's fellow writer and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith, who gave HPL to name-check his magic tome in the elder-god cosmos. Now, Smith's baroque fantasy-stories were at their most extreme never as gory as a standard Fulci film. But quite a few Smith stories deal with the same tropes seen in this trilogy: the menace of living corpses, described with considerable delectation, or of victims condemned to dwell in the twilight of an undead existence.