10 Best Lucio Fulci Horror Films
10 Best Lucio Fulci Horror Films
These are the finest fright flicks from the Italian Godfather of Gore that helped earn him the title Master of Horror.
October is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “31 days of horror.” Don’t bother looking it up; it’s true. Most people take that to mean highlighting one horror movie a day, but here at FSR, we’ve taken that up a spooky notch or nine by celebrating each day with a top ten list. This article, about the best Lucio Fulci horror movies, is part of our ongoing series 31 Days of Horror Lists.
When it comes to cinema, masters of horror are a dime-a-dozen. That’s not meant to throw shade on auteurs like John Carpenter and Wes Craven, or even new macabre impresarios like Robert Eggers, but we’re so eager to give out that title the moment a horror film makes an impact that we begin to lose sight of what really constitutes a genius. Still, there are certain directors who absolutely warrant that lofty moniker, none more worthy than the Italian Godfather of Gore, Lucio Fulci.
A grandfatherly man with a knit cap and coke bottle glasses that rivaled George Romero’s own specs, Fulci did what so few horror directors ever even attempted: he created artistically impactful horror films that just so happened to be wrapped in gleefully sadistic sex and violence.
He spun his inherent Artaudian sensibility into splatter flicks that are able to straddle the line between arthouse and grindhouse in a way other masters of horror were less inclined to do. Beneath the layers of sleaze and stomach-churning deaths, you can see Fulci’s visual eye veer more towards surrealist filmmakers like Luis Buñuel than his fellow Italo contemporaries like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. The arthouse horror movement that’s popular today just wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for Fulci’s contributions to the genre.
Fulci’s output is as vast as it is diverse, so to cut through to the meat of his filmography, Anna Swanson, Brad Gullickson, Chris Coffel, Kieran Fisher, Meg Shields, Rob Hunter, Valerie Ettenhofer, and I have chosen the ten films that truly exemplify why Lucio Fulci has earned his title as master of horror.
10. A Cat in the Brain (1990)
A Cat in the Brain opens on a remarkable image of a cat literally eating a brain, which is the level of subtlety you come to Lucio Fulci movies for. Essentially his own spin of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, Fulci casts himself as himself, a disillusioned horror director who begins hallucinating that his gory creations are coming to life and driving him to murder.
While not nearly as salacious as his other films, this latter career Fulci is admirable for both its unique cleverness (that is arguably emulated in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio) as well as the director’s own charmingly quirky acting style. I’ve always loved his lackadaisical cameos as police investigators in The New York Ripper and Aenigma, but here his sleepy, detached performance works as the perfect – if not unintentional – counter to his proxy’s increasingly erratic behavior.
A lot of horror fans consider A Cat in the Brain to be for Fulci purists only, but I find it offers a fascinating peek into a distinct facet of the director’s artistry that audiences who may be unfamiliar with his work can find engaging. This is a meta-fiction horror-comedy that I earnestly believe film majors should devour right alongside Fellini’s original masterwork. (Jacob Trussell)
9. Aenigma (1987)
“My lips are numb, and my patients are waiting.” Look, even when Fulci is “not at his best,” he’s still more ghoulish and entertaining than everyone else in the room. There is a shot in this film where a rotting apparition of a supernatural coma patient fades to reveal a jubilant Top Gun poster. A girl is eaten alive by snails. A handsy calisthenics teacher strangles himself. What more could you ask for?
Aenigma tells of a teen whose boarding school peers inadvertently bully her so hard she has a near-fatal accident. Look, her mom is the janitor and she smells like garlic, which is enough cause for ridicule; you know how girls are!. Refusing to go quietly after slipping into a coma, the bullied girl possesses a mid-term newcomer at the school and begins exacting her telepathic revenge. This is the bastard child of Phenomena and Patrick – and if that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, we can’t be friends. (Meg Shields)
8. The Black Cat (1981)
The pairing of Fulci and Edgar Allan Poe is not the oil and water combination you might initially think it to be. The director’s uncontrollable desire to languish on the meat and the gore matches the emotional power behind the writer’s various acts of perversion. What would it actually feel like to be walled up inside a structure while still alive? Poe’s words get to the agony, but so do Fulci’s visuals. In the final moments of Fulci’s The Black Cat, the screams we see on the screen mimic the screams we imagined when we first read Poe’s fiction in school.
Edgar Allen Poe was the deranged madman of his time, and so was Lucio Fulci the madman of his. Placed across from each other in a pub, these sickos would have one helluva delightful conversation. The Black Cat is as close as we’ll ever get to witness such a chat. (Brad Gullickson)
7. Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
A giallo steeped in paranoia and mysticism, Don’t Torture a Duckling is a rough watch even by Fulci’s standards. One of his first horror films to really engage in abject violence, Duckling centers on a string of child murders occurring in a remote Italian village. The crimes bring attention to the small town as investigators track down an assailant who may be closer to the children than any of them think.
Fulci uses the insular, rural community to emphasize the split between science and superstition, the old world and the new, especially as the village grows hungry for a suspect and their rage turns towards a local gypsy woman (Florinda Bolkan) accused of witchcraft. This is only the tip of the iceberg in Fulci’s sweaty murder-mystery, but it’s perhaps most notable for being a departure from his latter horror career.
This isn’t ooey-gooey demons and zombies, but rather a very real – and sadly still very relevant – look at the actual monsters that exist in our everyday. With sharp cinematography, a sustained bleak tone, and marvelously bonkers usage of gory special effects, Don’t Torture a Duckling is one of the most serious and mature works from Fulci. (Jacob Trussell)
6. The New York Ripper (1982)
Fulci may have described this shocker as “Hitchcock revisited,” but a member of the UK’s censorship board at the time saw it differently as “the most damaging film I have ever seen in my whole life.” To that I’ll only add, why not both? I kid, although both takes are similarly exaggerated for effect. The film is a murder mystery of a sort that sees a sadistic killer brutalizing women throughout New York City, and much of the film was shot in the Big Apple offering a delicious snapshot of the city at its sleaziest.
As grim and grotesque as it gets, though, Fulci keeps the tone as wobbly as possible with absurd attempts at humor including a killer who calls the police using a Donald Duck voice. Gone are the unnatural demons and zombies of Fulci’s other films, and in their place is a killer prone to graphic displays of cruelty. It’s those scenes that gave the film its notoriety, both for the critics and the fans, and they are absolutely not for the squeamish. Seriously. While flesh is mangled and mutilated throughout his filmography, here it’s captured with such glee and mean-spiritedness that the carnage can’t help but feel worlds apart from his usual horrors. (Rob Hunter)
5. A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)
Fulci saw your glossy English murder mystery and decided to raise you one. In this dreamy, psychedelic giallo, Florinda Bolkan plays a sexually frustrated woman tormented by her desire for a neighbor and salacious fantasies that haunt her every night. When the neighbor is murdered, it brings to light all the frenzied and forbidden desires that have been buried deep. The film has a hazy, seductive sheen, an (un)healthy dose of gaslighting, and because this is Fulci, special effects that nearly got the director arrested. I can’t believe I’m not kidding about the last part. (Anna Swanson)
4. Zombie (1979)
Italian copyright laws in the 1970s meant that any film could be marketed as a sequel to another. That’s why so many of the country’s genre movies are “sequels” to films they aren’t remotely connected to from a story standpoint. Zombie (a.k.a. Zombi 2 and Zombie Flesh Eaters) was produced as a follow-up to Dawn of the Dead, but it’s very much a standalone movie that doesn’t adhere to the same rules of the undead. It marked a return to the subgenre’s voodoo roots, albeit with the gore and video nastiness that Fulci was notorious for.
The movie boasts a handful of memorable scenes, including one in which a shark fights a zombie. The scene was included after producer Ugo Tucci insisted that the film included a shark. Fulci protested, and a second unit director was hired to deliver the scene in question. The film benefitted as a result. Maybe the end product wasn’t Fulci’s original vision, but the film certainly helped cement his status as a genre legend. (Kieran Fisher)
3. The House by the Cemetery (1981)
On paper, The House By The Cemetery reads like any other haunted house flick: a couple and their son move into a decrepit but beautiful house where the son begins seeing apparitions, Mom gets spooked, and Dad reassures them that everything is fine long after it’s clear that things are not fine. Of course, since the story sprung from the mind of Lucio Fulci, it turns out to be a stylish and singular film with cool camerawork, a gnarly mad scientist backstory, and a fantastic, underrated score. Compared to Fulci’s more splatter-heavy films, it’s downright restrained, with a creepy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife, but when the climax rolls around, no one’s viscera is safe. (Valerie Ettenhofer)
2. The Beyond (1981)
If you’re looking to introduce someone to Lucio Fulci, there may be no better place to start than with The Beyond. Just hit them with all the Fulci weirdness at once. Why beat around the bush? This classic from the Godfather of Gore is about an old hotel in Louisiana that contains an entrance to Hell. It’s a surreal film meant to knock you off-kilter, so the story isn’t the most coherent, but you should already know that because it’s Italian. It features one of Fabio Frizzi’s most iconic scores, some of Fulci’s most gnarly effects, and a lot of gross spiders. One interesting tidbit is that most of the film was actually shot on location in New Orleans. This is a bit of a rarity as a lot of Italian horror films from this era that take place in the US were typically shot in European cities. (Chris Coffel)
1. City of Living Dead (1980)
From the first snare of Fabio Frizzi’s synth score to the ominous melodic guitars that accompany the hanging body of a priest, the opening scene of City of the Living Dead – the first film in the unrelated Gates of Hell trilogy – fills you with palpable anticipation in that deliriously dreamy way Italian horror, but especially Lucio Fulci, just inherently exudes. After a priest kills himself in the rural community of Dunwich, and a séance in New York City leads to the death and resurrection of a young woman, a reporter is led to the small town where, quite literally, the gates of hell have been cracked open and bodies start piling up; people are vomiting their intestines, corpses are taking bites out of people, skulls are being both drilled and crunched, so you know – general Fulci stuff!
Released in 1980, decades before Lovecraftian occult kookiness became both cool and commercially successful, this was Fulci indulging for the very first time in that gruesome aesthetic that would become his legacy. Why I find we flock to a Fulci film is because they have an expressionistic theatricality that we just don’t find in Western productions both before and since. Sure, he’s got a way with blood, guts, and gore, but it’s his striking visuals – like shards of glass stuck into walls that bleed – that make his distinctive eye unparalleled. (Jacob Trussell)
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