The Cabin in the Woods is a 2011 (released 2012) US horror film directed and co-written by Drew Goddard and co-written and produced by Joss Whedon. It stars Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, and Jesse Williams.

The film follows five friends who travel to a remote cabin for a holiday and become victims of a seemingly stereotypical horror movie plot while being observed via hidden cameras by mysterious office workers.

Goddard and Whedon, having worked together previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, wrote the screenplay in three days, describing it as an attempt to “revitalize” the slasher film genre and a critical satire on torture porn. Principal filming took place from March to May 2009 on an estimated budget of $30 million, and was shot in Canada. More than sixty artists worked on the effects before filming began.

The Cabin in the Woods premiered on March 9, 2012 at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas and was released in the United States on April 13, 2012. The film went on to be a critical and commercial success, grossing more than $65 million in the box office.

Plot teaser:

Technicians Gary Sitterson and Steve Hadley prepare for an operation, one of several taking place around the world, while joking with fellow technician Wendy Lin.

College students Dana Polk, Jules Louden and her boyfriend Curt Vaughan, Holden McCrea, and Marty Mikalski go to a remote cabin in the woods for a vacation. While there, the technicians control the local environment and give them mood-altering drugs to manipulate the group into following a scenario. The drugs gradually reduce the group’s intelligence and awareness, and also increase their libido. After entering the cellar, the group discovers a large assortment of items, including a diary by Patience Buckner, a girl abused by her sadistic family. Reciting an incantation from the diary, Dana inadvertently triggers the Buckner family scenario — a family of zombies who rise from their graves.

Curt and Jules go outside to have sex, encouraged by more mood-altering drugs. The Buckners attack the lovers and kill Jules, but Curt flees to the cabin. Meanwhile, Marty, who frequently smokes marijuana, becomes paranoid and believes they are being manipulated. Curt informs the group of Jules’ death. Discovering a hidden camera, Marty thinks that he is on a reality television show, but is attacked and dragged away by one of the Buckners. Holden, Dana, and Curt attempt to flee in their RV, but the technicians barely block their path. Curt attempts to jump a ravine to flee only to crash into an invisible forcefield and fall to his death. Realizing that something is unusual about the environment, Dana becomes convinced that Marty’s worries about their manipulation were correct…

 Buy The Cabin In The Woods on Blu-ray at Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“The Cabin in the Woods is hardly the most serious, or smartest, horror film audiences will have seen in a while – there are plenty of eye-roll-inducing dialogue moments and the over-arching setup might be hard for some moviegoers to accept – but, for anyone that’s ready for an entertaining (albeit over-the-top) horror movie, avoid the film’s spoiler-filled trailer and head to your favorite cineplex knowing as little as possible.” Screen Rant

“It’s an affectionately satirical nightmare that asks why horror is so potent: what awful human need is being fed by seeing attractive young people in states of semi-undress who are suddenly, brutally slaughtered, almost as if they are being punished for being young and sexy? Why does the genre adhere so closely to the belief that young people in jeopardy have to be picked off singly, leaving that one character who had initially appeared to be so vulnerable and unworldly, but in whom the situation has uncovered extraordinary reserves of heroism and grit? Could there be some anthropological answer to the ritualist behaviour in horror?” The Guardian

“If it’s true that you always kill the thing you love, then horror honchos Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard have taken an ax to slasher cinema in The Cabin in the Woods and chopped it up for kindling. With love, mind you, and a potently playful sense of mischief. Cabin is a deliciously devious scare dance that keeps changing the steps until you lose your shit and fall helplessly into its demonic traps. Screenwriters Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Goddard (Cloverfield), in his feature-directing debut, are fright-obsessed.” Rolling Stone

“… vaguely akin to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in that it also contemplates the function, and arguable importance of horror stories as a way of somehow addressing and helping viewers comprehend genuine evils throughout the world, while safely engaging our primitive instincts and blood-lust. In Craven’s film, the Nightmare on Elm Street series acted as a way of containing some form of ancient, nameless evil that was condensed and given articulated form in the shape of Freddy Krueger. When the films stopped, the evil was released and free to roam the collective consciousness of the wider world. Horror cinema has long been discussed in terms of its ability to help viewers deal with complex emotions and anxieties in a safe environment, where we know no harm can come to us.” Behind the Couch

“Making cookie cutter movies about kids going out to the woods to get murdered just won’t be good enough anymore. The Cabin In The Woods may have been a love letter to the horror genre, but it was also a much-needed kick in the arse.” Den of Geek

Soundtrack excerpt by David Julyan and ‘Last’ by Nine Inch Nails, plus image montage [spoiler alert]:

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Marvel Zombies was initially a five-issue limited series published from December 2005 to April 2006 by Marvel Comics. The series was written by Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead) with art by Sean Phillips and covers by Arthur Suydam. The story is set in an alternate universe where the world’s superhero population has been infected with a virus which turned them into the undead. The series was spun out of events of the “Crossover” story-arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four, where the zombie Reed Richards tricked his Ultimate counterpart into opening a portal to the zombie universe.

The series of titles begins with two Ultimate Fantastic Four story arcs, “Crossover” (2005) and “Frightful” (2006), by Mark Millar and Greg Land. The story arcs were followed by a Marvel Zombies limited series by Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips, who also created the prequel Marvel Zombies: Dead Days and sequel Marvel Zombies 2. A deal between Marvel and Dynamite Entertainment allowed for a crossover with Army of Darkness - Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness.

With Marvel Zombies 3, Kirkman and Phillips were replaced by Fred Van Lente and Kev Walker. The team continued on to Marvel Zombies 4, a four-issue mini-series starting in April 2009. Van Lente then stayed on to write the first and last issues of Marvel Zombies Return a series of five one-shots looking at different aspects of the outbreak. With Marvel Zombies 5 he teamed up with Kano, with the story picking up from the end of Marvel Zombies 4. A new series was launched in 2011, Marvel Zombies Supreme takes the zombie infection to Earth-712, the universe of Squadron Supreme. It has a new creative team of Frank Marraffino and penciller Fernando Blanco. This was followed by Marvel Zombies Destroy! set in a dimension where Nazi zombies won the war. It was initially written by Frank Marraffino, with art by Mirco Pierfederici but Marraffino’s health issue meant he had to hand over the writing reins to Peter David with issue #3.

Like many of the best films dealing with zombies, no definitive explanation is given in any of the comics as to how our heroes have become infected, though references are made to scientific experimentation and space radiation – all we can say for certain is that there have been outbreaks across the Universe and there appears to be no discrimination as to who it infects – this includes Gods (both based ‘above’ and the likes of Thor), metallic beings such as Ultron and huge entities such as Galactus. In a similar manner to zombie films post-Night of the Living Dead, a bite from an infected being will cause the same devastating effects to be transferred to the victim, providing enough useful flesh remains. Naturally, one of the things which sets to comic series apart from the films are that the characters retain many of their super-powers, which are supplemented by a raging hunger which can only be satiated by the consumption of living flesh.

The disease is incredibly hard to stop once spreading, due to the high survival rate of all zombies. Zombies seem to only need their brain stem to survive and can continue living without any use of their organs, limbs, and body functions.The infection even allows severed heads without lungs or vocal cords to continue speech just to further its infection capability. This was witnessed by Wasp and Hawkeye in the original Marvel Zombies, they were both simply severed heads that somehow still could function; another example would be Captain America who survived for over forty years as a brain on the ground until being put inside the body of Black Panther’s dead son. Although a cure is eventually found, the nature of Marvel is such that this can conveniently be forgotten for the sake of further episodes.

The adult nature (that’s is to say, gratuitous gut-munching and gizzard-wrestling) of the comics and the sprawling Universe, already created for the to wander around and the complicated relationships built up over decades, made it a huge success and future spin-offs appeared;

* Spider-ham, already a porcine riff on Spiderman

* Exiles, a multi-Wolverine all-in fight

* Marvel Zombies Halloween/A Christmas Carol

* Marvel Zombies: The Book of Angels, Demons, & Various Monstrosities

Perhaps the most recurring idea is for a film version of the comics. Though extremely competent fan-made movies have appeared online, Marvel itself are adamant that such a spectacle should not appear, for fear that many of their beloved characters would have children running out of cinemas in terror.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

‘Blood madness… out of the fog… into your heart!’

Valley of the Zombies is a 1946 American horror film directed by Philip Ford for Republic Pictures from a screenplay by Dorrell McGowan and Stuart E. McGowan. It stars Robert Livingston, Lorna Gray (The Man They Could Not Hang), Ian Keith (The Phantom of Paris; Fog Island), Thomas E. Jackson, Charles Trowbridge (The Mummy’s Hand), Earle Hodgins, LeRoy Mason, William Haade, Wilton Graff, Charles Cane.

The film makes reference to a zombie cocktail drink.

Plot teaser:

A shadowy figure climbs up and across a roof top toward the office of Dr. Rufus Maynard (Charles Trowbridge). Inside, Maynard informs his partner, Dr. Terry Evans (Robert Livingston), and Terry’s girl friend, nurse Susan Drake (Lorna Gray), that blood has again been stolen from the laboratory. Once Terry and Susan leave, Maynard is abruptly confronted by the top-hatted figure. The threatening man identifies himself as Ormand Murks (Ian Keith) and reminds Maynard that five years previously, the doctor had placed him in a mental institute. Two years later, Murks was brought to Maynard for treatment, but he apparently died on the operating table of no apparent cause…

Reviews:

” …it’s a spooky house movie, and a vampire movie, and a voodoo movie, and a mad science movie, all in just under an hour! With all those elements crammed so tightly together, I can almost forgive Valley of the Zombiesfor its conspicuous lack of both valleys and zombies. It’s even sort of a murder mystery …The latter probably made Valley of the Zombies look distinctly retro even in 1946; in any case, its reliance on early-30’s styles of presentation is plainly apparent from the vantage point of the 21st century. Today, what’s most interesting about this movie is probably its sense of humor on one hand, and Ian Keith’s portrayal of Ormand Murks on the other.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

” …this is yet another one of those post-war 40s efforts where noir was swallowing horror a bit. You can feel that genre’s influence more than any other, with Murks’s undead status being the only thing that even pushes it into horror territory. Hailing from Republic Pictures (basically a conglomerate of other Poverty Row studios), it’s no surprise that it feels like a quick attempt to cash in on the early zombie craze (which was already on its last legs at this point) and film noir.” Brett Gallman, Oh, the Horror!

“Wearily predictable, the script seems to have exhausted its supply of wit in finding the name Ormand Murks for its mad undertaker.” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

Choice dialogue:

“You’re more stubborn than my wife!”

“Dying is getting to be a habit round here.”

“You might need help. And I’m good at screaming.”

IMDb

Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953 – 1968 is an academic  book written by Kevin Hefferman and published by Duke University Press in 2004.

In the first economic history of the horror film, Hefferman analyses how the production, distribution and exhibition of horror movies changed as the studio era gave way to the conglomeration of New Hollywood. He argues that major cultural and economic shifts in the production and reception of horror films began at the time of the 3-D cycle of 1953-54 – looking closely at House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon – and ended with the 1968 adoption of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system and the subsequent development of the adult horror movie – epitomised by Rosemary’s Baby.

Hefferman describes how this period presented a number of daunting challenges for movie exhibitors: the highcosts of technological upgrade, competition with television, declining movie attendance, and a diminishing number of annual releases from the major movie studios. He explains that the production and distribution branches of the movie industry responded to these trends by cultivating a youth audience, co-producing features with the film industries of Europe and Asia, selling films to television, and intensifying representations of sex.

The book includes analyses of Hammer Films and The Curse of Frankenstein; Hypnotic horror; William Castle’s movies; Vincent Price’s rise to horror stardom; AIP; Astor Pictures and Peeping Tom; TV syndication of horror movies (with listings of all the packages); Bava’s Black Sabbath; Continental distributing and the success of independents such as Night of the Living Dead.

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“While acknowledging the importance of the insights into the genre provided by such theorists as Robin Wood, Carol Clover, and Thomas Doherty, Heffernan identifies a neglected area in their analyses of the genre’s evolution: how the economic imperatives of an industry shape its final product. As a result, Ghouls becomes a multi-disciplinary text, one that cultural theorists, business historians and horror enthusiasts alike will find both useful and entertaining.” Louise Sheedy, Senses of Cinema

“Historians of the medium will appreciate Heffernan’s detailed scrutiny of the economic and cultural influences at work on the industry, which he intersperses with lively descriptions and critiques of both notable and obscure horror films of the era.” Andrew J. Douglas, Business History Review

“The use of color and gore, first seen in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), was similarly designed to increase profits through exaggerated and stylized responses to conventions completely familiar to hard-boiled movie audiences. As Heffernan notes, audiences found their worlds becoming and tougher and tougher, and it was important for any film to be even tougher in order to elicit the desired reaction.” John F. Barber, Leonardo Online

Dawn of the Dead (also known internationally as Zombies and Zombi) is a 1978 American horror film written and directed by George A. Romero. It was the second film made in Romero’s Living Dead series but contains no characters or settings from Night of the Living Dead, and shows in a larger scale the zombie plague’s apocalyptic effects on society. In the film, a plague of unknown origin has caused the reanimation of the dead, who prey on human flesh, which subsequently causes mass hysteria. The cast features David Emge (Basket Case 2, Hellmaster), Ken Foree (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, The Devil’s Rejects), Scott Reiniger (Knightriders) and Gaylen Ross (Creepshow) as survivors of the outbreak who barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall.

The chaotic WGON television newsroom is attempting to make sense of the evidently wide-spread phenomenon of the dead returning to life to eat the living. Their main efforts are being channelled into simply staying on air to act as a public information system for those still alive to find places to shelter. Outside tensions have erupted at a tenement building where the residents are refusing to hand over the dead bodies of their loved ones to the authorities for them to dispose of, resulting in a SWAT team assembling to resolve the issue by force. As both sides suffer casualties at their own hands and those of the reanimated corpses, four by-standers gravitate towards each other and plot to escape this madness; SWAT soldiers Roger (Reiniger) and Peter (Foree) and a couple who work at the station, Francine (Ross) and Stephen (Emge) – it is agreed that they will take the company’s helicopter and seek sanctuary.

With the helicopter liberated, they stop off for fuel, narrowly avoiding the attention of both zombie adults and children – on a human angle, it is clear the soldiers come from very different worlds to Fran and Stephen. Still short of fuel, they set off again and happen upon a shopping mall – though surrounded by the living dead, the opportunity presented by an abundance of food and provisions, as well as a place to the secrete themselves is irresistible. Devising a system of clearing the zombies already in the mall, during which Roger is bitten but survives, and creating their own living quarters behind a false wall, they learn (Stephen included) that Fran is four months pregnant. Roger and Peter are keen to look for other survivors but under the circumstances, the others feel that staying put and essentially quitting whilst they’re ahead would be the safest option.

The images they witness on their looted television give little hope but before a decision can be agreed upon, they realise that the mall has also attracted the attention of an army of local bikers, not looking for anything except target practise and goods. Their defences breached, the foursome face a seemingly impossible situation where both human and zombie foes have designs on their hides. Can they reclaim the mall or get to the helicopter before they find themselves wandering the mall for eternity?

Although in gestation for some years before making it to the screen, the follow-up to Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead appeared a full ten years later. The slow-burn effect of this film, plus George’s notoriously poor grasp of finances led to producer Richard Rubinstein looking further afield for investment to get the project off the ground. Salvation came in the form of the genius Italian film director, Dario Argento (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; Deep Red; Suspiria) who had long admired Night and could see the value in producing a sequel of some kind.

And so began an arrangement whereby the funds were made available to make the film in exchange for international distribution rights and Argento’s option to make an entirely different cut of the film for a Continental audience. Romero ensconced himself in a small apartment in Rome where he quickly wrote the screenplay, allowing for filming to begin in Pennsylvania in November 1977. Key to Romero’s vision for the film was the iconic mall setting, already firmly imprinted in his mind due to the owners of the Monroeville Mall, east of Pittsburgh, in existence since 1969 and one of the first really large out of town shopping districts. His connections were enough for the owners, Oxford Development, to allow out-of-hours filming. Romero had been given a private tour of the facility and was privy to sealed off areas which had been stocked with civil defence equipment in case of a National emergency – a fact fully exploited in the film.

Casting for the film was the responsibility of John Amplas (star of Romero’s Martin and later Day of the Dead) who also has a small role of a Mexican, shot by the SWAT team in the early exchange of fire. The cast was made up of largely local actors who had featured in theatre rather than film roles – indeed few of them went on to have significant film careers but still trod the boards at provincial theatres. Friends and acquaintances were coerced into appearing, amongst their number, George’s wife and assistant director, Christine Forrest (also appearing in several other of his films in an acting capacity, including Martin and Monkey Shines) George himself (seated alongside her in the TV studio sequence), Pasquale Buba (later to edit the likes of Day of the Dead and Stepfather 2), special effects guru Tom Savini and Joe Pilato (Day of the Dead‘s Rhodes). Such economy and camaraderie was to pay off spectacularly. Even minor characters are given hinted-at histories which are endlessly intriguing – an eye-patched Dr Millard Rausch (Richard France) opines thoughtfully on television: “These creatures cannot be considered human… they must be destroyed on sight! … Why don’t we drop bombs on all the big cities?”

Filming at the mall could hardly have commenced at a more inconvenient time, the freezing cold temperatures and busy festive season meaning that shooting times were extremely tight (between 10pm and 8am), resulting in several occasions when members of the public were forces to consider why their shopping trip looked more like an ghoul-invested abattoir. Exterior shots were even harder to come by, only half a day a week was allotted to get the shots of the swarms of zombies roaming the car park, without pesky customers getting in shot. Scenes such as mall breakers revelling in the local bank’s bundles of bank notes necessitated a great deal of care to ensure light-fingered crew members didn’t make off with the ‘props’. The most familiar location in the mall, JC Penney’s department store, has since closed, though the mall remains, in a surprisingly familiar state (see below). Other locations employed, such as the abandoned airfield, the gun store and the quartet’s hideout, were shot locally too, the latter being constructed in Romero’s production offices, Laurel.

Make-up and special effects were the responsibility of Tom Savini and team, also including Gary Zeller and Don Berry, who later both worked on such films as Scanners and Visiting Hours. Having already developed his talents on Deranged and Martin, Savini was far from an enthusiastic amateur, though it was this film and the free reign Romero gave him, that helped establish his name as the go-to for gore effects for many years to come. Signature effects on Dawn include the flat-headed zombie being semi-decapitated by helicopter blades (a ludicrously dangerous effect involving an admittedly obviously fake head-piece) and the exploding head in the tenement sequence (so redolent of a similar effect in Scanners) by shooting a fake heads packed with condoms filled with fake blood and scraps of food. One bone of contention with many is the unrealistic blue/grey make-up the zombies sport, a mile away from the decaying cadavers of, say, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters. Romero has ‘validated’ this by claiming it was always his aim to have a comic-book feel to the film, though this smacks slightly of convenience. What is true is that the never-redder blood is a real eye-opener and lends itself to large-screen viewing. What the zombies lack in biological realism, they certainly gain in back story (all walks of life are considered from bride, to Buddhist monk to nurse) and gait – the now familiar stagger now being the blueprint for the correct way for all animated corpses to adopt.

Buy Dawn of the Dead 4-disc DiviMax Special Edition from Amazon.com

DISC 1: The original unrated director’s cut. NOT THE EXTENDED EDITION, which is not truly Romero’s director’s cut. This disc includes commentary with George Romero, Tom Savini, and Chris Romero along with Theatrical trailers and radio spots.

DISC 2: The extended edition, often mistaken for a ‘director’s cut.’ This disc includes an additional 12 minutes of glorious footage. Also includes commentary by producer Richard Rubinstein. The disc has a commercial for the Monroeville Mall and a memorabilia gallery.

DISC 3: The Dario Argento cut. This version of the film has less humor and more drama, released in Europe with additional music from Goblin. This version includes commentary by all four stars of the film.

DISC 4: This disc contains several documentaries including the all new ‘The Dead Walk’ (75 min) and the classic ‘Document of the Dead'; a feature-length documentary shot during the making of Dawn of the Dead. This disc also includes home movies from the set and a tour of the Monroeville Mall with actor Ken Foree.

To complement the garish visuals, Romero favoured library music, a technique he used to good effect in Night of the Living Dead. The De Wolfe library, still in regular use, was employed for this task and a variety of styles from the waltzy muzak of the shopping centre to atmospheric electronic drones to a song by The Pretty Things, “I’m a Man”, a song co-written by one Peter Reno, better known as Mancunian zero-budget film legend, Cliff Twemlow and his working partner, Peter Taylor. The most famous piece, unavailable until relatively recently, is The Gonk, by Harry Chappell (who had his own library business), written in 1965.This trumpet/xylophone led polka-like march is deliciously out of place and yet completely in keeping with the absurdity of the situation. Argento’s vision of the film as a fast-paced action movie with geysers of blood throughout required a different approach and he used the Italian-based band Goblin (incorrectly credited as “The Goblins”) extensively. Goblin was a four-piece Italian/Brazilian band that did mostly contract work for film soundtracks. Argento, who received a credit for original music alongside Goblin, collaborated with the group to get songs for his cut of the film.

A completely different ending was originally planned and, rather like its predecessor, had a resolutely unhappy ending with Peter shooting himself and Fran either purposely or accidentally stepping into the helicopter blades, only for the blades to stop spinning at the conclusion to the end credits, an indicator that they were doomed anyway. These are both hinted at in the filmed version though all signs point to them being ultimately only existing on the page.

Dawn of the Dead has received a number of re-cuts and re-edits, due mostly to Argento’s rights to edit the film for international foreign language release. Romero controlled the final cut of the film for English-language territories. In addition, the film was edited further by censors or distributors in certain countries. Romero, acting as the editor for his film, completed a hasty 139-minute version of the film (now known as the Extended, or Director’s, Cut) for premier at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. This was later pared down to 126 minutes for the U.S. theatrical release. In an era before the NC-17 rating was available from the Motion Picture Association of America, the US theatrical cut of the film earned the taboo rating of X from the association because of its graphic violence. Rejecting this rating, Romero and the producers chose to release the film un-rated so as to help the film’s commercial success. United Film Distribution Company eventually agreed to release it domestically in the United States. It eventually premiered in the US in New York City on April 20, 1979, fortunately beating Alien by a month. The film was refused classification in Australia twice: in its theatrical release in 1978 and once again in 1979. The cuts presented to the Australian Classification Board were Argento’s cut and Romero’s cut, respectively. Dawn of the Dead was finally passed in the country cut with an R18+ rating in February 1980. It was banned in Queensland until at least 1986.

Dawn Of The Dead was submitted to the BBFC in Britain for classification in June 1979 and was viewed by six examiners including the then Director of the BBFC, James Ferman.

BBFC examiners unanimously disliked the film, though acknowledged that the film did have its merits in terms of the film-making art. The main bone of contention were the zombies themselves – were they shells without feelings or dead people with families? One examiner felt so strongly that the film glorified violence that he excluded himself from any further screenings or discussions surrounding the work.

It was agreed that cuts to the film were necessary, Ferman as self-appointed editor extraordinaire, stating that the film featured violence perpetrated against people which was “to a degree never before passed by the Board” and subsequently issued a cuts list that amounted to approximately 55 separate cuts (two minutes 17 seconds). These included images of zombie dismemberment, the machine gunning of a child zombie, a machete cutting open a zombie’s head (one of the most famous scenes!) and the shot of a zombie’s head exploding.

The following month a cut version of the film was re-submitted for re-examination and this time another team of examiners viewed the film. All of the examiners still disliked the film and some were convinced that cutting was not the solution to alleviating the possible desensitising effect that the film might have on vulnerable audiences. Despite this view, the suggestion of further extensive cuts was made and the film was once again seen by James Ferman, who subsequently issued a further one minute 29 seconds of cuts to more scenes of gory detail. At this point the distributor (Target International Pictures) was worried that the film would not be ready in time to be screened at the London Film Festival, so James Ferman suggested that the BBFC’s in-house editor create a version that would be acceptable within the guidelines of the X certificate.

In September 1979 Ferman wrote to the distributor exclaiming that “a tour de force of virtuoso editing has transformed this potential reject from a disgusting and desensitising wallow in the ghoulish details of violence and horror to a strong, but more conventional action piece…The cutting is not only skilful, but creative, and I think it has actually improved a number of the sequences by making the audience notice the emotions of the characters and the horror of the situation instead of being deadened by blood and gore”.

When the work was first submitted for classification for video in 1989 it arrived in its post-BBFC censored version, now clocking in at 120 minutes 20 seconds. However, under the Video Recordings Act 1984 (VRA) , the film was to be subjected to another 12 seconds of cuts to scenes of zombie dismemberment and cannibalism. In 1997 Dawn Of The Dead was picked up by a new distributor (BMG) who took the decision to submit the film in its original uncensored state, with a running time of 139 minutes.

This time the BBFC only insisted on six seconds of cuts. However, it was in 2003 that the film was finally passed at 18 uncut by the BBFC, with the examiners feeling that under the 2000 BBFC Guidelines it was impossible to justify cutting the work.

Internationally, Argento controlled the Euro cut for non-English speaking countries. The version he created clocked in at 119 minutes. It included changes such as more music from Goblin than the two cuts completed by Romero, removal of some expository scenes, and a faster cutting pace. Released in Italy in September 1978, it actually debuted nearly nine months before the US theatrical cut. In Italy it was released under the full title Zombi: L’alba dei Morti Viventi, followed in March 1979 by France as Zombie: Le Crépuscule des Morts Vivants, in Spain as Zombi: El Regreso de los Muertos Vivientes, in the Netherlands as Zombie: In De Greep van de Zombies, by Germany’s Constantin Film as Zombie, and in Denmark as Zombie: Rædslernes Morgen.

Despite the various alternate versions of the film available, Dawn of the Dead was successful internationally. Its success in the then-West Germany earned it the Golden Screen Award, given to films that have at least 3 million admissions within 18 months of release.

Recently, Romero has claimed that to be successful artistically, all horror films must be either political or satirical. Such a ludicrous statement may explain the director’s poor run of recent films but here it is rarely more apposite. The consumer-angle to the zombies mindless wandering is difficult to argue, though has now been stated so many times it’s in danger of overtaking the fact that the film is a magnificent piece of work; multi-layered in both character and plot (whatever became of the soldiers taking their boat down the river?) and influential to a generation of film-makers, as a horror film there are few better, a view echoed many, even the notoriously fickle Roger Ebert who gave it a great many thumbs up. The film has also spawned a range of spoofs, copycat films, a 2004 remake by Zack Snyder, toys, games and merchandise. In 1985, Romero temporarily concluded his zombie fascination with Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead was remade by Zack Snyder in 2004.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

With thanks to the BBFC for details about the film’s UK release and Nick Richmond for his recent snaps of Monroeville Mall.

Buy Dawn of the Dead on Arrow Video Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk

Offline Reading:

101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die – Edited by Steven Jay Schneider, Cassell Illustrated, 2009

Zombies on Horrorpedia: The Astro-Zombies | Big Tits Zombie | Birth of the Living Dead | Bloodeaters aka Toxic Zombies | Burial Ground: Nights of Terror | Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things | The Coed and the Zombie Stoner | Daddy, I’m a Zombie | Dawn of the Dead (2004) | The Dead | The Dead 2: India | Dead Banging | Dead Heat (1988) | The Dead One | Empire of the Dead | Hell of the Living Dead | I Walked with a Zombie | I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain | The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies | Land of the Dead | Let Sleeping Corpses Lie aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue | Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout | The Living Dead Girl | Marvel Zombies | Marilyn Monroe: Zombie Hunter | Milfs vs. Zombies | Night of the Living Dead | Night of the Living Dead 3D | | Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation | Night of the Zombies | Nightmare City | Plants vs. Zombies | The Return of the Living Dead | Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave | Revenge of the Zombies | Silent Night of the Living Dead | Virgin Among the Living Dead | Volcano Zombies | The Walking Dead (TV series) | World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2 | World Zombie Day | Zombie 108 | Zombie-A-Hole | Zombie Christ | Zombie cocktail | Zombie Creeping Flesh (song) | Zombie Desert | Zombie Fight Club | Zombie Flesh Eaters | Zombie Girl: The Movie | Zombie Hunter Rika | Zombie Night | Zombie Nightmare | Zombie Pirates | Zombie Shark | Zombie TV | Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street | Zombie Zin Zinfandel | Zombies’ Lake | Zombies: The Beginning | Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (book)

Monroeville Mall – then and now:

Nick takes the easier route.

Zombie-fleer or lift vandal, you decide.

The Dead 2: India is a 2013 British horror film written and directed by Howard J. Ford and Jon Ford. It is a sequel to the 2010 film The Dead, which was set in Africa.

Filmed in five weeks, in locations across India, including Rajasthan, Delhi and Mumbai, The Dead 2: India stars Joseph Millson, Meenu, Anand Goyal, Sandip Datta Gupta and Poonam Mathur.

American engineer, Nicholas Burton (Joseph Millson, Devil’s Bridge), is toiling in the barren countryside of India, working on wind turbines and fretting about his girlfriend, Ishani (Meenu Mishra) who is 300 miles away on the edge of the slums of Mumbai, under the watchful eye of her disapproving father (Sandip Datta Gupta), who is about to get even more ruffled when he learns she’s pregnant. They will shortly have more to worry about as mother is in bed with a bit of a chomp wound. Elsewhere, a ship from Somalia, docks, one of the passengers stumbling off the ship, not quite himself since he was bitten by a crazy woman. In the cramped streets of the sprawling city, it isn’t long before his newly-found passion for eating human flesh has turned viral, sensible folk taking shelter behind the locked doors of their homes. Burton telephones Ishani and advises her to stay put whilst he makes his way to save her – his work colleague, nearer to the city, recommends avoiding heroics and getting to one of the planes which are shuttling foreign nationals out of the danger zone.

300 miles suddenly feels more like 3000 for Burton and his initial attempts to get there via a parachute powered by a giant fan (no, really) are jettisoned as quickly as he is deposited on the desert floor. Fleeing, he meets an orphaned child, Javed (Anand Krishna Goyal), who is rather obliged to tag along, lest the film carry on with Burton talking to himself. Luckily, Javed knows his way around every inch of India, despite it being the world’s 7th largest country, and so can give his new mate, ‘Mr Nicholas’, the very best directions in their newly acquired car.

There are inevitably mishaps across the desert and after abandoning their car, they ‘borrow’ a motorbike, only to have it nicked off them by a desperate local who needs to urgently visit his cannibalistic kids. After Javed is rescued by a Chinook loaded with refugees, Nick is forced to stagger through the burning sun alone, evading zombies and hoping his beloved hasn’t already become one of the shuffling rot bags. Will he honour his promise to meet Javed at the refugee camp? Will he get to the girl in time? Is mother hungry?

Firstly, let us dispense with the formalities – if you didn’t like the first The Dead film, which is absolutely everyone I’ve spoken to about it, you aren’t going to be converted by this. Millson is a more accomplished lead but there again, he is given far more to do, as opposed to the silent and solemn mystery of The Dead’s protagonist. You will need something approaching titanium-strength tolerance to Javed’s constant appeals to ‘Mr Nicholas’ which ultimately borders more on the entrenched racism of Love Thy Neighbour than Eat Thy Neighbour. The rest of the acting is appalling, chief offender being Ishani, the whole thing being a terrible affair best forgotten.

It’s easy to see why the Brothers Ford fancied another shot at relocating zombies to an unfamiliar locale, but that is also its failing. It is a complete re-run, the trek across the desert naturally being the same, apart from Nick apparently not suffering too much from thirst and having a side-kick. Our hero has a remarkable knack for avoiding being infected, unlike everyone else in the film who suffer particularly satisfying bites to the extremities – for all its faults, there is no questioning the cinematography or special effects. With an inexhaustible supply of bullets, it does feel like you’ve pressed ‘cheat mode’ on a computer game, a pleasing and quite believable twist at the end making such frippery just about palatable. Just to ensure the saris and turbans aren’t enough, the original soundtrack is re-used but with added sitar and rhythms. It’s an easy, no-brain watch but there are hints at real opportunity and the fact they largely go untapped is enormously frustrating.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Speaking about this sequel in Cannes, Howard J Ford  commented: “Jon and I knew we’d get around to making a sequel one day as there was plenty of scope to where we could take our idea of abject horror and emotional devastation presented against a stunning natural backdrop. But it was while we were escorting The Dead to various film festivals around the world, listening to the overwhelmingly positive feedback and reading all the Internet comments, that we felt compelled to make another film pretty quickly to satisfy the demand we knew was out there. We wrote the sequel frighteningly quickly, tapping into every constructive comment from true fans of the genre so we could make a film we feel we owe to all the people who supported The Dead“.

Jon Ford added, “We still felt our creative itches hadn’t been scratched and that we needed to continue our adventure into the living dead unknown. There just seemed to be too much talk and anticipation about us making another zombie movie we couldn’t ignore. So we thought let’s do it! Part of the magic of The Dead was its minimalism both in terms of dialogue and how it played out in the road movie style. Not everyone was going to get that and we knew it. So we decided to embellish the story this time with a few more mainstream elements without losing what was so special about the first film”.

Howard concluded, “There was a tenderness to The Dead that thankfully people loved and the character connections are what many warmed to. Thus it was important to include those aspects again and add to them, because we want The Dead 2: India to pull on your heartstrings as much as we want the exciting and violent elements to thrill you”.

Related: living dead | zombies

Scouts vs. Zombies is an upcoming American horror comedy film directed by Christopher B. Landon (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones) and written by Emi Mochizuki, Carrie Evans, Lona Williams and David Koechner. The film stars Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller and Joey Morgan. The movie’s makeup effects are being handled by Tony Gardner and his company, Alterian, Inc. The film is scheduled to be released on October 30, 2015, by Paramount Pictures.

Plot teaser:

Three scouts who, on the eve of their last camp out, discover the true meaning of friendship when they attempt to save their town from a zombie outbreak…

Wikipedia | IMDb

French poster

The Nude Vampire – French title: La vampire nue – is a 1969 film (released May 1970) directed by Jean Rollin. It stars Christine François,Olivier Rollin, Maurice Lemaitre, Bernard Musson, Jean Aron, Ursule Pauly, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel and Michel Delahaye.

Plot teaser:

Wealthy and decadent industrialist Georges Radamante rules over a strange secret suicide cult and wants to achieve immortality by figuring out a way to share the biochemistry of a young mute orphaned vampire woman. Complications ensue when Radamante’s son Pierre finds out what’s going on and falls for the comely lass…

The Nude Vampire was Jean Rollin’s first collaboration with cinematographer Jean-Jacques Renon and his first film in colour.

Buy The Nude Vampire on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“The film comes across with the emotionally intense illogic of a dream, intellectually nonsensical but meaningful on an instinctive plane. No means a total triumph, dialogue is stilted, and the story lags in several places. Still, there is enough suggestive menace and outrageous imagery to make up for this shortcoming, and the touches of science fiction and kink point dramatically to the dreams of surrender and destruction that Rollins had up his sleeves.” Sex Gore Mutants

“Though the pacing of The Nude Vampire is still recognizably Rollin-esque, this film may prove easier for newcomers to swallow as its story veers from one oddball element to the next. Leopardskin fabrics, party masks, and lots of teasing partial skin shots set this one firmly in 1970, and as a mod French art film gone berserk, it’s plenty of fun.” Mondo Digital

“There are a lot of signs of what is yet to come from director Jean Rollin and yet this early effort is also appealing because it is not as filled with the usual Jean Rollin clichés. Ultimately The Nude Vampire is a solid early effort from director Jean Rollin with its many memorable images and fascinating take on immortality.” 10,000 Bullets

“Jio Berk designed the fabulous costumes and the visual style was drawn from pulp comics and old paperback covers. La vampire nue is one of Rollin’s most enjoyable films and a great leap forward, technically, from Le viol du vampire. It also remains remarkably true to its original conception of a film around the idea of mystery, of enigma. Even the ending, when an explanation is given for all the mysterious events, is successfully undercut.” Cathal Tohill, Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: Sex & Horror Cinema in Europe 1956 – 1984

Buy Psychedelic Sex Vampires: Jean Rollin Cinema book from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“The film’s visual highlights include shots of night-lit streets which evoke the paintings of Paul Delvaux, or tableaux ala Max Ernst (a strong influence on Rollin) often using spotlights to achieve vivid contrasts and shadowy outlines, as well as back lighting to make women’s transluscent. The picture is most fascinating if seen as an intensely fetishistic but luscious play of textures punctuated by beautifully stylised, extravagantly romantic comic-strip compositions chronicling the obsessions of a guiltily Catholic voyeur, wallowing in a sense of perversion and sin.” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

Jean Rollin on Horrorpedia: Fascination | The Grapes of Death | Lips of Blood | The Living Dead Girl | Night of the Hunted | The Nude Vampire | The Rape of the Vampire | The Shiver of the Vampires | Virgin Among the Living Dead | Zombies Lake

Wikipedia | IMDb

The Mummy can, in many respects, hold claim to being the most unloved of the classic movie monsters – if not, then surely the most inconsistently served. The oft-quoted line from Kim Newman, that the issue lies with “no foundation text” upon which to base the creature, certainly carries some weight, though Mummies had certainly been written about in the 19th Century – notable works include Poe’s short story, Some Words With a Mummy (1850), Conan Doyle’s Lot No. 249 (1892), the latter establishing the Mummy as a malevolent predator seeking revenge, as well as touching upon elements also explored in later films, such as the methods of resurrection and the supernatural control of a ‘master’.

Poe’s tale is rather more barbed, the bandaged cadaver reanimated by electricity and quizzed upon its ancient knowledge (or lack of), a side-swipe at both modernist self-aggrandising and the Egyptomania which had swept through both America and Europe since Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign of 1798-1801. The fascination of the general public in all levels of society lasted throughout the Victorian era, peaking again when Howard Carter uncovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. This obsession didn’t stop with the collection of Egyptian artworks and an influence on fashion and architecture – it was not uncommon in both America and Europe (though England especially) for the upper classes to purchase sarcophagi containing mummified remains at public auctions and then charging interested parties to a literal unveiling at what became known as ‘mummy unwrapping parties’. Though many of these were under the slightly dubious guise of scientific and historical investigations, the evidence of publicity material listing admission prices for children rather suggests a more obvious parallel of the fascination with freak shows, as well as the ever-popular grave robbing and body snatching.

It is such unbalanced factors which contributed to the Mummy onscreen as such a difficult to pin-down character. Bram Stoker’s 1909 novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars, concentrated on the attempts to resurrect a mummified Egyptian Queen but is full of the author’s own clear obsession with the subject, detailing minute features of objects and environment. Even looking at these three texts, very different perspectives are offered:

1. The curse
2. The resurrection (either via electricity, potion or supernatural means)
3. Love across the ages
4. The exotic nature and history of Egypt

Mummy films are somewhat doomed to pick one or more elements of this and then factor in the very nature of a Mummy – a zombie with bandages with a grudge. Most films dealt with this threat as a singular foe, one with pre-determined victims in a relatively limited environment (either in his native Africa/South America or relocated to a museum elsewhere). Fundamentally, it’s not easy the share the fear of the pursued – the regularly featured greedy archaeologist or treasure hunter clearly would not have many rooting for them, the similarly omnipresent character of the innocent damsel being mistaken by old clothy for his bride from B.C. is often equally wretched.

The first documented films concerning Mummies are 1899’s Georges Melies‘ Cleopatra (French: Cléopâtre), also known as Robbing Cleopatra’s Tomb, which, at only two minutes in length, is pretty much the synopsis, action and epilogue all in one. Despite a false alarm in 2005, no copy of the film now exists, a fate shared by another French film, 1909’s The Mummy of the King Rameses (French: La Momie Du Roi). Though literature was raided for ideas in some of these early efforts, in particular 1912’s The Beetle, based on the Rich Marsh 1897 novel of the same name, the general tone was of mystery, over-egged comedy and slushy drama, the long-lost tombs of nobility and monarchy gripping audiences without the need for too much in the way of ravenous corpses.

1932’s Chandu the Magician just pipped Universal to the post as an Egyptian villain stalked America’s screens with a recognisable actor in the role of the baddy, Bela Lugosi kidnapping all and sundry in a bid to possess a death ray (he later appeared as the hero in the follow-up, 1934’s Return of Chandu). As with so many of Universal’s introductions of classic monsters, many elements of 1932’s The Mummy leeched into films right up to the present day. For first-time viewers, the biggest surprise is the incredibly short screen time of the bandaged one, though the slowly-opening eyes of the revived Mummy is one of the great moments in horror film.

It is as the reawakened Ardath Bey that Boris Karloff spends most of the film; Jack Pierce’s excellent make-up giving ‘life’ to a cadaverous-featured, be-fezzed Casanova seeking his love whom he believes has been reincarnated. The Egypt of the film is populated by aloof and cultured Westerners working in a land of subservient and befuddled locals, including Horrorpedia favourite, Noble Johnson as ‘The Nubian’ and can be seen as a view of a colonial viewpoint of ‘foreigners and their strange ways’, sometimes quasi-religious, at others playing on the public awareness of the so-called Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, an event only a decade prior. Egypt is still as remote, uncouth and dangerous as the forests of Romania and the invented village of Vasaria – the notion that this place actually exists and that tombs were still being uncovered lending an extra, illicit thrill, modern science at war with religious belief and customs. Bey/Imhotep stalks his beloved in a more stealthy manner than that of Dracula, the quick nip on the neck replaced by a rather more sinister, unspoken threat of capture, death and sex, the latter two being interchangeable. This, of course, remains unspoken but presumably an inevitability, Universal instead charging the film with shots of unbridled romance, both in set-design and, importantly, a specifically-composed score by James Dietrich and Heinz Roemheld, the first for a Universal Horror. This was underpinned by passages from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, another nod to Transylvania.

Though a success at the box office, it was a full eight years before Universal unleashed a Mummy again, the 1940 film The Mummy’s Hand not being a sequel but rather a reintroduction of the monster. Universal flex their creative muscle here, rather like 1941’s The Wolf Man, their invented lore (the poem of how a man is doomed to turn to beast) it is a given ‘fact’ that a Mummy can be brought back to life and indeed sustained by a potion of ‘tana leaves’. Evidently aware of the lack of an actual Mummy in its 1932 effort, the studio pushed the bandaged monster to the fore, plot and backstory being secondary to getting him on screen and tormenting people. It was a simple enough conceit that it was this Mummy, Kharis who would appear in the film’s sequels, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse, all of which would feature Lon Chaney Jr as the monster, the quality always sinking ever lower but still with Pierce’s sterling work on the costume and make-up, much to Chaney’s chagrin.

If the lack of genuine horror in the films wasn’t enough, the ever-present comedy or cartoon featuring Mummies again gave the character a persona that was not to be taken seriously. No matter how hard you tried, if you put bandages on a violent, ever-living zombie, there was a danger of farce. This can be evidenced with attempts such as the RKO-distributed Wheeler & Woolsey film, Mummy’s Boys (1936), The Three Stooges’ We Want Our Mummy (1939) and Mummy’s Dummies (1948) and on to Abbott and Costello’s encounters in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), a threadbare affair in both costume and entertainment – comedy often leaned on the fact Mummy is an un-threatening sounding word with two meanings as well as the opportunity to sing and dance in a manner audiences might expect from Egyptians (or not). Bandage unravelling was a given.

It would be two other countries which would rescue the Mummy from the filmic doldrums, at least in sparking an audience’s interest. 1957 saw the release of two Mexican films – The Aztec Mummy (Spanish title: La Momia Azteca) and The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (Spanish: La maldición de la momia azteca), neither likely to win awards for outright quality but giving Mummies in new life in a new environment, the ancient Aztec culture and wacky wrestling superhero (in this case El Ángel) marrying easily with the tropes already laid down by the earlier American films. The films offered enough promise for Jerry Warren to recut, dub and add additional scenes for an American audience. The films were a success in both markets and led to two further sequels, The Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy (1958) and Wrestling Women vs.The Aztec Mummy (1964).

Britain’s bandaged offering, inevitably from Hammer, was 1959’s The Mummy. Here, Hammer borrowed heavily from Universal (again, overlooking the studious 1932 film and cutting straight to the monster-driven sequels) but brought out the big guns; Terence Fisher directing and the double-whammy of Lee and Cushing. For all the film’s faults, and there are several, the film finally gives the monster the strength and terror that his complex evolution and background demands. Here, Lee towers over the other characters both literally and metaphorically, emerging from a swamp in a scene which should be considered as iconic as any in Hammer’s canon. No longer a shuffling bag of bones, the Mummy here is athletic and merciless, with the strength and stature of Frankenstein’s Monster with the eternal threat of Dracula.

Two of the sequels misfired quite badly, 1964’s Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and 1971’s Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb yet both have the odd moment of inspiration (the latter’s scenes involving voluptuous Valerie Leon in particular!) but running out of things for the Mummy to do. On the other hand, Hammer’s The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) is instantly forgettable.

Interestingly, Egypt’s own attempt at filming its own national monster feasted liberally on Abbott and Costello romping, the result being 1953’s Harem Alek (literally ‘shame on you’, retitled as Ismail Yassin Meets Frankenstein). Shrieking and gurning abound in a very close relation to the American comedians in their meeting of Frankenstein, the mummy in question being much nearer to the bolted creature.

One of the oddest appearances for a mummy was a narrator – voiced distinctively by Valentine Dyall – for Antony Balch’s 1969 British low budget anthology film Secrets of Sex aka Tales of the Bizarre. A healthy dose of dark humour, plus copious nudity from both sexes, has ensured that there is still a cult following for this eccentric entry.

Grabbing the monster by the scruff of the neck was Spain’s Paul Naschy, never one to tip-toe around a subject. 1973’s Vengeance of the Mummy (Spanish: La vengance de la momia) is gory, lurid and enormous fun, the hacking and head-crushing monster being completely self-governing and with the added bonus of an alluring assistant, played by Helga Liné, though sadly her rumoured nude scenes have yet to surface. Naschy played the Mummy once more, in the all-star monster fest of 1988’s Howl of the Devil.

The Mummy often appeared as part of an ensemble of monsters, giving the film-maker an answer as to what to do with it – from singing puppet mayhem of Mad Monster Party? and 1972’s animated semi-prequel Mad Mad Mad Monsters to encounters with Scooby Doo and rock band Kiss, the monster remained an also-ran and supporting character. Though managing to get on screen in 1987’s Monster Squad, missing out on the action of 1981’s The Monster Club suggests his standing in the pantheon of monsters was less than stellar.

1980’s The Awakneing was a latter-day attempt at filming Stoker’s novel – though managing to capture visually a sense of antiquity and some pleasing shots of Egypt, it lacks fire and threat and once again a classic monster is reduced to dreary, slow-paced banality. On the other side of the coin was Frank Agrama’s 1981 brutal guts and gusto Dawn of the Mummy, which sees the restless ones reanimated by the hot lights of a fashion shoot. This at least forgives lots of manic running around and a conflict between the modern day and the ancient, gloves off and with little regards to sense or history. The title alone should lead the audience to expect a more zombie-based event and though frequently silly and frayed, largely due to the low budget, it does at least give the sub-genre a shot in the arm.

Later films perhaps tried too hard – 1982’s Time Walker pitched the Mummy as actually being an alien in stasis; 1983’s baffling and boring Scarab throwing Gods, Nazis and scientists into the mix but only ending up with a mess; Fred Olen Ray’s breast-led 1986 effort, The Tomb. None came very close to succeeding in any sense.

The 1990’s was possibly the most desperate time for Mummies worldwide – whether it was the schlock of Charles Band (The Creeps, 1997), the critically-mauled 1998 film Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy or Russell Mulcahy’s flying Mummy of Talos the Mummy (1998), the monster suffered more than most at the hands of those trying to use new technology at the expense of plot and character to succeed. Only in 2002 with Don Coscarelli’s film Bubba Ho-Tep did The Mummy make a meaningful return, pleasing both fans of Bruce Campbell and too-cool-for-school scouts for cults as they happen, as well as horror fans desperate to see their bandaged hero as a tangible threat.

When Hollywood finally decided to throw some money at a reborn franchise, there was to be disappointment – the Indiana Jones-type action of 1999’s The Mummy, as well as its sequels and spin-offs were an exercise in CGI and tame thrills. Speakers were blown, images were rendered but whatever fun audiences had, omitted the scare factor.

2014’s R-rated The Pyramid promises Rec-style horrors and a return, successful or not, to the concept of a straight-forward monster released from its tomb. Further field, Universal have promised/threatened to relaunch their entire world of monsters, beginning with The Mummy from 2016.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Mummy Filmography: 

1899 – Cleopatra

1909 – The Mummy of the King Rameses (aka. La momie du roi)

1911 – The Mummy

1912 – The Mummy

1912 – The Vengence of Egypt

1912 – The Mummy and the Cowpuncher

1913 – The Egyptian Mummy – comedy short

1914 – Naidra, The Dream Worker

1914 – The Necklace of Rameses

1914 – Through the Centuries – short comedy

1914 – The Egyptian Princess

1914 – The Mummy

1915 – The Dust of Egypt

1915 – When the Mummy Cried for Help

1915 – Too Much Elixir of Life

1916 – Elixir of Life – comedy short

1916 – The Missing Mummy – comedy short

1917 – The Undying Flame

1917 – The Eyes of the Mummy

1918 – Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled – comedy short

1921 – The Lure of Egypt

1923 – The Mummy

1923 – King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s Eighth Wife

1926 – Mummy Love

1926 – Made For Love

1932 – Chandu the Magician

1932 – The Mummy

1933 – The Ghoul

1934 – The Return of Chandu

1936 – Mummy Boy

1939 – We Want Our Mummy

1940 – The Mummy’s Hand

1942 – The Mummy’s Tomb

1943 – The Mummy Strikes

1944 – The Mummy’s Ghost

1944 – A Night of Magic

1945 – The Mummy’s Curse

1953 – The Mummy’s Revenge (Spain)

1953 – Harem Alek (Egypt)

1955 – Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy

1957 – Curse of the Aztec Mummy (Mexico/USA)

1957 – Castle of the Monsters

1957 – Curse of the Pharaohs

1957 – Robot versus the Aztec Mummy (aka “La momia azteca contra el robot humano, Mexico)

1958 – Dos Fantasmas y una Muehacha (Mexico)

1958 – House of Terror (aka “Face of the Screaming Werewolf,”  Mexico/USA)

1958 – The Man and the Monster (Mexico)

1959 – The Mummy

1960 – Rock n Roll Wrestling Woman vs the Aztec Mummy

1962 – I Was a Teenage Mummy

1963 – Attack of the Mayan Mummy

1964 – Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb

1965 – Mummy’s Dummies

1965 – Orgy of the Dead

1966 – Death Curse of Tarta

1966 – Carry On Screaming!

1966 – Mad Monster Party?

1967 – The Mummy’s Shroud

1967 – Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea “The Mummy” (TV episode)

1968 – El Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monster (Mexico)

1969 – The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals

1969 – Secrets of Sex aka Tales of the Bizarre

1970 – Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy (aka Santo En La Venganza de la Momia, Mexico)

1970 – Dracula vs. Frankenstein” (aka ‘Assignment Terror, Italy/Spain/Germany)

1970 – The Mummies of Guanajuato (Mexico)

1971 – Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb

1972 – Mad, Mad, Mad Monsters

1972 – Dr Phibes Rises Again

1973 – Vengeance of the Mummy (La vengance de la momia, Spain)

1973 – The Cat Creature

1973  – Chabelo y Pepito vs. Los Monstruos” (Mexico)

1973 – Son of Dracula

1974 – Voodoo Black Exorcist

1975 – Demon and the Mummy (US TV Movie)

1978 - KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park

1980 – Fade to Black

1980 – The Awakening

1981 - Dawn of the Mummy

1981 – The National Mummy (La Momia Nacional, Spain)

1981 – Sphinx

1982 – Secret of the Mummy (Brazil)

1982 – Time Walker

1982 – Scarab

1985 – The Tomb

1985 – Dear Mummy (Hong Kong)

1985 – Transylvania 6-5000 (US/Yugoslavia)

1987 – Night of the Living Duck (US animated short)

1987 – The Monster Squad

1988 – Howl of the Devil

1988 – Saturday the 14th Strikes Back

1988 – Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (US animated short)

1988 – Waxwork

1989 – Encounters of the Spooky Kind 2 (Hong Kong)

1990 – I’m Dangerous Tonight (US TVM)

1990 – Tales from the Darkside: The Movie

1990 – I’m Dangerous Tonight

1992 – I was a Teenage Mummy

1992 – Nightmare Asylum

1992 Franky and his Pals

1992 – Bloodstone: Subspecies II

1993 – Bloodlust: Subspecies III (US/Romania)

1993 – The Mummy Lives

1993 – The Mummy A.D. 1993

1993 – The Mummy’s Dungeon

1994 – Stargate

1995 – Monster Mash

1996 – Le Siege del l’Ame (France)

1996 – The Mummy (Pakistan)

1996 – Birth of a Wizard (Japan)

1996 – La Momie Mi-mots” (aka “Mummy Mommy, France)

1996 – The Seat of the Soul” (aka “Le siege del Time, Canada)

1997 – The Creeps

1997 – Bram Stoker’s The Mummy

1997 – Mummy’s Alive

1997 – Under Wraps (TV Movie)

1998 – Trance

1998 – Talos the Mummy

1999 – Ancient Desires

1999 – The Mummy

1999 – The All-New Adventures of Laurel & Hardy ‘For the Love of Mummy’

2000 – Curse of the Mummy

2000 – Lust in the Mummy’s Tomb

2000 – Ancient Evil – Scream of the Mummy

2001 – Mummy Raiders

2001 – The Mummy Returns

2002 – Bubba Ho-Tep

2002 – The Scorpion King

2002 – Mummy’s Kiss

2003 – Scooby-Doo! Where’s My Mummy?

2005 – Legion of the Dead

2005 – The Fallen Ones

2006 – Seven Mummies

2006 – The University of Illinois vs. a Mummy

2007 – Mil Mascaras vs. the Aztec Mummy

2008  – The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

2008 – Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior

2010 – The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

2010 – Pink Panther and Pals ‘And Not a Drop to Pink’ (TV episode)

2012 – Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption

2014- Scorpion King 4 – Quest for Power

2014 – The Mummy Resurrected

2014 – The Pyramid

Day of the Dead is a 1985 American horror film written and directed by George A. Romero and the third film in Romero’s Dead Series, being preceded by Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). Though planned as the final part of the saga, the travails of humankind versus their infected dead continued for a further three films (thus far) and two un-Romero related re-hashes… thus far! The film stars Joe Pilato, Lois Cardille, Sherman Howard (billed as Howard Sherman) and Richard Liberty. Tom Savini enjoys his finest moments in charge of make-up and effects, whilst Romero alumni John Harrison composed the score.

A helicopter circles Fort Myers, Florida, the four passengers on a recce mission for survivors from the zombie catastrophe introduced in Night of the Living Dead and last seen compromising tenement blocks, TV studios and shopping malls in Dawn of the Dead. It is clear from abandoned buildings, cars and debris that the situation has not improved – of note is a newspaper, The Southern Globe, which flutters into view, briefly informing us that the President is missing, the National Guard are overwhelmed and the C.I.A. have no answer to the crisis – indirectly, we are now aware that the zombie outbreak is not confined to isolated pockets of the American North West.

A Hispanic-American male, Miguel Salazar (Anthony Dileo Jr, Monkey Shines, Two Evil Eyes), an unwilling member of a small group of military personnel, uses a megaphone to try to attract survivors. We are also introduced to Jamaican helicopter pilot, John (Terry Alexander, Werewolf of Washington, House III – The Horror Show), radio operative, Irishman McDermott (Jarlath Conroy) and scientist, Sarah (Lori Cardille, daughter of ‘Chilly; Billy Cardille, host of TV’s Chiller Theater), who is also Miguel’s girlfriend. The ‘hellos’ only serve to attract the undead who appear from the seemingly abandoned resort. We immediately learn three things; they have decayed significantly since the previous film; they now make a sound (collectively the wailing is genuinely disturbing); there are an awful lot of them.

The helicopter returns to base, a fenced facility where the remaining humans reside underground in a series of bunkers divided into living quarters, science labs and a cavernous area gated off from roaming zombies. They are immediately harangued by the apparent leader of the group, a member of the military called Captain Rhodes (Pilato, Dawn of the Dead, Wishmaster) for their lack of success, their wasting of helicopter fuel and their futility leading to goading the zombies lined up at the fence. We realise that the camp is firmly divided into military versus science, with John and McDermott representing the average civilian, only making their way due to their technical expertise.

The military faction, Rhodes, Steel (Gary Howard Klar) and Rickles (Ralph Marrero, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie) are sweary, obnoxious and intolerant of the slow results of the scientists and their increased use of their slim resources. The scientists, led by Dr ‘Frankenstein’ Logan (Liberty, The Crazies)  and aided by Sarah and Fisher (John Amplas, Martin, Dawn of the Dead) are a meeker lot but under huge pressure to find answers, lest they become target practise. Unhelpfully, Miguel has been driven half-mad by the apocalyptic events, singling Sarah out for extra taunting and dividing the two groups even further.

Logan largely works alone and when he presents the fruits of his labours, a semi-domesticated zombie he names Bub (Howard, Freddy’s Nightmares), who has developed the rudimentaries of speech and tool-use and even recalls parts of his past life as a soldier but still remains chained for the safety of the humans, Rhodes is monumentally unimpressed, the ‘advancement’ offering no solution to the reversal of the plague.

Daily tasks include the rounding up of zombies for the scientists to experiment on; a task performed with little more than a lasso on a stick and some tricky wrangling in the dark. When two soldiers are bitten during one such venture, Rhodes declares all experiments should end and existing specimens (including stomach-less zombies, those with only a brain attached to their body and mouthless eyes) be destroyed. Worse is to come as both Sarah and Rhodes are enlightened as to Logan’s extracurricular experiments which have necessitated the flesh of Rhodes’ own men to be used as food. He shoots and kills Rhodes and Fisher, the rest cast out into the zombie-infested caverns, with little in the way of arms.

Meanwhile, Miguel has gone completely insane and staggers to the lift-accessed surface, not only becoming food for the undead but allowing the hoards to swamp the whole base. Amid the chaos, the trio of Sarah, John and McDermott aim to reach the helicopter and bid to fly to safety, whilst the remaining military adopt an ‘every man for himself’ approach, with the benefit of arms but the disadvantage of, well, everything else. As time and places to hide run out, one zombie in particular seems to have a score to settle…

It is no secret that this film little resembles Romero’s original vision for the conclusion of his’ Anubis’ trilogy. The intention was to film a far more overtly political film, the politicians controlling a military which had domesticated zombies into something resembling the slaves working the fields of sugar plantations, though rather than farming they were being trained as a weapon of control. Lower echelons of society lived in a dilapidated, drug-filled annexed ‘stalag’, a set-up which more closely mirrors Land of the Dead, Romero’s somewhat ill-fated attempt to finally film his intended story.

Though impressive in scope, Romero’s screenplay, running at an outlandish 204 pages, had little chance of being green-lit, less so when the studio, United Artists, learned that the film was doomed to receive an ‘X’ certificate due to the amount of gore and violence. In 1985, such a certificate was usually reserved for hardcore pornography and severely limited the commercial opportunities of a mainstream film, albeit a horror. The projected budget was gauged at around $6.5million, an amount the studio balked at.

This financial hoo-ha may initially seem unfair; the $55million plus performance of Dawn of the Dead at the box office would, you’d think, appease any fears but the underperformance of both Knightriders and Creepshow left investors wary. Horror was currently feasting on simple concepts; the slasher and the dream worlds of Freddy were big business and required far less in terms of location and set-pieces – Romero envisaged a high action, highly moral film, a risk for an audience that was snaffling up cheap jumps and equally cheap thrills.

Romero significantly pared down the script to a little over a hundred pages but this would still have needed in advance of an extra million dollars to film – there was little option but to jettison the idea and retain only elements – a brief flirtation with filming in 3D was perhaps wisely passed over. The eventual, accepted re-write, a scant 88 pages, required the film to have far less in the way of location and action – a significant opening sequence on water and an ending of all-out war went un-filmed, replaced by a now far talkier, claustrophobic film – brief aerial images of the city hinting at the scope, the tense underground sequences filmed at the former limestone Wampum mine in Pennsylvania, again reinforcing Romero’s philosophy that humans were comfortably the equal threat of the chomping dead.

When filming commenced at the end of 1984, it was clear that the environment of the ex-mine (now a storage facility) was going to problematic – it was dark, cold, wet and the damp meant the equipment regularly malfunctioned, as well as leading to the majority of the cast and crew succumbing to illness. Again, Romero gave budding actors and acquaintances key roles, saving money as well as giving an ‘everyman’ quality to the film – we could attempt to associate with the characters without being taken out of our escapism by the sight of familiar Hollywood actors. Of note, are Pilato, an excellently-realised glob of vicious bile and anger, Howard who is given a thankless task of making a trained zombie believable and sympathetic, without sinking to cheap laughs and Liberty, a character who, more than any other in Romero’s zombie films, gives way more than most exactly what has happened to lead us to this point. Again, Romero opts for lead roles to be played by a woman and a black actor.

Tom Savini was again allowed free reign to make his ideas flesh (rotting or otherwise), the advancements in techniques and technology allowing for grander gore theatre and an ability to give the zombies even more detailed individuality and hinted-at backstories. Sarah bemoans Logan’s lack of scientific breakthroughs at one stage, highlighting that he has barely progressed from “proving theories advanced months ago” – coupled with the existence of the newspaper seen in the first scene, it is clear this episode does not take place too much further in the future than Dawn, though accepted wisdom puts the timescale nearer to five years. This certainly explains the far more decayed creatures Savini presents to us. Two other important pieces of information are given to us by Logan; the estimate of the undead outnumbering survivors by around 400,000 to one and his discovery that the eating of flesh does not nutritionally sustain the zombies.

There are significant implications to the latter two statements, both of which suggest that the best course of action actually lies with John and McDermott – rather like the much-maligned Cooper of Night of the Living Dead who suggests hiding in a locked-up cellar and waiting for help to arrive (he is ultimately proved right), against such insurmountable odds, John’s dream of taking the helicopter and spending his life sunbathing on a deserted island (or indeed McDermott’s of drinking to forget) and leaving the carnage to exist in an alternative world are both realistic and appealing.

Neither the military nor science are proved to hold the answer – lack of ammunition and men mean Rhodes is in a hopeless situation, his anger at the scientists’ lack of progress having a certain amount of justification, though this overspills into the murder of two scientists and the ordered execution of Sarah. Pertinently, the ‘wise old head’ of the film, Logan is eventually revealed to be as insane as Miguel, devoid of ideas but happy in his world where he is as much a self-appointed king as Rhodes. Sarah, the lynchpin between the two, has neither the strength nor the tools to either heal Miguel (physically and emotionally), add anything meaningful to Logan other than criticism or commit to aiding the two to escape until the choice is made for her.

These are all extremely human reactions to an outrageous scenario. The desire to fight or explain away the problem is understandable, though clearly impossible. John echoes Peter’s quasi-religious musings from Dawn but takes it a step further – it doesn’t matter how or where, the important factor is that by sticking around they are under “a great big, fourteen mile tombstone”. Day of the Dead is unremittingly grim (especially compared to the same years Return of the Living Dead), the level of swearing actually being as shocking as the gore, which is quite an achievement, though it’s difficult to believe anyone would logically behave with decorum in such a situation. The confines of the bunker accentuate this to almost unbearable levels, the wider scope of Land of the Dead and its overplayed morals and posturing proving that in this instance, less was actually more.

The film’s score is the work of John Harrison, also known for his scores to Creepshow and Effects, though is probably known to most fans as the zombie who receives a screwdriver to his earhole in Dawn of the Dead. Also featured are Sputzy Sparacino who is the lead singer of Modern Man and Delilah on the tracks “If Tomorrow Comes” and “The World Inside Your Eyes”, the latter closing the movie and causing a certain amount of derision amongst some, the saccharine 80’s soul being ‘unbecoming’ of a horror film. In actual fact, the pitching of an distinctly 80’s sound in a film which is Romero’s final successful social commentary, is quite appropriate – put next to his later nasty, poorly played rock music, one of his most desperate latter-career devices, it’s a Godsend. Harrison’s electronic suites are highly underrated, lengthy and complex but used in the film with great care and subtlety. He just gets away with a comedic “gonk” reference. Just…

The ultimate irony is that the film was indeed the poorest in terms of financial return, grossing $30million at the box office and didn’t even have a flag of consolation waved by many a critic at the time; Roger Ebert gave it a lowly 1½ stars, declaring,

“In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive”.

Such a viewpoint is unnecessarily pompous – moaning that the characters shout a lot, rather supposes he’d expect cosy-cups-of-tea debate; that they overshadow the zombies, misunderstanding the presented view of the survivors as being a greater threat to each other as much as he said ‘he got’ the retrospectively clumsier representation of consumerism in Dawn. Day of the Dead remains one of the 80’s greatest horror films though stands as a final fanfare for Romero as a director, only 1988’s Monkey Shines offering a glimpse of a filmmaker of huge invention and skill.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Zombie is a song by British singer/songwriter Jamie T and is the second single to be taken from his 2014 Virgin Records album Carry on the Grudge.

The promotional music video for “Zombie” features the singer and his backing band The Pacemakers gradually turning into the living dead whilst performing at a soulless, lifeless English pub.

The video was directed by James Slater and the gory makeup and special effects were designed by Natasha Lawes.

Buy Zombie on MP3 from Amazon.co.uk

Sick: Survive the Night - also known as Sick – is a 2012 American horror film directed by Ryan M. Andrews from a screenplay he co-wrote with Chris Cull. It stars Debbie Rochon, Christiana Aceto, Richard Sutton and Robert Nolan.

Midnight Releasing and Acort International are releasing the film on DVD and VOD in 2015, although an exact date has yet to be announced.

Plot teaser:

Two years after the infection began, billions have died. Governments have collapsed and the human race is on the brink of extinction. Dr. Leigh Rozetta is a young, maverick scientist, who’s been living in a secret underground government facility since the outbreak began. After constant failed attempts to find a cure, Leigh sneaks away to return to her parent’s house. On her way she crosses paths with Seph and Mckay, two militant survivalists, who only just barely escaped an attack from a group of infected.

With nightfall close at hand, the three of them know they need to seek shelter, as the ‘Sick’ are more active in the dark. Boarding themselves up in Leigh’s parents house, the plan is simple: survive the night. But with the ‘Sick’ surrounding the house and their own tensions through the roof, they’ll be lucky if anyone makes it out alive…

IMDb

WH

‘There is a fate worse than death!’

Night of the Living Dead is a 1990 US horror film directed by Tom Savini. It is a remake of George A. Romero’s 1968 horror film of the same name. Romero rewrote the original 1968 screenplay co-authored by John A. Russo

Following the plot of the seminal original film, Barbara (Patricia Tallman: Army of Darkness, Monkey Shines) and her annoying brother, Johnnie (Bill Mosely: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2; The Devil’s Rejects) travel by car to visit the grave of their mother. At the graveside, Johnnie’s taunts of, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara”, are interrupted by not one but two shambling corpses, a tussle between corpse and male sibling leaving Johnnie dead with a cracked skull. Barbara flees but after crashing her car, is forced to sprint to the nearest dwelling, a large, remote farmhouse.

Once there, she finds several previous occupants dead but mobile but is soon aided by another living person seeking sanctuary, Ben (Tony Todd: Candyman; Hatchet). Ben has just about kept his cool whereas Barbara is a gibbering wreck. With the house barricaded up, they are surprised to find five other survivors, Harry Cooper (Tom Towles: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer; The Borrower; ) and his wife, Helen (McKee Anderson), who, despite the racket, had opted to stay out of sight in the cellar. Also holed-up are their daughter, Sarah, who has been bitten and is out cold, plus young locals, Tom (William Butler: Friday the 13th Part VII; Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3) and Judy Rose (Katie Finneran).

None too impressed at the lack of assistance, it is soon clear that common ground will be hard to find – the Coopers are insistent on locking themselves in the cellar to wait for help to arrive, the others more keen to escape by getting the truck outside to the nearby petrol station and heading for a safer, built-up area. With Barbara, who is starting to come back to her senses, staying to guard the house, the other three set off on their quest, only for a series of mishaps to leave two dead and the chances of escape even slimmer.

Back at the farmhouse, tensions have now reached unmanageable levels, squabbles over the TV and more importantly, gun rights, leaving more injured and the walking dead outside gathering in ever-greater numbers. It becomes a clear choice or fight or flight but unlike the original film, the survivors and the resolution may come as some surprise…

Buy on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Such was the farcical nature of Romero’s rights issues with the original masterpiece, it achieved an unwanted notoriety in the industry as a film anyone could release or lay claim to. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that Romero and many of his crew from 1968 felt compelled to throw their own hats into the ring, especially now more respectable budgets and film-making techniques were available.

With Russo out of the way, Romero was able to stay far closer to his original vision, fortunately at a time when he was still capable of being innovative and thoughtful without causing howls of derision. Savini, though fully immersed in the lore of the dead films, was a risk, given that it was his first directorial work but the remake can largely be hailed as a success, though the caveats to this would be the hindsight of truly horrendous horror remakes and how awful Romero’s own directorial additions to the saga are.

The primary differences are the semi-role reversals of Barbara and Ben, a nice enough device, though Barbara’s transformation from sobbing hysteria to crack-shot marksman and voice of society, literally overnight, is somewhat over-played and hollow. The character of Ben is more successful, less tragic than the original and slightly aloof, a pleasing antidote to the traditional saccharine Hollywood treatment which one may expect. Similarly, Cooper has far more about him and is more dis-likeable than in the ’68 version. He remains fundamentally correct in his decision to keep safe and out of sight, an always pleasing aspect of the first, though Cooper’s self-preservation here makes it more understandable that others may choose the other route. Despite an almost identical role to the original, Mosely is pretty unbearable as the unlucky Johnnie.

There are numerous nods to both the ’68 film and Dawn of the Dead; aside from on-camera appearances from original cast members such as “Chilly Billy” Cardille, again interviewing locals and the original Johnny, Russell Streiner, as the sheriff, we can see the early red neck collectives taking great pleasure in dispatching the shuffling corpses. Allegedly planned for Romero’s version, the ending shows ‘lynched’ zombies strung up in trees for the locals to abuse, a jarring image and perhaps the biggest hang-over to the initial implied criticisms of human behaviour and racism.

There are also hints at the cause of the zombies – a TV broadcast quickly dispels fears that the issue lies with chemical spills, perhaps a dig at John Russo’s work on 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, whilst a photograph of the USS Eldridge in the farmhouse hints at the possibility that the so-called Philadelphia Experiment carried out by the military, may have had some influence. The zombies themselves are superb and reason alone to give this version a chance. It is not only the make-up which elevates them to near the top of the living dead league but their individuality and costumes. The early stages of the outbreak allow for naked zombies, seen in Romero’s original but rarely otherwise, as well as junkies, children and neighbours and family members of the trapped survivors. There is a reprise of the bug-eating zombie, though this is expanded to a ghoul eating a live mouse, one of the only times any film concerning zombies has tackled the fate of other living mammals.

The electronic score by Paul McCollough works best when straying away from attempts at sustained melody and theme and instead creates oily and atmospheric musical vignettes, suggesting gloom without resorting to ham-fisted, obvious cues. The film suffered heavily at the censors, being cut to avoid an ‘X’ rating, the outtakes still not replaced but occasionally shown by Savini at horror conventions.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a 2015 American horror comedy romance film directed by Burr Steers and co-written with David O. Russell, based on the 2009 novel of same name by Seth Grahame-Smith. The film stars Lily James, Sam Riley and Matt Smith.

Plot teaser:

Jane Austen’s classic tale of the tangled relationships between lovers from different social classes in 19th century England is faced with a new challenge — an army of undead zombies.

Cast:

• Lily James as Elizabeth Bennet
• Sam Riley as Mr. Darcy
• Bella Heathcote as Jane Bennet
• Jack Huston as Mr. Wickham
• Douglas Booth as Mr. Bingley
• Matt Smith as Mr. Collins
• Suki Waterhouse as Catherine “Kitty” Bennet
• Charles Dance
• Lena Headey
• Emma Greenwell as Caroline Bingley
• Dolly Wells
• Ellie Bamber as Lydia Bennet
• Millie Brady as Mary Bennet
• Alisha Heng as Cassandra
• Harry Hewitt

 Filming locations:

The filming began on September 24, 2014, at West Wycombe House and Park, Buckinghamshire. During the Halloween weekend, actors were spotted shooting some scenes at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. Later in early November, crews were filming at Basing House in Old Basing. On November 13, filming shifted to Frensham.

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Satan is coming!’

The Devil’s Wedding Night is a 1973 Italian horror film originally known as Il Plenilunio delle Vergini (“Full Moon of the Virgins”). It was directed by Luigi Batzella (Nude for Satan; The Beast in Heat) and stars Rosalba Neri and Mark Damon.

In the USA, The Devil’s Wedding Night was released by Dimension Pictures (Kingdom of the Spiders; Werewolf Woman; Night Creature) with a typically lurid advertising campaign. After a number of pan-and-scan VHS releases, the film was finally released widescreen on DVD by Shout Factory in September 2006 with optional comments by Elvira although the print used has obvious wear.

Plot teaser:

The 1800s: scholarly Karl Schiller believes he’s found the ring of the Nibelungen, which holds great power. It’s at Castle Dracula. His twin, Franz, a gambler, asks if vampires frighten Karl; Karl shows him an Egyptian amulet, which may protect him. Franz takes the amulet and sets out ahead of his brother, arriving at the castle first. There he finds a countess who invites him to dine.

Later that night, Karl arrives. Coincidently, it’s the Night of the Virgin Moon, a night that falls every fifty years and draws five virgins from the surrounding village to the castle not be heard from again. Can Karl protect his brother, find the ring, and rescue the virgins?

Reviews:

” … a by the numbers vampire film with some serious T&A tossed into things to spice it up a bit. It’s formulaic, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable particularly when it’s shot as well as it is here thanks to some slick cinematography from the late, great Joe D’Amato. The castle makes for a great and macabre set, the women are all lit quite seductively and while there isn’t as much atmosphere as, say, Castle of Blood or Black Sunday there are still some very memorable visuals and sets.” Ian Jane, DVD Talk

“Stealing the show as usual is the supremely sexy Rosalba Neri of Amuck! and Lady Frankenstein. Her over-the-top performance combined with her propensity for nude scenes make Neri’s presence a boon for this flick. There’s also Lara, the Contessa’s servant (and lesbian lover), who is played to perfection with a dichotomously somnambulistic and bug-eyed craziness by Brazilian actress Esmeralda Barros. The most pitiful roles are given to Xiro Papas (Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks) as the monstrous vampire thug and Gengher Gatti (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) as the mysterious butler/coach driver.” Doomed Moviethon

“It’s no overlooked masterpiece of gothic horror; with its fits of pure silliness, but Damon doesn’t look down at the material, Neri is gorgeous (especially nude), and Joe D’Amato’s atmospheric cinematography is often stunning.” Basement of Ghoulish Decadence

“Rosalba Neri doesn’t get to have as much fun as she does in Lady Frankenstein but she still turns in a watchable performance. Mark Damon, who plays twins Karl and Franz, does so with equal commitment on both sides and in doing so pays tribute to Barbara Steele who played duo roles in Black Sunday, in which he also stars. They really do seem like two different people even though still playing with the good twin / bad twin cliché.” Sinful Celluloid

“It’s well-staged, beautifully shot and loaded with naked, lesbian vampires and curvy villager babes. Unlike films of this type made for today’s video market, it also takes its horror elements rather seriously and manages to have some fun along the way. It’s hard to dislike any movie in which one of the male leads seduces a peasant girl out of her knickers by slyly reminding her that Count Dracula is only interested in the blood of virgins. Though hardly a classic, it’s not bad, and it certainly delivers on the promises of its lurid U.S. ad campaign.” Bloody Disgusting

“… Batzella’s occasionally arresting imagery, as well as Neri’s sexy but commanding premise, make the film worth a look. While he’s certainly not cut from the same cloth as Mario Bava, Batzella manages to create an eerily erotic gothic atmosphere, highlighted by a fog-bound scene of undead women gathering for a blood orgy, and — especially — scenes of Rosalba Neri bathed in blood and rising naked from her crypt.” Tomb of the Headless Werewolf

Italian trailer:

Wikipedia | IMDb

A ghoul is a folkloric monster or evil spirit associated with graveyards and consuming human flesh, often classified as undead. The oldest surviving literature that mention ghouls is likely One Thousand and One Nights. The term was first used in English literature in 1786, in William Beckford’s Orientalist novel Vathek, which describes the ghūl of Arabian folklore.

A being which is largely misrepresented or used as a ‘catch-all’ to describe anything from vampires, zombies or other mythical creatures, a ghoul has habits and behaviour which can make it far more distinct. Despite this, even today it is used as a general phrase to describe someone (or something) who displays a macabre love of death or torture, especially any frowned-upon activities taking place in graveyards.

The word ‘ghoul’ is derived from the Arabic غول ghūl, from ghala, “to seize”. The term is etymologically related to Gallu, a Mesopotamian demon who dragged mortals into the Underworld and was widely understood to be appeased by the sacrificial slaughter of a lamb. Once the tale One Thousand and One Nights was translated into French by Antoine Galland, the concept of the ghoul entered Western lore.

In ancient Arabian folklore, the ghūl (Arabic: literally demon) dwells in burial grounds and other uninhabited places. The ghul is a fiendish type of jinni believed to be sired by Iblis, the Muslim God of darkness. Ancient accounts refer to ghūls as generally being female, distracting male travellers before killing and consuming them. When faced with such a foe, the only way of escape was to kill the ghul with one blow; a second or more would resurrect it from the dead.

A ghoul is also a desert-dwelling, shapeshifting, demon that can assume the guise of an animal, especially a hyena. It lures unwary people into the desert wastes or abandoned places to slay and devour them. The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, then taking the form of the person most recently eaten.

In the Arabic language, the female form is given as ghoulah and the plural is ghilan. In colloquial Arabic, the term is sometimes used to describe a greedy or gluttonous individual. Anglicized as “ghoul,” the word entered English tradition and was further identified as a grave-robbing creature that feeds on dead bodies and on children, the former offering a clear difference between ghouls and zombies. In the West, ghouls have no specific image and have been described (by Edgar Allan Poe) as “neither man nor woman . . . neither brute nor human.” They are thought to assume disguises, to ride on dogs and hares, and to set fires at night to lure travelers away from the main roads. They can often be detected by hoof marks in the ground near graveyards.

There are many cultural references to ghouls throughout the ages:

One Thousand and One Nights is the earliest surviving literature that mentions ghouls, and many of the stories in that collection involve or reference ghouls. A prime example is the story “The History of Gherib and His Brother Agib”, in which Gherib, an outcast prince, fights off a family of ravenous ghouls and then enslaves them and converts them to Islam.

Lord Byron made a reference to the ghouls in his epic poem “The Giaour” (1813): “Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip; / Then stalking to thy sullen grave, / Go – and with Gouls and Afrits rave; / Till these in horror shrink away/ From spectre more accursed than they!”

In Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairy tale, “The Wild Swans” (1838), the heroine Eliza has to pass a group of ghouls feasting on a corpse.

Edgar Allan Poe mentions ghouls in the despairing fourth section (“Iron Bells”) in his 1848 poem “The Bells”, describing them and their king as “the people, they that dwell up in the steeple” tolling the bells and glorying in the depressive effect on the hearers. “They are neither man nor woman— / They are neither brute nor human— / They are Ghouls.” His 1847 poem “Ulalume” also features ghouls.

Harry Shannon’s 2006 horror novel Daemon features a portrayal of a ghoul as an undead creature.

The Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine may have been inspired by the idea of a ghoul. Though subterranean, they feed on the living Eloi, not the dead.

In the short story “The Nameless Offspring” (1932) by Clark Ashton Smith, the ghoul is a cannibalistic humanoid which, besides eating the flesh of human corpses, procreates with those buried while still alive.

In the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, a ghoul is a member of a nocturnal subterranean race. Some ghouls were once human, but a diet of human corpses, and perhaps the tutelage of proper ghouls, mutated them into horrific bestial humanoids. In the short story “Pickman’s Model” (1926), they are unutterably terrible monsters; however, in his later novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), the ghouls are somewhat less disturbing, even comical at times, and both helpful and loyal to the protagonist. Richard Upton Pickman, a noteworthy Boston painter who disappeared mysteriously in “Pickman’s Model”, appears as a ghoul himself in Dream-Quest. Similar themes appear in “The Lurking Fear” (1922) and “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), both of which posit the existence of subterranean clans of degenerate, retrogressive cannibals or carrion-eating humans. This theme is elaborated on in Anders Fager’s “Grandmother’s Journey” in which a large family have degenerated (or changed) into a brood of sub-human beast men. Pickaman’s Model is also featured as a tale in Rod Serling’s TV series, The Night Gallery.

The November 1973 issue of Skywald Publications’ Psycho comic-magazine was an “all ghoul” edition.

In Neil Gaiman’s novel The Graveyard Book, ghouls are small, ape-like creatures who make their home in an extra-dimensional realm called Ghûlheim. They travel to our world through ghoul-gates, and name themselves after the first person they eat on becoming a ghoul.

In 1987, Brian McNaughton wrote a series of dark fantasy short stories in which these Lovecraftian ghouls are the protagonists. The stories, collectively published as The Throne of Bones, were a critical success and the book went on to receive a World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

In P.B. Kerr’s Children of the Lamp, ghouls (spelled as “Ghuls”) are one of the six tribes of djinn, and one of the three evil tribes.

In Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, the ghouls are a race that eats the dead of the other races that live on the ringworld. They have a fairly sophisticated (for a post-apocalyptic people) culture, and are the only race with a communication system that traverses the entire ringworld: heliographs.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, ghouls are harmless creatures that live in the homes of wizards, making loud noises and occasionally groaning; a ghoul resides in the attic of the Weasley family’s home as the family’s pet. Context implies that in the Harry Potter universe, ghouls are closer to animals than human beings. They are translated in some versions as vampire, although they have nothing to do with the creatures.

In Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, graveyards became infested with ghouls when the blessing of the graveyard was used up; this was usually caused when too many zombies were raised or voodoo rituals of evil nature were performed in the graveyard. That, or numerous animators (or people who possess magic related to the dead) are buried in the graveyard. Though they were once human, they are like lone wolves, and they are not very smart. The only reason Zach’s ghouls stayed and worked together was because Zach was controlling them. They will only attack if a person is vulnerable. A ghoul will run from a healthy, strong human being, and is afraid of fire. Like zombies, ghouls have human strength, but seem stronger because the sensations of pain and the ‘governors’ that keep people from ripping their bodies apart died with them. So while a human would stop trying to punch a hole in a steel door because of the pain a zombie or ghoul would keep trying until stopped or the door broke even if it would mean completely destroying their arm in the process.

In Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, ghouls are much like they are in the classic mythologies: humanoid monsters that feed on human flesh, and seem to be able to disguise themselves as ordinary humans. These ghouls are intelligent, as opposed to being mindless and feral monsters.

In Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain series, the ghoul is an undead being created through an ancient Egyptian ritual to act as a servant to a vampire. St. Germain comes across a dying slave and resurrects him as his faithful servant, Roger, who accompanies him through his adventures for the next 2,000 years. Roger is indistinguishable from humans except for his immortality and that his diet consists of raw meat. In her book Cautionary Tales, there is a short story about a teenage ghoul, working the graveyard shift in a morgue, eating parts of unclaimed dead people.

Caitlín R. Kiernan has written a number of short stories and novels featuring ghouls (referred to as the ghul), including “The Dead and the Moonstruck” and “So Runs the World Away” (both from To Charles Fort, With Love, 2005), Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, and Daughter of Hounds. Kiernan’s ghouls exhibit a blend of human and canine traits, are highly intelligent, live in subterranean cities, possess magical powers, and feed on the flesh of human corpses. According to Daughter of Hounds, they seem to have an extraterrestrial origin. They are often referred to as “The Hounds of Cain.”

In R.L. Stine’s Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls, ghouls are depicted as non-corporeal green mists that were humans at one point of time, and are able to steal bodies.

In the manga Rosario + Vampire, ghouls are a type of mindless, cannibalistic monster that are created in two manners. Ordinary ghouls are created when an evil spirit possesses a corpse. Rarely, ghouls are created when a human repeatedly has monster blood injected into their veins. The monster blood grants the ghoul supernatural power but at the same time destroys the psyche, leaving them a mindless killing machine. They resemble vampires but are easily identified by the web-like marking surrounding the bite mark where the monster blood was injected and their complete lack of self-control. The lead male character, Tsukune Aono, eventually becomes one such ghoul due to the continuous intake of vampiric blood from Moka Akashiya. Although thanks to some intervention he was able to regain almost all of his humanity and senses by having the vampire blood sealed through a Holy Lock. Although, for a time, there’s still a danger he’ll revert to a ghoul again. Eventually, Tsukune overcomes the vampire blood and becomes a full fledged vampire himself.

Although many screenplays have featured ghouls, the first major motion picture of this theme was the 1933 British film entitled The Ghoul. Boris Karloff plays a dying Egyptologist who possesses an occult gem, known as The Eternal Light, which he believes will grant immortality if he is buried with it, and thereby able to present it to Anubis in the afterlife. Of course, his bickering covetous heirs and associates would rather keep the jewel for themselves. Karloff vows to rise from his grave and avenge himself against anyone who meddles with his plan, and he keeps this promise when one of his colleagues steals the gem after his death.

In 1968, George A. Romero’s groundbreaking film Night of the Living Dead combined reanimated corpses (zombies) with cannibalistic monsters (ghouls), creating new film monsters more terrifying than either of their predecessors. The term “ghoul” was the one actually used in the film, though as we now know, the beings in Romero’s film exhibit the habits of zombies, in that they crave live human flesh, not that of corpses.

The 1976 Turkish movie Milk Brothers (based on H. Rahmi Gurpinar’s story, “Ghoul”) is a comedy in which ghouls feature prominently.

The 1975 British film The Ghoul (unrelated to the Karloff vehicle) stars Peter Cushing as a defrocked missionary whose son has developed a taste for human flesh while travelling in India. As the son’s mind and body degenerate, Cushing has several young people dispatched and prepared as food for his offspring, whom he keeps locked up in the attic.

The 1980 anthology film The Monster Club featured a segment about a village of ghouls stumbled upon by an unwary traveller (Stuart Whitman), who temporarily escapes the creatures with the help of one half-human girl, but he is recaptured when it turns out that the ghouls have representatives inhabiting our normal human world.

In the anime and manga series Hellsing, ghouls are zombie-like creatures that are created when a “chipped” (technological) vampire drains a victim to death, or, in the Manga, where a vampire drains the blood of someone who is not a virgin. If fatally wounded, they instantly crumble to dust. They are under the control of the vampire who bites them, eat human flesh, and are intelligent enough to use firearms. It is not rare to see a vampire amass a small army of ghouls for offence and defence

In Cannibal Flesh Riot, the 2006 film directorial debut of Children’s Book Author and illustrator Gris Grimly, two ancient ghouls, Stash and Hub, prowl cemeteries by night digging up the decaying bodies of the deceased to feed on their rotting flesh.

In I Sell the Dead, the 2008 film directorial debut of Glenn McQuaid, a comedy horror film about two grave robbers and their escapades, once they discover the prospects of the grave robbing of supernatural entities, their title goes from grave-robbers to ghouls .

The Batman comics-based franchise, including the 2005 movie, Batman Begins, has an antagonist named Rā’s al-Ghūl, whose name derives from the original Arabic name for the star Algol in the constellation Perseus meaning “the monster’s (i.e. Medusa’s) head”.

Daz Lawrence

‘Evil will rise’

The Lazarus Effect is a 2015 American horror film directed by David Gelb from a screenplay by Luke Dawson (Shutter) and Jeremy Slater (The Fantastic Four). It was previously titled Lazarus and is the latest from Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions, the company behind hits Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious, Sinister, and their sequels.

The film stars Evan Peters (American Horror Story), Olivia Wilde, Sarah Bolger, Mark Duplass and Donald Glover. It is scheduled to be released on February 27, 2015, by Relativity Media.

Plot teaser:

A team of ambitious medical professionals have found a way to bring dead patients back to life using a serum codenamed “Lazarus”. After several successful tests are done on animals, Zoe (Olivia Wilde), one of the lead researchers, dies in a lab accident.

In desperation, the team uses “Lazarus” to bring her back and they are successful. But as she begins to display unusual abilities the team begins to realise that in their attempt to resurrect the dead, they may have opened the door to unfathomable evil…

Wikipedia |

A nachzehrer is a form of vampire found in Germanic regions including Silesia and Bavaria, which also exhibits behaviour displayed by ghouls. The name translates as “after (nach) living off (zehre)” likely alluding to their living after death or living off humans after death in addition to the choice of “nach” for “after” which is similar to “nacht” (“night”). The nachzehrer was also prominent in the folklore of the northern regions of Germany and the word was also used to describe a similar creature of the Kashubes of Northern Poland; Kashubes are also referred to as Pomeranians and are descended from Slavic tribes found in Poland before what being inhabited by people referred by typically as Poles. Though officially a vampire, they are also similar to ghouls, and in many ways different from either undead; it quite clearly differs hugely from the slightly more noble or dashingly suave vampires popularised in fiction. The nachzehrer is not a blood-sucker, but like a ghoul, rather consumes already dead bodies.

A nachzehrer is created most commonly after suicide, though sometimes from an accidental death. According to German lore, a person does not become a nachzehrer from being bitten or scratched; the transformation happens after death and is not communicable. Nachzehrers are also related to sickness and disease. If a large group of people died of the plague, the first person to have died is believed to be a nachzehrer.

Typically, a nachzehrer devours its family members upon waking. It has also been said that they devour their own bodies, including their funeral shrouds, and the more of themselves they eat, the more of their family they physically drain. It is not unlikely that the idea of the dead eating themselves might have risen from bodies in open graves who had been partly eaten by scavengers such as rats.

The nachzehrer was similar to the Slavic vampire in that it was known to be a recently deceased person who returned from the grave to attack family and village acquaintances. Some Kashubes believed that the nachzehrer would leave its grave, shape-shifting into the form of a pig, then paying a visit to their family members to feast on their blood. Other animal shenanigans are involved in a popular nachzeher hobby of plaiting cow’s tails together, leading to plague and disease. In addition, the nachzehrer was able to ascend to a church belfry to ring the bells, bringing death to anyone who hears them. Another lesser known ability of the nachzehrer is the power it had to bring death by causing its shadow to fall upon someone. Those hunting the nachzehrer in the graveyard would listen for grunting sounds that it would make while it munched on its grave clothes.

It usually originated from an unusual death such as a person who died by suicide or accident. They were also associated with epidemic sickness, such as whenever a group of people died from the same disease, the person who died first was labeled to be the cause of the group’s death. Another belief was that if a person’s name was not removed from his burial clothing, that person would be a candidate for becoming a nachzehrer. A child born with a caul (a piece of the amniotic sac) will turn into a nachzehrer upon death.

Such a belief was found even in the Republic of Venice, where the body of a woman, with a brick in her mouth, was recently discovered in a mass grave of plague-dead people. As well as bricks and stones, spikes have also been found in corpses’ mouths, achieving the same result.

The official killing myth says you can kill a nachzehrer by placing a coin in its mouth, and then chopping off its head. It can be discerned from this that a mere coin in the mouth may result in paralysis as some myths say that a stake through a vampires heart does. It is essential to bury all dead with a cross next to their grave; as with other vampires and ghouls, seeds or rice are scattered to distract rising corpses. Those buried who are suspected of future nachzehrer activity have their necks broken prior to burial. On occasion, graves are opened to check for movement – any signs of clothing being eaten or other tell-tale signs may see the corpse having the heart and lungs removed to be burned, preventing them receiving their supernatural sustenance. Though it would perhaps seem odd to put flowers in a corpses’ mouth, this is fiercely discouraged as the tasty morsels may tempt the corpse to seek out other more fleshy snacks.

It is characteristic of a nachzehrer to lie in its grave with its thumb in its opposite hand, and its left eye open.

Daz Lawrence

Skywald Publications was a 1970s American publisher of black-and-white comic magazines, primarily the horror anthologies Nightmare, Psycho, and Scream.

Skywald’s first publication was Nightmare #1 (Dec. 1970). The company lasted until early 1975, with Psycho #24 (March 1975) being its final publication. Nightmare published 23 issues and Scream put out 11 issues.

The company name is a combination of those of its founders, former Marvel Comics production manager Sol Brodsky (“Sky”) and low-budget entrepreneur Israel Waldman (“wald”), whose I. W. Publications (also known as Super Comics) in the late 1950s and early 1960s published comic book reprints for sale through grocery and discount stores. Skywald was based in New York City.

Brodsky, who also served as editor, brought in Al Hewetson — briefly an assistant to Marvel chief Stan Lee and a freelancer for the Warren Publishing horror magazines and others — as a freelance writer. “Archaic Al”, as he later jokingly called himself in print, quickly became the associate editor, and when Brodsky returned to Marvel after a few months, Hewetson succeeded him as editor. Hewetson, aiming at a more literary bent than the work of industry leader Warren Publishing, developed what he called “the Horror-Mood” and sought to evoke the feel of such writers as Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and Kafka.

Comics professionals who produced work for the Skywald magazines include writers T. Casey Brennan, Gerry Conway, Steve Englehart, Gardner Fox, Doug Moench, Dave Sim, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman, and artists Rich Buckler, Gene Day Vince Colletta, Bill Everett, Bruce Jones, Pablo Marcos, Syd Shores, Chic Stone, and Tom Sutton. Many who also contributed to rival Warren employed pseudonyms. Future industry star John Byrne published his first professional story, a two-pager written by editor Hewetson, in Skywald’s Nightmare #20 (Aug. 1974).

Editor Al Hewetson, in an interview given shortly before his death of a heart attack on Jan. 6, 2004, asserted the demise of Skywald was caused by:

“…Marvel’s distributor. Our issues were selling well, and some sold out. Such returns as we received were shipped overseas, mainly to England, where they sold out completely… When Marvel entered the game with countless [black-and-white horror] titles gutting [sic] the newsstand, their distributor was so powerful they denied Skywald access to all but the very largest newsstands, so our presence was minimal and fans and readers simply couldn’t find us…”

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‘The dead shall rise and walk the Earth’

City of the Living Dead – Italian: Paura nella città dei morti viventi [translation: Fear in the City of the Living Dead], released in the US as The Gates of Hell – is a 1980 Italian horror film directed by Lucio Fulci (Zombie Flesh Eaters; The Beyond; The New York Ripper) from a screenplay co-written with Dardano Sacchetti. It is the first instalment of the unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy that also includes The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. The film’s haunting score is by Fabio Frizzi and was issued again as a vinyl album in 2013 by Death Waltz Recording Company.

The film stars Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Janet Agren, Antonella Interlenghi, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Michele Soavi, Venantino Venantini. Director Fulci makes an uncredited cameo appearance as Dr. Joe Thompson.

Plot teaser:

In New York City, during a séance held in the apartment of medium Theresa, Mary Woodhouse (Catriona MacColl) experiences a traumatic vision of a priest, Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine), hanging himself from a tree branch in the cemetery of a remote village called Dunwich.

When the images overwhelm her, Mary goes into convolutions, and falls to the floor as if dead. The police interrogate Theresa, but fail to heed her warnings of an imminent evil. Outside the apartment building, Peter Bell (Christopher George), a journalist, tries to gain entry to the premises but is turned away.

The following day, Mary is buried in a local cemetery on Long Island overlooking Manhattan and Peter visits her grave site. The gravediggers (Perry Pirkanen and Michael Gaunt) leave Mary’s half-covered coffin at the end of their work shift and leave. Soon, Peter hears muffled screams as he reluctantly leaves the graveyard. Using a pickaxe, he frees the screaming woman from her premature burial, but with the axe coming dangerously close to her head as it smashes through the casket lid.

Peter and Mary visit Theresa where she warns them that according to the ancient book of Enoch, the events Mary has witnessed in her visions presage the eruption of the living dead into our world. The death of Father Thomas, a marked priest, has somehow opened a door through which the living dead can enter and the invasion will commence on All Saints Day, just a few days away…

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Reviews:

” …with its nonsensical ‘plot’ randomly constructed according to the illogic of fear, and its grotesque emphasis on physical mutability, fragmentation and decay, it could just conceivably be the sort of disreputable movie the surrealists would have loved.” Time Out

” …City of the Living Dead’s narrative is bland and workmanlike, but it does at least plod along at a solid and continuous pace like the beating drum in Fabio Frizzi’s effective, minimalistic score. That score and every other aspect of the film really come into their own in the big finale; when the location of the portal into hell is discovered and Fulci’s direction is at its most stylish and lively, building up into a final shot that is perplexingly ambiguous.” Matt Shingleton, The Digital Fix

“While usual undead stylish Giannetto De Rossi isn’t along for the ride, these walking corpses are appropriately ghoulish and maggot infested. Their collective, grand rising occurs in one of Fulci’s best set-pieces: a dank, dark, cobwebbed crypt that exudes death. Whereas the barren wasteland of The Beyond is eerie in its vast emptiness, this is terrifying in its claustrophobia. Our characters here stumble into an eternal sea of visceral, violent death rather than a spiritual, soul-sucking demise.” Brett G., Oh, the Horror!

“What Fulci gives us is a collage of images, some of which fit into the film’s story arc, while others simply add to the overall atmosphere of apocalyptic doom. So, a shower of maggots appears out of nowhere, a boy’s head comes into contact with an industrial drill and a woman vomits up her intestines.” Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema

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“The story does verge on the incoherent at times and certainly isn’t as neatly tied together as The Beyond or The House By The Cemetery, but has a rather more dreamlike quality to it. The build up to the slightly anti-climactic ending is somewhat surreal… Andygeddon

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“City of the Living Dead is saturated with technical exaggeration, teeming with oddball performances and high on its own outrageous contrivances. Elegant cross-fades and superimpositions add beauty, as do a handful of judicious, painterly details, like the petal seen dropping silently from the rose held by the catatonic Mary in her coffin. All these factors coalesce, and the film survives its thin story thanks to the eccentricity of its detail.” Stephen Thrower, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci

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Buy City of the Living Dead on Arrow Video Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Special features:

• Original Theatrical trailer
• Dame of the Dead
• Live from the Glasgow Theatre
• The Many Lives And Deaths of Giovanni Lombardo Radice
• Penning Some Paura – Dardano Sacchetti Remembers COTLD
• The Audio Recollections of Giovanni Lombardo Radice
• Audio Commentary with Catriona Macoll and Jay Slater
• Profondo Luigi – A Colleague’s Memories of Lucio Fulci
• Fulci’s Daughter – Memories of the Italian Gore Maestro
• Carlo of the Living Dead – Surviving Fulci Fear
• Fulci in the House: The Italian Master of Splatter
• Gallery of the Living Dead

Choice dialogue:

Bar owner: “A few beers and you fellows start seeing ghouls and devils all over the place.”

Cast:

• Christopher George as Peter Bell
• Catriona MacColl as Mary Woodhouse (credited as Katriona MacColl)
• Carlo De Mejo as Gerry
• Janet Agren as Sandra
• Antonella Interlenghi as Emily Robbins
• Giovanni Lombardo Radice as Bob
• Daniela Doria as Rosie Kelvin
• Fabrizio Jovine as Father William Thomas
• Luca Venantini as John-John Robbins (credited as Luca Paisner)
• Michele Soavi as Tommy Fisher
• Venantino Venantini as Mr. Ross
• Enzo D’Ausilio as Sheriff Russell’s deputy
• Adelaide Aste as Theresa
• Luciano Rossi as Policeman #1 in Theresa’s apartment
• Robert Sampson as Sheriff Russell
• Lucio Fulci as Dr. Joe Thompson
• Michael Gaunt as the Gravedigger #1
• Perry Pirkanen as the Blonde Gravedigger
• James Sampson as James McLuhan; Séance Member
• Martin Sorrentino as Sgt. Clay
• Robert E. Warner as the Policeman Outside Theresa’s apartment building

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Wikipedia | IMDb