Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery is, I’ll admit, my least favorite of the director’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy. But that doesn’t mean that the film is without merits, it’s just that some of the effects and the overall English dub and transfer don’t so much match up with the first two. That doesn’t mean that House by the Cemetery doesn’t work on its own. This is the closest Fulci came to returning to giallo during his zombie years. It’s still very much a zombie feature that brings back the Lovecraftian cosmic horror of City of the Living Dead and The Beyond.
It’s a much smaller film than the other two as well. While they were focused around small towns and large hotels, the action in House by the Cemetery is almost exclusively confined to a Victorian house. Here we have a family trying to get by, very similar to The Shining and The Amityville Horror, as well as trying to figure out and make sense of the strange happenings inside their new home. It’s structured as such a traditional ghost story that the violence and the zombie scenes really come out of nowhere, making them all the more effective. The cast is a little smaller and the horror is a little more spaced out, but in a lot of ways that makes it one of Fulci’s scariest movies.
This is something that hadn’t been done on screen since the early Voodoo-centered features, but the zombie itself is very much the post-Romero rotting corpse. By making this change, it becomes a traditional monster in the house movie, which it pulls off relatively well. It doesn’t drag out the idea of something dwelling in the basement but instead uses that to great effect as the characters begin to realize that they are not alone in the house.
At a time just after Dawn of the Dead, when zombies were truly beginning to dominate the marketplace, it’s easy to imagine that House by the Cemetery offered a refreshing alternative. It’s a weird movie, far from perfect, but it stands out among the legions of walking corpses that became synonymous with the sub-genre.