- Zombi 2, aka Zombie
Tonight, the folks at Delilah’s are tuning up Lucio Fulci’s 1981 splatterfest The Beyond, one of the horror auteur’s best and nastiest films. Even within the horror niche, Fulci is something of a polarizing figure, a notorious gore hound who favored elaborate, violent, and otherwise inane set pieces over cogent storytelling and conventional narrative. Italian horror isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but those who can even halfway stomach the genre tend to stop with Mario Bava or Dario Argento, leaving Fulci for the fringe enthusiasts who revel in the director’s unique and decidedly bizarre fixation on blood, guts, and general mayhem.
- Una sull’altra [aka One on Top of the Other] (1969) Set in San Francisco and inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Fulci injected the burgeoning giallo genre with erotic energy. The plot is essentially the same—after the protagonist’s wife mysteriously dies, he encounters and becomes increasingly obsessed with a stripper who looks just like her—but Fulci explores themes of sexual angst and aggression amid the “free love” era, exploiting the hippie mindset with metaphor-heavy imagery and stylized dream sequences. The film features some of the director’s most outlandish flourishes, and it occasionally reads as a cheeky rebuttal to New Hollywood.
