El canon mensual tendrá como base un monto de $ 136.393 (pesos ciento treinta y seis mil trescientos noventa y tres) compuesto por la sumatoria de la Tarifa I Zona

The late, great Lucio Fulci is no longer with us, so thank goodness that his daughter Antonella is such an impressive authority on her father and his work. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to ask her a few questions about the man behind Zombie, The

Beyond, and so many other films.

With the exception of only a couple titles in the thriller/horror vein, Mr. Fulci mostly directed comedies and westerns up until 1979. How did he find himself hired to direct the gruesome

Zombie?

Initially, Zombie was supposed to be directed by Enzo G. Castellari, but he had to quit the project for some reason. Fabrizio De Angelis, the producer, needed someone capable of directing a film entirely based on special effects, which is a hard task, in a

few weeks and with a low budget. My father, with his long experience in every genre, seemed an excel- lent substitute.

How was the incredible shark attack sequence in

Zombie filmed?

They filmed it in Santo Domingo. I wasn’t there, but I’ve been told that they were more worried about the makeup of the zombie stunt man, afraid that it might melt underwater, than about the real sharks that roamed free in that area. They hired a shark trainer who brought the big one you see in the movie. My father, animalist at heart, said he felt bad for the poor old fish, who was often punched by the trainer to keep it calm for the shooting.

What kind of budgets was he given to work with on his films, in comparison with American horror films and other Italian productions? How long were the shooting schedules?

About seven to eight weeks at most. I think that his highest budget was less than half a million dollars. If you think about it, probably the lack of funds was a positive factor because it unleashed the imagination of artisans like my father and proved the talent of makeup artists like Giannetto De Rossi, Maurizio Trani, and all the wonderful people who created dreams (or night- mares) with a handful of clay, a ton of passion, and only a hotel room as an improvised effects lab. It’s quite fasci- nating, especially in the CGI era we’re now living in.

A foolish victim participates in a game of hide-and-seek in Lucio Fulci’s undead opus Zombie.© Variety Film

Mr. Fulci had an eye for setting up suspenseful sequences. His frequent use of extreme close-ups reminds me in a way of Sergio Leone’s westerns. What were Mr. Fulci’s cinematic influences and inspirations?

Although he was a huge film fanatic, I don’t think he was inspired by any of his favorite filmmakers while shooting his horror films (at least in a conscious way), because he often had to deal with poorly writ- ten and plotless screenplays that without a very per- sonal touch would result in a tasteless gorefest of butchery. Let’s give his master cinematographer Ser- gio Salvati all the honors he deserves, for being my dad’s imaginative “third eye” for so many years.

The Beyond features many haunting camera

angles and locations. How did he manage to shoot the scene on the bridge [in which the main character encounters a young blind woman, alone, on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway out- side New Orleans] with nothing visible for miles around? How did he manage to get such striking- looking lighting and camera compositions in such a short time?

I always thought that my father and Sergio Salvati were kind of telepathic. Nowadays, every time I see directors checking the current shot on a monitor, I remember that my dad and Sergio didn’t need one at all. Maybe that’s why their images still look so fresh after decades, proving once more how the human perceptions prevail over a machine’s.

Like in the scene you mention, where you see how the natural light of the Pontchartrain bridge at dawn may look spooky, and how evocative (and somehow apocalyptic) the image of a blind girl can be, if watched with a creative eye. If you think that the bridge, actually, is the main way of escaping

from the city if something bad happens, that scene seems even more meaningful.

I’m only glad that my father isn’t here to see what the hurricane did to his beloved New Orleans. You can’t imagine how much he enjoyed being there, anytime he could.

Many of Mr. Fulci’s zombie films are frightening and feature shocking imagery. Was there any crit- icism of the level of violence in the films at the time of their release, and did he have to respond to any criticism?

Not really, although he hated critics as a category, so whatever they said about any film, he disagreed. His films were always treated very badly by the critics, but audiences loved them, at least for the short time they were shown in Italian theaters before being exported here and there.

He learned that Zombie had found such great success in the United States by reading Variety. I remember that he said, “God bless Jerry Gross” (the American distributor) and went back to looking for movie gossip, his all-time favorite thing to read in that newspaper.

Several of his films were heavily cut for their release in other countries. Here in North America, it’s only recently that we’ve been able to see his films uncut. Was it frustrating for him to have his films altered for worldwide release?

He didn’t have control of that. Prior to the Internet, it was almost impossible to know where and how those films were released, so he was absolutely unaware of the cuts.

In Italy it’s still hard to see even a half-decent uncut copy of Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), a good film that’s literally had two entire key scenes ampu- tated for the version seen on TV.

Zombi 3 (1988) seems to have had a rough pro-

duction. What difficulties did Mr. Fulci encounter?

His liver was seriously injured, and the hot, humid weather of the Philippine Islands was a bad fit for an ill man. Plus, the budget was ridiculous, even for a little zombie film, and the producers, as far as I know, were not very honest. That’s why he left the set and came back home without finishing it. [Bruno] Mattei and [Claudio] Fragasso did the rest. He never recognized it as his own work. He hated it.

A Cat in the Brain, or Un gatto nel cervello (1990),

was a very unusual film. Did Mr. Fulci feel there was any truth to the subtext of the story, in which he played a film director whose violent movies caused violent behavior in the real world?

That film is a parody, and for me it’s hard to recog- nize my father in it. To be honest, I must say that it’s one of my least favorite movies of his because I see it as a lost chance. If the purpose was to joke about what people seemed to think about him, why make it so artificial and even use clips of horrible films that weren’t even made by him? It could have been a great experiment, but in my opinion it didn’t work, except for the wonderful ending shot on our boat, named Perversion, the only scene that explains what kind of ironic message the film would have had if not for its many flaws.

Which of his zombie films was Mr. Fulci most pleased with? Which zombie film do you think is his best?

I think he loved them all, because he had a lot of fun doing them. He was really satisfied by the atmos- phere of The House by the Cemetery (1981), which I

guess was his personal favorite, and by Zombie— not to mention the joy he felt, as I said, every time he could shoot a film in New Orleans, like The

Beyond.

As for me, I’m totally for Zombie, with a little crush on The Beyond due to the mark used for the “symbol of Eibon” in the film, which was inspired by an old, little tattoo I still have on my wrist, but that’s another story.

What do you think people find so fascinating about zombie films?

I’ll tell you what I always say when someone asks me why Zombie is still so popular: because it’s the per- fect film to watch with a couple of friends, a couple of beers, and a joint. It may scare you, but in a funny way. You could easily print “satisfaction guaranteed” on every copy without being wrong.

A few years ago I went to a festival in Naples and was delighted to see Zombie in an overcrowded the- ater that never stopped laughing, applauding, and screaming. Most of them were kids who weren’t even born when Zombie was released, but they seemed to be having the greatest fun ever. My father would have loved to see that, I’m sure.

I also think that the zombie archetype is very versatile, and easy to transform into a metaphor for the times we’re living in, like in the wonderful Night

of the Living Dead (the 1968 original, of course) or in

Joe Dante’s masterpiece episode of Masters of

Horror, “Homecoming” (2005).

Those two cinematic jewels show how being undead sometimes means being eternal, like the injustices of our world. Nothing kills you anymore, but your flesh is vulnerable. What better metaphor for people of all ages?

burning through flesh, and a tarantula attack that ends with the phony-looking critters exposing ridiculously large fangs and digging their teeth into their incapacitated victim. But the highlight is the film’s climax, in which Warback and MacColl must shoot their way out of a hospital f illed with gore- drenched, rampaging zombies, many of whom are characters who died violently earlier in the movie. The sequence features a famously disturbing shot of a young zombie taking an exaggeratedly large bullet hole to its head. This alarming finale is what makes The Beyond so, well . . . special.

Unfortunately, Fulci himself didn’t see things that way. The director often told the press that the hospital sequence was his least favorite in the movie. He hated it, and shot it only to make the project more attractive to distributors in Germany.

Ironically, the film wasn’t even picked up by the demanding Ger- man distributors, but it was success- ful enough in Italy to keep Fulci working (it grossed 675 million lira, more than Fulci’s Zombie [1979], but equal to only about $590,000 U.S. thanks to a less favorable

exchange rate), and it quickly became a cult item worldwide. It was even rereleased to movie theaters in 1998 by Rolling Thunder Pictures, the distribu- tion arm of genre fan Quentin Tarantino.