Some Ideas About The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Original title: Quella villa accanto al cimitero

Because doing a plot synopsis of this particular film without describing it scene by scene would be even less coherent than the film itself, and instead of reading a description of every single scene of a film, one should simply watch the damn movie, I’ll present some scattered thoughts about one of my very favourite movies.

It is very much worth watching, anyhow, even though Cemetery is usually described as the least of director Lucio Fulci’s trilogy (at least in mood) of films consisting – of course – of this, City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. It’s probably even less digestible for anyone coming to a horror film expecting a sensible plot, conventional narrative or storytelling than the other two films, because its great strangenesses in plot and structure are rather going at the audience as its villain, the delightfully/absurdly/hilariously named Dr Freudstein is at his victims. Riddle me this, for example: does our “hero” (heh) Norman Boyle know he is moving his family into Freudstein’s house? If he doesn’t, how can he still not know this after his wife (the always delightful Catriona MacColl) has found a tomb with the Freudstein name in their parlour? If he does know, why the hell does he seem so genuinely surprised by it later on? Like half of the characters here, Norman acts as if he was going by one base of facts in one moment and by the exact opposite one in the next.

Or take that babysitter – what is her deal exactly? Why does she clean up the leftovers of one of Freudstein’s kills when her death scene makes clear she isn’t in league with him? Add to this particular set of confusions about her, when the film early on seems to suggest she might be a ghost or some sort of revived manikin. She definitely acts bizarrely throughout her lifespan in the film. I could go on and on with this, because there’s really no single character in the film whose acts suggest the coherent whole we expect of a movie character.


But I believe it is exactly Fulci’s purpose here to populate the film with characters that don’t make sense and by this rob his audience of all the security that comes with stable structures like character arcs and proper (or even fake) human psychology, setting us adrift in a world where everybody’s goals and personalities change in inexplicable ways. Thus, House by the Cemetery is less focussed on dragging the audience and the characters into the world of Fulci’s Beyond by dissolving their senses of time, place, and human anatomy as the other two films in the trilogy are (though there’s of course a bit of that, too), and more about finding the uncanny in the lack of a human core most narratives insist on.