Door to Silence (1992)

aka Door into Silence

Original title: Le porte del silenzio

Real estate business guy Melvin Devereux (John Savage), is trying to get from New Orleans to his home further South. But from the beginning of his travels he is beset by strange encounters and peculiar occurrences: a mysterious woman (Sandi Schultz) is mysterious towards him, promising a later encounter at a certain crossroads, perhaps for sex, perhaps for something very different indeed. Melvin repeatedly encounters a hearse whose driver seems hell-bent on getting him killed. Worse still, the hearse seems to be carrying the dead body of one Melvin Devereux, husband of Sylvia, like our protagonist is. The swampy byways of Louisiana are either blocked for various reasons, or roads seem to lead into dreams and visions, or simply not where they are supposed to, while the sun never sets above them.

These encounters and more do suggest to Melvin that something very strange is going on, and it’s clear that he eventually arrives on the suspicion the audience has been having right from the start – that he’s dead and trapped in some sort of limbo.

Well, I say the audience has the suspicion, but Lucio Fulci’s final movie doesn’t actually try to surprise its viewers with the truth about Melvin’s state. So, instead of wasting time on diffusion and trickery to surprise us with something we’re not going to be surprised about anyway (the true surprise in a film of this sub-genre would be when the protagonist weren’t dead already), Fulci uses the space and time thus afforded to him to create a mood of the strange and a labyrinth out of wide open spaces. While he’s at it, he adds nods to Southern US folklore as well as classic mythology – which quite often seem to be closely related anyway, just differing in their expression of the state of humanity and life – as a backdrop to Melvin’s slow unravelling. It’s also a road movie, obviously, for there’s little we Europeans like to romanticize more than the tale of anyone going on a journey by car through parts of the USA, even when, as it may be the case here, the journey really runs in circles from death to the very same death again.

It will be rather a matter of taste if this works for any given viewer, I believe. There’s a slowness to the proceedings that may prefigure Slow Horror if you’re of a mind to see it that way, but which can also be read as Fulci dragging out a miniscule plot and a somewhat basic idea to feature length come hell or high water. I, not surprising anyone, belong to the former camp, but then, a film of a guy travelling through the US South (well, at least Louisiana) by car and encountering strangeness and eventual doom there is very much the sort of thing I would go for. Really, if Fulci had replaced the Dixieland on the soundtrack with classic country blues, you might have sold me on the idea the film at hand was indeed made for me, personally.

Apart from the film’s pushing of a lot of my personal buttons, I also like Savage’s performance as a not terribly likeable yet also not horrible man finding himself in a situation nothing could ever have prepared him for and understandably losing it piece by piece and bit by bit. Playing a character who is neither a complete prick nor a nice guy isn’t actually that easy or common. In this case, it also shields the whole film from becoming too much of a Twilight Zone episode, the rather cynical Fulci clearly having no truck with the moral(ising) universe perfected by Rod Serling.

His last movie is also yet another example of Fulci as a director who wasn’t actually too bothered with staying in his comfort zone, genre-wise, not going for gore or aggressive, meaningful illogic as in his most-loved films, but ending his filmography restlessly, trying to make a film he hasn’t done before.