VIDEO NASTIES – Zombie Flesh Eaters

Published on: 2nd September, 2009

VIDEO NASTIES - Zombie Flesh Eaters  | read this item

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Of all the filmmakers to grace the ‘Video Nasty’ list, the most common name to appear was Lucio Fulci. Throughout the existence of the DPP’s list of obscene feature films, three would belong to the Italian director, whilst a fourth (Lo squartatore di New York/The New York Ripper) would be cause equal controversy whilst escaping the ‘nasty’ label. Out of the three that would be included, perhaps the most notorious of these was Zombi 2, released in the UK as Zombie Flesh Eaters. Despite being cut by one hundred and six seconds and granted an X-rating (an equivalent to the current ‘80’), the movie would eventually become a target of the DPP and, in October 1983, would become one of the many so-called ‘nasties.’ There was one sequence in particular that would cause such an outcry (and it would be the image of an eyeball being pierced by a splinter that would cement Fulci’s reputation and career), and soon the government began banning similar films, regardless of content (resulting in Bruno Mattei’s Virus/Zombie Creeping Flesh also making the list).

Lucio Fulci was born on June 17 1927 in Rome and had early aspirations of becoming a doctor, before a stint as an art critic convinced him to enroll at Luchino Visconti’s Experimental Film Centre. His first foray into the industry was a writer on the little-seen 1948 documentary Pittori Italiano dei dopoguerra (Italian Painters of the Post-war). He soon made the acquaintance of Marcel L’Herbier, his first chance to get behind the camera was as an assistant director on Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii) two years later. Spending his early years working alongside such greats as Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini and Mario Bava, Fulci finally made his directorial debut in 1959 with Il ladri (The Thieves). Despite failing at the box office, it gave him the confidence to try his hand at various genres, resulting in comedies (Toto all inferno/Toto Goes to Hell, Urlatori alla sbarra/Howlers of the Docks), musicals (Ragazzi del jukebox/Jukebox Kids) and, eventually, thrillers, beginning with Una sull’altra (Perversion Story) in 1969.

Throughout the 1970’s, Fulci would develop a cult following with a series of gialli that included Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Ducking) and Sette Note in Nero (Seven Notes in Black/The Psychic). As his appeal soon began to slip, good fortune would come in the shape of Fabrizio de Angelis, who had produced Joe D’Amato’s Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne? in 1977. Impressed by Sette Note in Nero, de Angelis approached Fulci and offered him the chance to direct his next feature. Italian cinema at that time had become notorious for plagiarizing and capitalizing on the success of American movies and de Angelis was no exception. It had been almost a decade since the phenomenal success of Night of the Living Dead and its creator, George A. Romero, had finally followed it up with his blood-soaked epic Dawn of the Dead.

Released in Italy on September 2 1978 under its international title Zombi, the movie had managed to out-gross its predecessor, partially thanks to the involvement of Dario Argento, one of Italy’s most popular filmmakers, who had co-funded the movie and obtained the European distribution rights from Romero. de Angelis knew that he wanted to somehow jump on the Zombi bandwagon and so suggested to Fulci that they produced something similar. But they didn’t simply want to make a carbon copy of Dawn of the Dead and so the first decision was made to move the story away from the cities and the suburbs, as had become commonplace since Romero had revamped the genre back in 1968. Instead, they decided to revisit the origins of the zombie, which had first been brought to the attention of the western world in the 1920’s when American explorer William Seabrook explored the tribes and villages of Haiti in search of rumours of voodoo and zombification for his book The Magic Island. Drawing heavily from this type of theory, de Angelis and Fulci decided to take the zombie back to the Caribbean.

The task of writing the script would eventually fall to Elisa Briganti, whose husband Dardano Sacchetti had become a successful writer during the early 1970’s with such cult favourites as Argento’s Il gatto a nove code (The Cat o’ Nine Tails), Bava’s Reazione a catena (Twitch of the Death Nerve) and Stelvio Massi’s La banda del trucido (Destruction Force), which would mark his first official collaboration with Briganti. For the script, Sacchetti would provide uncredited assistance, as would Fulci, who would change various elements and restructure the plot in order for the story to be closer to what he had intended. To further cash-in on the success of Dawn of the Dead, the script was titled Zombi 2 in an effort to fool audiences into believing that it was an official sequel to Romero’s blockbuster.

Although Fulci’s gialli thrillers had contained moments of gore, he realized that if he was to outdo Dawn of the Dead then he needed to provide special effects even more outrageous. A then unknown Tom Savini had been responsible for filling Romero’s movie with blood, guts, decapitations, disembowelments and other tasty set pieces, yet the blood had been an unrealistic shade, almost orange, resembling the style that had been used in Argento’s previous hits Profondo rosso (Deep Red) and Suspiria. In order to create something more realistic and brutal, Fulci turned to Giannetto De Rossi, the legendary makeup artist responsible for the effects in Sergio Leone’s classic western C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) and had prior zombie experience after working on Jorge Grau’s cult horror flick Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue/Let Sleeping Corpses Lie).

De Rossi had, incidentally, previously worked with Fulci on two comedies, 1964’s I maniaci (The Maniacs) and 1972’s All’onorevole piacciono le donne (The Senator Likes Women… Despite Appearances and Provided the Nation Doesn’t Know). His crowning achievement would be the infamous eyeball scene, in which a zombie’s hand crashes through a window, grabbing a woman’s hair and pulling her forward until a splinter punctures her eyeball, all in one take without the camera cutting away. Not only would it result in the movie falling foul of censorship but would also launch Fulci’s trademark, as from the on many of his horror films would include some kind of eye shot (from the bleeding of the eye in Paura nella città dei morti viventi (City of the Living Dead) to a shot in E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà (The Beyond) where a character is paralyzed and attacked by spiders.

One common method in Italian horror is the casting of actors of different nationalities, often resulting in more than one language being spoken on set. This would cause constant communication problems but was intended to help the movie appeal to various countries. Filmmakers would ask for their actors to perform in their native language and then the film would be dubbed for the relevant market. Thus, it would not be uncommon for American and British actors to star in Italian movies, many of which would become ‘video nasties.’ For the lead role of Anne Bowles, who investigation into the whereabouts of her missing father drives the films narrative, the producers eventually settled on Tisa Farrow, the younger sister of Woody Allen regular (and former wife of Frank Sinatra) Mia Farrow. Tisa Farrow would soon retire from acting, making only one other notable appearance, in D’Amato’s Antropophagus (Anthropophagous: The Beast), the following year.

The role of reporter Peter West, who would join Anne on her journey to the remote island of Matool, would go to Scottish actor Ian McCulloch, whose subsequent Italian work would include Zombi Holocaust (Dr. Butcher M.D.) and Contamination. The remaining principal roles would be awarded to English born Peter Johnson (from The Exorcist rip-off Chi sei?/Beyond the Door), Pierluigi Conti (credited under the American-sounding Al Cliver) and Auretta Gay, who would only appear in three more films. Fulci would surround himself with talent behind the camera as well, most notably cinematographer Sergio Salvati, who had first made a name for himself as a cameraman on Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and would later find acclaim for his D.O.P. skills on Fulci’s subsequent zombie films, as well as movies for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, which was based in Italy at that time.

Passed by the BBFC as Zombie Flesh Eaters on January 2 1980 and released theatrically by Miracle Films, the movie would require extensive cuts from the eyeball scene, as well as a zombie-munching shot. For its home video run, VIPCO would release two versions of the film, one as seen in cinemas and an all-new ‘strong uncut version.’ The movie would find its way onto every single draft of the DPP’s ‘video nasty’ list, eventually being released once again by VIPCO in 1992, although this cut would run almost four minutes less than the version passed by the BBFC in 1980 (this, however, would not stop VIPCO from claiming the film to be uncut). Another version would be passed in 1999, although this would still be omitting twenty-three seconds. A full uncut release of Zombie Flesh Eaters was not passed in the UK until October 26 2005.

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