Zombie-icon2

Dawn Of The Dead was one of the most influ­en­tial hor­ror movies of its time, offer­ing a blend of hor­ror, action and social com­men­tary that film­mak­ers all over the world rushed to cap­i­tal­ize upon.  Italy was one of the first places it made that influ­ence felt, mainly because co-producers Dario and Claudio Argento acted on their right to release their own edit of the film in Italy.  The end result was released a year before Dawn of The Dead made it to U.S. screens and was wildly pop­u­lar, spawn­ing a series of Italian zom­bie films that con­tin­ued well into the 1980’s.

Lucio Fulci’s Zombie was at the van­guard of this cycle of films.  In fact, it was in Italian the­aters within two months of Dawn Of The Dead’s release in Italy (where it was called Zombi, which meant Zombie was known in Italy as Zombi 2).  “Serious” crit­ics often deride it as a cheap imi­ta­tion, fail­ing to real­ize that Zombie is the rare imi­ta­tion matches all the ele­ments it bor­rows from its inspi­ra­tion with new touches of its own design.  The fin­ished film may bor­row some com­mer­cially viable ele­ments from Dawn but it has a mood and a style that is all its own.

The story begins on a Dracula–esque note as a seem­ingly aban­doned boat rolls into New York’s waters.  When two har­bor cops inves­ti­gate, a zom­bie promptly attacks one of them before being shot into the waters.  The boat belonged to the father of Anne (Tisa Farrow) and he’s not found on it.  Anne teams up with news­pa­per reporter Peter West (Ian McCulloch) to go to the island of Matoul, her father’s last des­ti­na­tion.  Teaming up with boat-owning vaca­tion­ers Brian (Al Cliver) and Susan (Auretta Gay), they set sail for the trop­i­cal island despite warn­ings about its bad vibes.

Of course, those bad vibes come to the fore once the quar­tet reaches Matoul.  They meet up with Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson), who reveals that not only is Anne’s father dead but the island’s pop­u­la­tion is being swept by a strange ill­ness that kills peo­ple and then seem­ingly brings them back to life.  In short order, our heroes dis­cover these revived corpses are hun­gry for warm human flesh — and they are trapped on all sides.  Cue a great building-under-siege finale with molo­tov cock­tails a-plenty, fol­lowed by a fun sting-in-the-tail coda that brings every­thing full circle.

The end result is obvi­ously inspired at a con­cep­tual level by Dawn Of The Dead yet man­ages to feel noth­ing at all like that film. In fair­ness to its crit­ics, Zombie lifts a num­ber of key con­cep­tual ele­ments from Dawn: build­ing the story around a quar­tet of heroes, mix­ing action with shocks, a zom­bie plague of vague ori­gins and a cli­max built around a siege on the heroes by large num­bers of zom­bies.  However, Elisa Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti’s script takes the film back to the roots of the zom­bie genre by giv­ing it an adven­ture movie-styled “jour­ney to a trop­i­cal isle” premise and bring­ing voodoo into the mix.

However, the big­ger rea­son for the styl­is­tic dif­fer­ence between Zombie and Dawn Of The Dead is Lucio Fulci’s approach to the mate­r­ial.  He bypasses the comic book flair and dark wit that George Romero favored to cre­ate an atmos­phere of oppres­sive dread.  Though his tech­nique is very styl­ish, Fulci digs into the essen­tial grit­ti­ness of the post-Romero zom­bie genre.  Zombie is a film filled with sweat, screams and vis­cer­ally depicted suf­fer­ing of count­less vari­eties, all hap­pen­ing to heroes whose real­ity is being slowly dis­man­tled before their eyes.  Whether you’re watch­ing a poten­tial vic­tim or one of the walk­ing dead, no one here escapes unscathed — and the bru­tal after­math is shoved right into the viewer’s face.

Sergio Salvati’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy plays a vital role in real­iz­ing this aes­thetic, bring­ing a pre­ci­sion of framing/movement and ele­gant light­ing to the film (note how often makes the rot­ted build­ings of the trop­i­cal isle resem­ble a gothic spaghetti west­ern locale).  Even when the film is deal­ing in gory shocks — like the heroes dis­cov­er­ing a scene of zom­bies devour­ing an unfor­tu­nate vic­tim, depicted like a per­verse bur­lesque of “The Last Supper” — such moments are laid out in with a calm, unearthly ele­gance.  The mar­riage of Salvati’s art­ful visu­als to Fulci’s go-for-the-jugular instincts retains its power to unnerve long after the first viewing.

And Salvati isn’t the only crew­man doing top-shelf work here. In fact, he is a part of a trio of Italian genre film pros who would become key to real­iz­ing the style of Fulci’s most pop­u­lar period as a film­maker.  Editor Vincenzo Tomassi gives a fluid pro­gres­sion to the film’s mounting-nightmare feel and trans­forms each set­piece into its own mini-movie, com­plete with begin­ning, mid­dle and end.  The final piece of the puz­zle is Fabio Frizzi’s music, which blends John Carpenter-styled elec­tronic min­i­mal­ism with jit­tery tribal rhythms to cre­ate a sub­tly eerie sonic stew that creeps under the audience’s skin with ease.  Any shock-horror fan of a cer­tain age can hum this film’s theme, a tes­ta­ment to Frizzi’s skill at cre­at­ing a mem­o­rable melody.

Finally, the per­for­mances serve an oft-ignored pur­pose here (even though no one would con­sider Zombie an actor’s film).  The main weight is shoul­dered by McCulloch and Johnson.  McCulloch goes about his work like a b-movie Michael Caine, offer­ing a pro­fes­sional turn as a rea­son­able man try­ing to stay sane in the midst of insan­ity, while Johnson eas­ily sells the viewer on his character’s burnt-out attempts to stay in charge of sit­u­a­tion that is spi­ral­ing out of his con­trol.  Their straight-faced approach does a good job of sell­ing the audi­ence on the film’s horrors.

Even the lesser per­for­mances add to the tex­ture here: Cliver may be wooden dur­ing the emo­tional beats but he’s great with the phys­i­cal act­ing dur­ing the action-oriented finale and Farrow’s haunted, blank-eyed qual­ity would be a deficit else­where but instead adds to the doomy mood of this film.  Finally, Olga Karlatos deserves kudos for her brief but mem­o­rable turn as Johnson’s hys­ter­i­cal wife, hit­ting and sus­tain­ing a shrill note of inten­sity that clues view­ers in to the mad­ness at play on the island.

In short, Zombie is a film that has tran­scended its deriv­a­tive ori­gins to become a part of his­tory for hor­ror movie cultists.  Fulci would go on to bolder, more baroque flights of macabre fancy but this film laid the bedrock for his suc­cess and defined a con­tro­ver­sial but effec­tive approach that holds a dark spell over many Italian hor­ror afi­ciona­dos… not bad for a knock-off, eh?