City of the Living Dead (1980)

There's a moment in City of the Living Dead where a woman stands paralysed, tears of blood streaming down her face, while her insides are slowly pulled out of her mouth. It takes an age. Fulci holds on it. And by the end you're simultaneously revolted, impressed, and slightly ashamed of how impressed you are. That, in a nutshell, is what this film does to you.

Lucio Fulci's 1980 entry into what's come to be known as his unofficial "Gates of Hell" trilogy isn't really a zombie film in the Romero sense. Forget the rules. Forget logic. A priest hangs himself in a New England graveyard, a portal to hell swings open, and the dead begin stalking the fog-thick streets of a town called Dunwich. From that point on, the film operates on its own internal dream logic, closer to Dante than anything George Romero ever put to screen. It's less about survival and more about spiritual contamination, the sense that the world itself is quietly rotting from the inside out.

And that atmosphere is where Fulci earns his reputation. The streets are perpetually shrouded in mist. Churches loom, empty and cold. Wind howls through corridors that feel like they've been abandoned by God as well as people. He's not interested in jump scares. He builds unease slowly, patiently, and then detonates it in your face with something so viscerally grotesque you'll have to rewind just to confirm you saw what you think you saw. Worms pour from walls. Skulls are crushed with bare hands. That intestine sequence. It's shockingly graphic even now, let alone for 1980, and the practical effects work is executed with a kind of sadistic ingenuity that still holds up.

Now, let's be honest about what this film isn't. The plot holds together with the structural integrity of wet tissue paper. The dubbing turns already stilted dialogue into something that occasionally tips into unintentional comedy. The acting swings between genuinely intense and magnificently absurd, sometimes from one scene to the next. There are subplots that wander off and never come back. If you're the sort of viewer who needs everything tied up neatly, this will drive you to distraction.

But demanding narrative coherence from City of the Living Dead is a bit like complaining that a nightmare didn't have a satisfying third act. That's not the contract on offer. What Fulci is selling is mood, texture, and the visceral thrill of decay. The film works because it commits completely to its own rotten, fog-drenched world. It doesn't apologise for what it is.

As a fan of Italian horror from this period, it's genuinely refreshing to find a zombie film that goes for something more metaphysical than a shambling horde. I loved Zombie Flesh Eaters, Fulci's earlier splatter landmark, and there's a direct line between that film's gleeful nastiness and what he's doing here, but City of the Living Dead feels stranger and more ambitious, like he was trying to make horror feel genuinely apocalyptic rather than just viscerally unpleasant. The closest comparison might actually be Cemetery Man, another piece of Italian undead cinema that swaps genre mechanics for something more surreal and philosophically queasy.

Fulci doesn't show you the end of the world and ask you to marvel at it. He puts you inside it. You smell the damp earth. You feel the cold. By the time the film reaches its strange, abrupt, deeply weird ending (and I mean deeply weird), you've been so thoroughly marinated in dread that it almost makes a kind of sense. Almost.

Three and a half stars. Creepy, stylish, and unapologetically nasty. Not one for the faint-hearted, but if you've got any love for Italian horror and you can stomach the gore, this is essential viewing. Just don't eat beforehand.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1980  | Watched: 2026-02-25

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Lucio Fulci: Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)