City of the Living Dead

Moxey's near-namesake from 1960 has the British anatomy of New England sins, here's the uncanny Italian view. The prologue leaps from a padre suddenly swinging from a noose in Dunwich ("north central Massachusetts," according to Lovencraft) to a séance in New York, leading to the image of the medium's (Catriona MacColl) dilated pupil becoming an iris upon which the hanged figure is projected—pure cinema. The next sequence manages to top it: She's declared dead but comes back to life in a half-buried casket, her screams and scratches are heard by a snooping journalist (Christopher George), the Vampyr allusion is carved with a pickaxe. "The gates of Hell have been opened." Artaud plus Fuseli equals Lucio Fulci, a pure surrealism and all-enveloping dread and sorrow. The hamlet has such a macabre past that the blowup doll-molesting outcast (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) turns out to be the most innocent of the bunch, meaning he gets an industrial drill corkscrewed through his skull. The dead priest emerges as the leader of the undead pack, his gaze is enough to cause one unfortunate lass to bleed from her eyes before regurgitating her entire digestive system. (The delirious gross-out joke is compounded by the presence of Michele Soavi as her beau, gawking at the spectacle until he gets his cerebellum squeezed out.) Not "galloping cadavers" but teleporting ghouls, not Hitchcock's birds in the chimney but a storm of maggots flying through the window. A bravura befouling of textures, a tastefully set breakfast table stained by the blood dripping from the ceiling, bread and wine replaced by worms and sludge in the zombified cleric's palm. The baffling denouement is profoundly attuned to the Fulci credo, "things that will shatter your imagination." With Carlo De Mejo, Antonella Interlenghi, Janet Agren, Daniela Doria, and Fabrizio Jovine.