Just when you thought it was safe to rent a creepy old country house at a surprisingly affordable rate…
Cobbled together from bits and bobs cadged from Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, fueled by the adrenaline rush of nightmare logic, and particularized by an orgiastic excess of hyper-violence, Lucio Fulci HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (in Italy, QUELLA VILLA ACCANTO AL CIMITERO) went into production in March 1981 under the working title FREUDSTEIN. The original story was the work of Elisa Livia Briganti (who contributed to the script for Fulci’s 1979 film ZOMBIE/ZOMBI), with screenplay credit going to Briganti’s screenwriter husband Dardano Sacchetti, in partnership with Fulci, and Giorgio Mariuzzo. The tale of a family who takes possession of a creepy country house which then endeavors to take possession of them was familiar territory, reflecting Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), Stuart Rosenberg’s THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (1979), Dan Curtis’ BURNT OFFERINGS (1976), even William Castle’s spookhouse satire 13 GHOSTS (1960) – to say nothing of the made-for-TV terrors of Walter Grauman’s CROWHAVEN FARM (1970), Steven Spielberg’s SOMETHING EVIL (1972), and John Newland’s DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (1973) – each a sobering parable of the dark side of home ownership. (One might even detect the influence of Paul Wendkos’ 1975 telefilm THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN, which located in the Borden family basement a ghoulish mortician’s lab not dissimilar from the lair of HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY‘s resident bogie, Dr. Freudstein.) Though the narrative structure is boilerplate – with a generalized feeling of unease metastasizing into inexplicable occurrences and gruesome deaths – distinction arises from Fulci’s charnel insatiability, a no-holds-barred/no-quarter-given authorial intent straight out of the Roman Bread and Circuses.
Considerably less outre than THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, BURNT OFFERINGS is more of a slow burn affair, charting as it does the mental/spiritual calculus of a family who must figure out for themselves how much punishment they can take in order to have the house of their dreams — a question that becomes complicated when various members of the family are not acting like themselves. If it lacks big tentpole setpieces for most of its running time, the film at least prompts the viewer to ask him or herself: when would I bail? Or would I hang in there until the bloody end? Based on the bestseller by Robert Marasco, BURNT OFFERINGS very nearly came to be directed by Bob Fosse, who developed the project between the crash-and-burn of his first foray as a film director, SWEET CHARITY (1969), and the career save of CABARET (1972). Dan Curtis did a bit of a trade with, of all people, Sergio Leone to get the rights to BURNT OFFERINGS, selling to Leone his rights to an obscure crime novel that became the basis for ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1982). But all that to one side, it’s fun to watch these movies back to back and observe the somewhat symbiotic relationship that exists between them. I own both on DVD (and recently recorded an audio commentary for a Blu-ray release of BURNT OFFERINGS) but I’ll be there on the couch in front of the TV this Saturday night as if I haven’t seen these movies in years. And you should be, too!
And why not make a full night of it this Saturday? Prior to TCM Underground, we are showing a triple bill of horror spoofs: YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974), THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967), and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1953).