How to best describe the 1922 Swedish film Haxan (also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages) by Danish director Benjamin Christensen? While not a conventional documentary by anyone’s standards, it is not a traditional narrative film either and straddles several genres in its exploration of witchcraft and the black arts from the Dark Ages up to 1921.
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If Lucio Fulci had only directed the 1979 cult splatterfest Zombie, he would still warrant more than a footnote in any film history of the horror genre. Obviously inspired by the success of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, Fulci’s cult favorite pushed the zombie film into over-the-top excess with the famous eyeball-splinter scene and an underwater grudge match between a shark and one of the undead.
Zombie vs. Shark in Lucio Fulci’s outrageous Zombi 2 (1979)
It also launched a whole new genre in the Italian film industry which included such imitators as Cannibal Apocalypse, Nightmare City and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (all released in 1980). Fulci went on to further heights (or depths according to his detractors) with such supernatural thriller gross-outs as City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981) and The House by the Cemetery (1981). But what most Fulci fans and film buffs tend to overlook is the fact that he was once a director who could occasionally turn out a thought-provoking and artful work of cinema such as his 1969 historical drama, Beatrice Cenci. Continue reading
Cinema Sojourns 