When it comes to discuss Italian zombie movies, as it does so often these days, you've got to talk about Luci Fulci. Three summers ago, this Italian director thrilled Fangorians with his colossal gore fest, Zombie. Now, Fulci has come back with even more rotted flesh and spewing entrails in Gates of Hell.

This time around, a priest hangs himself, and, is so doing, unleashes evil forces and a pack of homicidal zombies. The heroes must race against the clock to close the Gates of hell before the world becomes the Devil's domain. Scenes of a young man getting his head drilled and a young woman vomiting her guts are sure to please Fango readers who demand nothing but the grossest.

Before he ventured into the field of Romeroesque zombies, Fulci was a screenwriter, director and producer on a wide variety of films that contained no cannibalism nor eye violence whatsoever. He has been working in the movie industry for some 30 years and originally studied with such well known Italian directors as Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up and The Passenger) and Luchino Visconti (The Damned and Death in Venice).

The following interview was conducted by French reporter Robert Schlockoff - which accounts for the French titles given for some of Fulci's lesser known movies (lesser known, at least, in America); the interview first appeared in L'Ecran Fantastique. In this talk, Fulci relates how he became involved in horror and fantasy films, and elaborates on the dramatic perspective and technique that went into the making of Zombie and Gates of Hell. As we pick up this conversation, Fulci is discussing some of his early producing and writing credits:

Fulci: I was assistant-producer on a film by L'Herbier, The Last Days of Pomperii, before launching out into comedy with Mario Monicelli and Steno (Times are Hard for Vampires with Christopher Lee). At this point I was working more on screenplays than on directing. With the exception of Zombie I am the sourse for the screenplays for all my films.

Fang: You prefer doing screenplays to directing?

Fulci: Not really. Directing interests me above all on a technical level, for me, the most important stages of a film are the screenplay, the mixing and the editing. I have a terrible flaw: I don't like "stars"!

Fang: Mario Bava had the same reaction!

Fulci: Absolutely, and Hitchcock, too, who sent little notes to his actors giving them their directions. Paul Newman asked him about this one day, and Hitch told him: "In this way I can avoid talking to you!" In actual fact, I like working with actors, but not with stars, with devas. To return to Bava, his films rest, above all, on the technical aspect, the special effects and the suspence; he doesn't really need actors. But Bava was misunderstood in Italy: he and Freda were ignored and the critics did not talk about this genius who was Bava until after his death. Among the great actors whome I have worked with, there is no exception, however; the great comedian Toto with whome I made 22 films as screenwriter or assistant-producer. Likewise, it was he who helped me produce my first film Le Voleur, which was, by the way, a dazzling failure! At this point I was making a lot of comedies, likewise musical films on rock 'n' roll.

Fang: Are you very familar with fantacy movies?

Fulci: Of Course, I was a great admirer of Jacques Tourneur [The Cat People, Curse of the Demon] and above all Roger Corman, whose Poe series I loved. Then I made enough comedies and refused to make any more; I was without work for a year because of this, and that was when some friends and I produced a Western which, in my opinion, accentuates the fantastic: The Time of Massacre. An intimist film, radically different from the Italian Westerns of that time, but with a lot of violence. The story is of two brothers who come face to face in an unreal, ultraviolent atmosphere. Franco Nero was the leading actor in it; he was no longer filming "Django" Westerns. The fantastic above all first made its appearance in my films with Carole (Une Lucertola Con La Pelle Di Donna), which starts out like a fantastic film but ends in the form of a police investigation.

Fang: There are surprising nightmares in Carole, such as that gigantic goose which pursues Carole or the scene with the bats which swoop down on her en masse.

Fulci: We had certain problems with this sequence that Carlo Rambaldi [Alien and E.T.] did the special effects for. Rambaldi constructed mechanical bats sliding along wires and beating their wings; besides, he added the superimposition of the shadows of the bats. I remember that Bava was very surprised at this special effect, but i told him: "Listen, Mario, without doubt you would have done this scene a thousand times better then I did!"

Fang: There are also those dogs, their stomachs open, in the laboratory. A terrible scene!

Fulci: Yes, Rambaldi used these artifical dogs, inside which he put special bags which, operated from behind, give the impression that the heart and entrails of these animals move. By the way, we were indicted on this subject; people thought that we were using real dogs, which is unthinkable. I love dogs! At the trial, Rambaldi saved me from two years of prison by finding one of the synthetic dogs which he used for the sequence.

Fang: One thing which strikes many people in seeing Carole and L'Emmurree Vivante (Sette Notte in Nero) are the absolutely unheard-of technical aspects of these films!

Fulci: I've always wanted to move ahead, to try new processes. This was, then, the case with The House of Exorcism [not to be confused with the Mario Bava movie released in this country under the sam title] a very special film which treats the problem of witchcraft in our time, in a small district in the south of Italy: some children are killed and a "witch" is accused of these murders by a priest; the most violent scene that I've ever done, by the way, is that where the poor woman is killed by being hit with chains by the peasants. It turns out that the priest is guilty of these crimes. The film caused a sensation in Italy and I decided to continue in the vein and produce a totally fantastic film: L'Emmurree Vivante.

Fang: Which is a surpriseing film and should have presented a lot of problems.

Fulci: Yes, this is a film for which I suffered a lot on the professional level. It took a certain time before I had written the story with my scriptwriter Dardano Sarchetti, but the producers, Luigi and Aurelio Di Laurentis, pestered me for a year. One day they wanted to make a mystery film, the next day a comedy, etc. I resisted for a whole year, then refused; they made me loose 12 months, and, in addition, it was impossable for me to work in such conditions. It was then that I met the producer Fulvio Frizzi, the father of my composer Fabio, who hired the marvelous actress Jennifer O'Neill. I'm greatfull to Fulvio Frizzi for his strong will and his tenacity which allowed me to finish this film well. We produced it just as it was originally written, and L'Emmurre Vivante proved that I was right, because it met with a lot of favor at your Festival, with the young people in the audience that all my films are aimed at!

Fang: The film contains an especially shocking scene, when a woman falls from a cliff and one sees clearly her face crash onto the rocks!

Fulci: We repeated a little the final sequence where the priest died in The House of Exorcism; the special effects consisted of shooting with a camera lying down with an actress stretched out along a kind of rail.. Then, one had the actress slide on the board on which she was attached toward the camera and the rock. At the moment when she reaches the rock, the face of the actress is subtituted in closeup by a head made of plastic which, upon contact with the rock, bursts into an explosion without flames. The sequence, then, alternates with the total shots where one sees a dummy fall, the shots close to the actress on the rail and the closeup shots of the dummy.

Fang: L'Emmurree Vivante was a turning point in your career?

Fulci: With regard to the fantastic, yes, but on a commersial level it was a failure, and for the next two years, I ended up having to produce music hall revues on TV! It was at that point that the producer of Zombie, Fabrizio de Angelis, came to see me. He was enchanted with L'Emmurree Vivante, and was convinced that no one but me would be better to produce Zombie. I was very happy, because I was able to reassemble the crew from my previous films and the shooting went perfectly.

Fang: You didn't write the script for Zombie?

Fulci: No, but I modified it quite a lot. I wanted to make a film which was completely fantastic and free, in contrast to L'Emmurree Vivante which was a film based above all on a mechanism demanding a certain cerebral attention. Here, this was not the case: it's a film of sensations, playing on fear and, of course, horror. In this regard I'm very happy with the masterful work of Giannetto de Rossi, already responsible for the makeup for Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, of Jorge Grau in particular, this scene of the eye which impressed many people. Giannetto de Rossi wasn't able to be present for the shooting of Gates of Hell and it was Franco Rufini who replaced him, but Giannetto will return for L'Al Di La.

Fang: What do you have to say to people who attack you with regard to the horror in your films?

Fulci: Horror isn't an end for me; what interests me above everything else is fantasy: there are only a few horror scenes in Gates of Hell, and it is above all the tension which is important in this film. With Gates of Hell, I have in fact abandoned horror for its own sake and wanted to make a nightmare film where horror is present, everywhere, even in forms pretending to be inoffensive. There are only two scenes where horror occurs in a spetacular manner. By the way, one of them, that in which the young Bob undergoes a trepanning, is a cry which I wanted to launch against a certain kind of fascism, that of the father of this girl who kills Bob because Bob is a different marginal being: a terrified victim who doesn't understand the hostility which is unleashed against him, like the so-called "witch" in The House of Exorcism. I wanted to show Bob as a young man a bit lost, fearful, and whom the girls are fond of because he's nice, but unfortunately they didn't let me develop enough the reactionary side of certain inhabitants of Dunwich. Gates of Hell is for me a visual representation of the metaphysical aspect of bad dreams: the horrors which nightmares arouse in us. I shot Gates of Hell in Savannah, Georgia, and I completely transformed this city to make out of it a nightmarish city, unreal, of the kind that the viewers are unable to pinpoint as a particular city. I hope to do the same with my own vision of New Orleans in L'Al Di La.

Fang: The music in Gates of Hell is excellent, in particular this surprising and rhythmic tune which accompanies the living-dead.

Fulci: Yes, the march of the Zombies? (Smiles) I was happily surprised to hear the whole audience at the Rex sing the theme of the zombies. It is this total audience partisipation to this kind of film at the Festival which is very important and which represents a new factor in films: the evolving rapport between the cineaste and the audience, and the film and the viewers thus meet on the same level, and I think that it's very interesting on a sociological level, because that proves that many things have to change in the cinema. It is thus necessary to suppress the possible ambiguities between the viewer and the cineaste. By the way, to return to horror in my films, it isn't so much the horror that the people are applauding, because they applaud after such sequences: many people talk incorrectly about the gratuitousness with regard to horror, and the forces of censorship talk about the inciting to violence, but, on the contrary, is relieved from it, he is free from the horrors contained in himself, and that is due to the bias of the film.

Fang: In this regard it is interesting to note that one of the most applauded scenes is that in which the zombies burn.

Fulci: Yes, because the audience is fundamentally against Evil. I think the police films with Clint Eastwood are much more dangerous for young people. My films are no more then nightmares at the end of which one wakes up, relieved and relaxed. I feel the cinema of the fantastic is deeply liberating, for young people in particular, due to this "audience participation." In Gates of Hell I was in fact above all interested in the story much more than in these zombies who only appeared incidentally.

... Zombies on the prowl in Gates of Hell. Left: Cute kids are not exempt from decayed, undead grips from the grave. Right: Another Fulci zombie grabs a handful of skull.

Fang: Let's talk about certain special effects of Gates of Hell, in particular about the rain of worms and maggots.

Fulci: Yes, that presented us with a lot of problems, because the actors had a hard time accepting the fact that we stuck living worms in their faces! We used thousands of real maggots and mealworms, around 10 kg.!

Fang: And the sequence where the girl vomits her entrails.

Fulci: Oh yes, well, we had to use the entrails of a sheep that had just had its throat cut (because after 10 minutes the entrails start to dry out and can't be used) which really had to be swallowed by the actress and which she then had to vomit up. Horrible, isn't it! In the closeups where the entrails come flying out, we used, of course, a dummy which spewed out the entrails.

Fang: Can we talk with you a bit about L'Al Di La?

Fulci: The theme is as follows: a hotel is built on one of the seven gates of Hell; it thus seperates the world of the living from that of the dead, but one day the gates are opened by mistake. If you will, the hotel is in some manner a passageway - but an important one - between Hell and our own world, represented by a city and in particular by an immense hospital. L'Al Di La is a mysterious story where the dead are at the center of the film, but they aren't "aggressive" dead people as in Zombie. They do certain things, but depend totally on the story itself, of which the theme is very metaphysical, with, however, certain horror scenes. This is, the the film is only like this at the begining; it's a little difficult for me to talk about it now. I wanted to use Tisa Farrow again, but she's a rather bizarre girl; the last I heard, she had become a taxi driver in Manhatten!

Fang: One thing that seems interesting in L'Al Di La is your personal vision of the beyond, which makes me think Hell such as you depict it in the final scene of Gates of Hell.

Fulci: Yes, these skeletons in Gates of Hell, spread out on the bottom of the crypt, have a function other than frightening: this represents a cretain end and these dead people - socereign because they are above our heards - would well be able to represent Hell in this fantastic place which has nothing to do with traditional crypts. But in L'Al Di La, I tackle Hell with an even more metaphysical elaboration.

Fang: The sound track was very important for you in Gates of Hell.

Fulci: Yes, and not only the music, but also the sound, the sound effects, the bird cries, etc. I wanted to create a new sound environment throughout this film and to that effect I worked very closely with the mixing. I wanted expressly that the sound of the film be very strong, because the sound track is itself nightmarish!

Fang: And The Black Cat?

Fulci: I shot it pretty quickly to do a favor for a producer friend of mine. It is a fantasy, but, here again, with a bit of horror. In fact that this film is above all for me an homage to this master of fantacy literature, perhaps likewise an homage to Corman. I feel that this fantasy cinema, and in particular horror films, is currently in the process of being revived. Many people starting to appreciate the value of this kind of film. And your Festival taught me something new, this participation of the audience with the film, in such a close way. That proves that not only is fantasy a genre above all aimed for young people - which I'm very happy about - but also that with such a reaction, popular cinema, which is the cinema par excellence, is becoming socially acceptable; all the viewers are on the same way in every country, regardless of social origin or age. In this way the cinema is becoming international, and I think that to attain such a result is the dream of every true film devotee.