If anyone was ever to doubt Italian director Lucio Fulci’s claim to being one of the goriest filmmakers ever, they need only watch the scene in Zombie Flesh Eaters where a woman has a large jagged wooden splinter slowly driven through her eyeball -- a scene which has become one of the most infamous moments in the annals of zombie horror. She screams and tries to save herself. But in a Fulci film there is rarely, if ever, an escape from encroaching evil. When I first watched Fulci’s The Beyond (1981) in my early teens I was struck by its fatalism, a fatalism which I hadn’t, at that early point in my film watching life, encountered in other horror films. Most of the horror films that I had watched were American and showed humans ultimately triumphing over the uncontrollable chaotic forces that welled up in the form of monsters, vampires, demons, etc. Ten years later I’m still struck by the mood of fatalism that pervades Fulci’s films. Zombie Flesh Eaters evinces a slow implacable movement towards a complete reversal of the current cosmic order: social mechanisms disintegrate, the dead wander the streets, and the living provide the dead with a source of food. This movement towards inevitable disintegration constitutes one of the major differences between American and Italian horror. American horror films attempt to placate audiences by encouraging a sense of security via easy messages such as: Good will always triumph over Evil. In contrast, Italian horror films attempt to unsettle audiences by plugging them into the dark brooding chaos that lies just beneath life’s well-ordered surface, and by demonstrating how this destructive chaos, once unleashed, cannot be stopped. Accordingly, American zombie films are likely to explain every element of the plot, and many give a reason for the zombies rise, whether it be runway scientific experimentation or acid rain. Fulci, on the other hand, doesn’t burden his plot with explanations as to why the dead are rising and eating the living. He merely presents it as a fact. This allows him to avoid representing the zombies as a problem that can be solved, as a breakdown in the cosmic order which can ultimately be understood, and therefore, ultimately controlled. He presents the zombie’s rise as an unexplained and unexplainable fact precisely because it allows him to position his zombies as an opaque irrational violence that we can look at but not look into. And it allows him to foreground the physicality of the zombies, and the violent disorder they set in motion. He gives us a very literal, but very realistic, cinematic representation of fear as something that confronts us, that fixes our gaze, that we stare at but can never see through, as something that returns our search for meaning with an impenetrable meaninglessness.

Traditionally, cinematic zombies are killed via a bullet or blow to the head. They can be gutted, gouged, decomposed, de-limbed, etc-- but as long as the head is intact they will search out humans and kill them. In short, severe brain damage is the only way to stop these creatures, something which strikes an ironic note as the brain seems to be the one organ that zombies don’t use. It is true that in American zombie films, such as Day of the Dead (1985), the zombies often have dim memories of their past life, and may vaguely recognize objects or places. These dim memories are constructed as the last vestiges of these creatures ‘humanness’, the last traces of their once individualized personalities. This faint trace of humanness provides an opportunity for the main characters to ‘save’ these creatures from their mindless existence as zombies. (It’s not an uninteresting thought that Western colonialism, in one way or another, has been in the business of ‘saving’ people in other cultures from their ‘mindless’ or ‘soulless’ existence for at least the last 400 years, perhaps longer. A thought which has come to me at this juncture, at least in part, because of a scene in Zombie Flesh Eaters where the 400 year old corpses of Spanish conquistadors rise from their graves.) In Italian zombie films such traces of humanness simply don’t exist. There are no dim memories. The moment a dead person becomes a zombie they are a creature to be feared and killed. This lack of cognizance is perhaps one reason why the greatest fear of characters in these films is the fear of becoming a zombie: it signals a loss of the self. A loss which expresses the eruption of chaos into the safest and most secure dimension of our existence. A more sociologically slanted reading of zombie films might see this loss of individuality as a comment on contemporary culture, as a fear of being integrated and ‘consumed’ by an inhuman social order. If such a reading sounds far-fetched, it’s worth pointing out that zombie films themselves sometimes press home this point, for example: Dawn of the Dead (1978), in which hordes of zombies mindlessly mill about a large shopping mall is not hard to see as a critique of America’s runaway consumerism.

When viewed by non-Italian audiences, (and I’m particularly thinking of American, English and Australian audiences), Italian zombie films have the feel of something exotic. Zombie films would generally be positioned as an example of violent popular low-culture entertainment, but Italian zombie films, in addition to including a particularly graphic, intense, and inventive representation of violence, are strangely saturated with refinements of a thoroughly cultural nature. For example, whatever else Zombie Flesh Eaters is, it is also a highly operatic film, with Fulci visualizing the attack of ghoulish zombies as something almost graceful, almost balletic in its own ponderous way. In one scene zombies invade an old wooden hospital in which the last survivors have barricaded themselves. As the zombies slowly break through the doors Molotov cocktails are thrown. The building catches fire around them and begins to collapse. Burning limbs fall off the zombies as they continue their mindless advance. And this scene of fiery cataclysmic destruction is flooded with deep operatic music that fills it with a sense of dramatic inevitability. It’s a tableaux that seems as much like something out of Dante, as it does something out of a piece of popular entertainment.

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