Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 2: And this is Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you
Speaker 2: an older episode of Weird House Cinema. This is on
Speaker 2: Luccio Folcheese House by the Cemetery about as weird a
Speaker 2: movie as you could want. This episode originally published October
Speaker 2: twenty ninth, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: It's a movie that literally has it all so dive
Speaker 1: right in. It's a great Halloween selection. Here.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 2: And this is Joe McCormick, and it's October. And though
Speaker 2: we cover horror movies a lot on this show, I
Speaker 2: guess we have to do some really intense horror this month.
Speaker 2: And so what better time to introduce our very first
Speaker 2: Luccio Fulci movie on Weird House.
Speaker 1: That's right, Luccio Fulci's nineteen eighty one film, The House
Speaker 1: by the Cemetery. This is a just a bloody and
Speaker 1: bonker's tale that has multiple elements in it that I
Speaker 1: think are worth geeking out over, and it also feels
Speaker 1: on some level. It feels like the perfect film too
Speaker 1: to discuss this week, because as of this week, Weird
Speaker 1: House Cinema has completed its first Journey around the Sun.
Speaker 1: We've been doing these episodes for a year now, and
Speaker 1: you've been either putting up with them or enjoying them
Speaker 1: with us for a year, and so we appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Now, Rob, this movie was your pick, So I assume
Speaker 2: this must you must have some kind of personal history
Speaker 2: with it. What is your connection to House by the Cemetery.
Speaker 1: I think it was the first Fulci film that I
Speaker 1: saw that really connected with me. That the first film
Speaker 1: where I felt like, I mean, they're even his worst film,
Speaker 1: his less celebrated films. Often there's generally something enjoyable in them,
Speaker 1: but sometimes if you don't, if you're not really a connoisseur,
Speaker 1: it's easy to get caught up on the things that
Speaker 1: don't work. And so I think i'd had that experience
Speaker 1: with some of his other films, like what New York Ripper?
Speaker 1: And is it New York Ripper? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think so, I've never seen that one.
Speaker 1: In Manhattan Baby, which is a wonderful I love the
Speaker 1: title Manhattan Baby because it's kind of implies a certain
Speaker 1: unders like a b cinema international idea of what New
Speaker 1: York was, and therefore you could just put the word
Speaker 1: Manhattan in front of Baby and it takes on sinister qualities.
Speaker 1: But those are all films where I think I saw
Speaker 1: more of the flaws than the genius, and in this film,
Speaker 1: the genius stood out to me. So I was really
Speaker 1: excited to revisit it, and I found that in revisiting it,
Speaker 1: I got to appreciate all the bonker stuff a lot more.
Speaker 1: I feel like my memory had kind of selectively cut
Speaker 1: out a lot of the weirder plot holes in this film,
Speaker 1: and I mainly remembered like a really great monster. I
Speaker 1: remembered some, you know, some weird scenes and some heightened tension,
Speaker 1: but ultimately this is just a wonderful weird pick. Well.
Speaker 2: So we've been talking recently a number of times about
Speaker 2: specifically about these rubbed the Fur movies, movies that are
Speaker 2: more about a vision of audio visual texture than they
Speaker 2: are about the narrative contents of the film. And it's
Speaker 2: funny that that Folcie never came up when we were
Speaker 2: talking about these before, because I think in the most
Speaker 2: disgusting possible way. Folci was deeply committed to making rub
Speaker 2: the fur type movies cinema as a as a almost
Speaker 2: purely esthetic exercise over a narrative one. And so I've
Speaker 2: seen a number of Fulcy horror movies and I can't
Speaker 2: remember a single one of them for its characters or plot. Instead,
Speaker 2: what you what you remember from these movies are and images.
Speaker 2: So I tend to think of a Fulci as a
Speaker 2: I think of his approach to movie making as kind
Speaker 2: of similar to a child creating shoebox dioramas, except of
Speaker 2: course they're strewn with ludicrous amounts of blood and gore.
Speaker 2: So he has like an extraordinary eye for these memorable
Speaker 2: set pieces of weirdness and wet violence. But on the
Speaker 2: narrative level, these scenes and the characters in them always
Speaker 2: feel just barely held together by the vaguest of narrative logic.
Speaker 2: Every ful Chie movie I have ever seen feels like
Speaker 2: it takes place in a dream, where in every scene,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like that moment in a dream where
Speaker 2: some things are going on around you, but you couldn't
Speaker 2: necessarily explain how you got there or why.
Speaker 1: Now, like a dream, you can, I think, what I do,
Speaker 1: or what I've done in the past with fullshoe movies
Speaker 1: is afterwards, I kind of reflect on the dream and
Speaker 1: sort of ascribe it a structure, you know, And I
Speaker 1: feel like you can certainly do that with a film
Speaker 1: like this. You can be like, Okay, well, this was
Speaker 1: at heart a film about a house that is haunted.
Speaker 1: People move into said haunted house, have encounters with the haunt,
Speaker 1: and you know, there are consequences for all of that.
Speaker 1: I think that's basically the plot, but what we actually
Speaker 1: witness on screen is a lot more I don't know, frenzied,
Speaker 1: and like you say, it kind of definitely follows the
Speaker 1: logic or the lack of logic found in dreams.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like you're saying, I mean, actually, it's kind
Speaker 2: of hard to describe because his movies do, in fact
Speaker 2: have plots and they have characters. So Housed by the Cemetery,
Speaker 2: which we just watched, is a movie that technically has
Speaker 2: a story that you could summarize in words. It's more
Speaker 2: that it just doesn't really feel that way when you're
Speaker 2: watching it. You know, like you could write out a
Speaker 2: plot summary and it would more or less make sense.
Speaker 2: It's just that seemed to see, and I at least
Speaker 2: don't feel the normal levels of narrative logic that you
Speaker 2: would in a movie where the plot hangs together like
Speaker 2: it should. Instead, once again, what we get is more
Speaker 2: like a collection of images, shots, set pieces, and scenes,
Speaker 2: as if billowing out of a dream and then kind
Speaker 2: of haphazardly strung together along a pretty standard kind of
Speaker 2: horror plot arc.
Speaker 1: I think one aspect of this, or one reason for this,
Speaker 1: is that I don't think full two was ever the
Speaker 1: sort of director to let the plot get in the
Speaker 1: way of a great shot, right there was something visually
Speaker 1: interesting to be done, it seems like he would do
Speaker 1: it even if it wasn't really helping out the plot
Speaker 1: all that much.
Speaker 2: Not even plot, I mean, just to let any kind
Speaker 2: of logic or reality get in the way of a
Speaker 2: good shot. So say the laws of physics. You know,
Speaker 2: he will show some kind of bizarre murder that he
Speaker 2: maybe came to him in a dream or whatever, and
Speaker 2: it doesn't really matter if this is not how like
Speaker 2: fluids flow in the real world, or if this is
Speaker 2: you know, it doesn't really gravity would interfere with what
Speaker 2: he wants to be showing you. He's just going to
Speaker 2: show it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know. Another thing that's kind of interesting about full
Speaker 2: Cheesse horror movies is that, though they are classifiable as
Speaker 2: horror and they generally have you know, ghosts and zombies,
Speaker 2: supernatural horror plot elements, I don't know if they're really
Speaker 2: intended to be scary. I never really find them scary.
Speaker 2: They're more like disgusting psychedelic art films.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this film in particular, Yeah, it feels like it's
Speaker 1: trying to be haunting and supernatural. It's it's definitely going
Speaker 1: out there to be gory, but really there's only there's
Speaker 1: only like one sequence of a child in peril that
Speaker 1: felt suspenseful. I don't know, maybe the opening kill sequence
Speaker 1: is a little bit suspenseful, even though you don't really
Speaker 1: have a firm attachment to any of the characters.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what's the elevator pitch on this one? Absurdly
Speaker 2: grizzly murders keep happening at the old freud Stein house.
Speaker 2: Let's watch what happens when a new family moves in.
Speaker 1: Don't you mean oak manor isn't it? Oh yeah, the
Speaker 1: realtors keep insisting don't call it the Freudstein House.
Speaker 2: God, I love the cutaways to the real estate office.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we got we had a strong real estate agent
Speaker 1: subplot in this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the real estate office was strangely political compared
Speaker 2: to you know, there was nothing else in the movie
Speaker 2: like this. But in the real estate office there are
Speaker 2: a bunch of flags. There's like an American flag and
Speaker 2: then some other flags. I don't know what they were,
Speaker 2: and then there's a might have been state flags or something.
Speaker 2: And then there's a framed portrait of John F. Kennedy
Speaker 2: and there's a big bust of an eagle. I don't
Speaker 2: know why it was so patriotic in there.
Speaker 1: Interesting. All right, Well, let's go ahead and hear the
Speaker 1: audio for some of the trailer audio. Maybe we'll play
Speaker 1: the whole trailer because this was a fun win and
Speaker 1: I'll explain why after you hear it. Even where are
Speaker 1: you playing for me?
Speaker 4: Stee in this house? What you don't know will hurt you.
Speaker 5: It was to be a getaway dream.
Speaker 4: It's becoming the runaway nightmare. Do you see anything? Some
Speaker 4: old steps coming down?
Speaker 5: He has been awaiting the arrival of his new guests.
Speaker 4: One by one.
Speaker 5: They are disappearing, one by bloody one.
Speaker 4: When you move to this house before you get locked
Speaker 4: in the fine friends, you may have just Morgan, you're right.
Speaker 5: Due to the graphic nature of this film, no one
Speaker 5: under eighteen will.
Speaker 4: Be admitted house by the cemetery.
Speaker 1: All right. So you might have noticed, Well, that's not
Speaker 1: a Maybe that's not our typical movie narrator. That's not
Speaker 1: that's a slightly different voice of God. Doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: a god at all. Maybe a devil is narrating this. Well,
Speaker 1: that devil is brother Theodore, the comedian and character actor
Speaker 1: that we discussed in the Warhawk Tanzania film The Devil's Express.
Speaker 1: You might also know him from the Verbs and the
Speaker 1: animated adaptations of The Hobbit in The Last Unicorn. He
Speaker 1: was the voice of Gollum in the animated Hobbit film,
Speaker 1: and here he is narrating a trailer. I love it.
Speaker 2: In The Devil's Express he was the street preacher who,
Speaker 2: in one scene was giving a sermon by the subway
Speaker 2: entrance about how all your gods are dead and the
Speaker 2: rats are screaming.
Speaker 1: I was looking around trying to figure out what other
Speaker 1: trailers he narrated, and I couldn't find evidence of a
Speaker 1: lot of them. So I don't know if this was
Speaker 1: like just a very brief gig for him, or if
Speaker 1: I'm missing a lot of trailers here, But oh, I
Speaker 1: wish he had done more. I wish he was still
Speaker 1: around to do film trailers. Like any kind of Oscar
Speaker 1: bait comes out, I want to hear Brothers Theodore narrated.
Speaker 2: How would he say it featuring the personable Mark Damon.
Speaker 4: It'd be good.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of humans, let's let's get into the humans
Speaker 1: involved in bringing this strange film to life first. I
Speaker 1: guess we'll begin with the director here, the key individual
Speaker 1: we've already we've already brought up already. That's Lucie Fulci,
Speaker 1: who lived nineteen twenty seven through nineteen ninety six. So
Speaker 1: we've mentioned him multiple times on Weird House Cinema, so
Speaker 1: it's it's ultimately nice to finally discuss him in one
Speaker 1: of his own films instead of just you know, referring
Speaker 1: to people who worked with him. He's best remembered today
Speaker 1: for his horror films of the mainly the nineteen eighties era.
Speaker 1: I guess it's the big time for him, and he is,
Speaker 1: without a doubt, one of the titans of Italian b
Speaker 1: cinema from this era. But all this really kicked into
Speaker 1: high gear after nineteen seventy nine's Zombie came out. We've
Speaker 1: talked about this one before. This was a very prolific
Speaker 1: period of his career to produced some of his best
Speaker 1: remembered films.
Speaker 2: Now this is Zombie with Justin and I instead of
Speaker 2: Is this the one that was marketed as an unofficial
Speaker 2: sequel to Dawn of the Dead.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was very much cashing in on the
Speaker 1: success of that film, and it is also you may
Speaker 1: remember us discussing the like some of the bonkers scenes
Speaker 1: in this this is another one where he didn't let
Speaker 1: the plot get in the way of an interesting scene,
Speaker 1: such as the one where what a shark and a
Speaker 1: zombie battle each other while a topless scuba diver swims by.
Speaker 1: Just you know, completely bonkers and definitely stands out in
Speaker 1: one's memory. But he'd been active for a while prior
Speaker 1: to to Zombie. He'd been directing full length films for
Speaker 1: twenty years at that point, including some horror films such
Speaker 1: as nineteen seventy one's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy twos, Don't Torture a Duckling. He also did
Speaker 1: a nineteen sixty nine Jalla film titled One on Top
Speaker 1: of the Other. But he directed a number of different
Speaker 1: genre films before the nineteen eighties, including Western spy, thrillers, comedies,
Speaker 1: and more. He did an adaptation of Jack London's White Fang.
Speaker 1: He also did a fantasy film, nineteen eighty three's Conquest,
Speaker 1: which is quite entertaining and weird. Maybe we'll come back
Speaker 1: to that one.
Speaker 2: Conquest can sometimes be kind of rough because it looks
Speaker 2: like it was filmed through cloth. Like it there is
Speaker 2: a just an impenetrable haze through the entire movie. It
Speaker 2: looks like there was a I don't know, gauze over
Speaker 2: the camera lens or something how I think they would
Speaker 2: normally describe it. It's just this gray, hazy look that
Speaker 2: never ends. But Conquest star so it's like a you know,
Speaker 2: it's a one of those barbarian movies, sort of a
Speaker 2: cone and ripoff, but it's got a Jorge Rivera from
Speaker 2: from where Wolf as the Conan character.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yeah, it has a number of fun elements
Speaker 1: in it. I wonder though, if if you're one of
Speaker 1: the things about these films is that is that some
Speaker 1: of us saw them years ago with less than on
Speaker 1: less than great formats, you know, maybe we even saw
Speaker 1: them on VHS. So I wonder if the version of
Speaker 1: Conquest you saw was like one of the was like
Speaker 1: a more recent restoration of it, or it was like
Speaker 1: it was older, because the film we're talking about here
Speaker 1: today was recently restored in two K and that was
Speaker 1: the version that I watched in preparation for this episode,
Speaker 1: and it really did seem a lot clearer than I
Speaker 1: remember watching it, you know, like ten or fifteen years
Speaker 1: ago the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one, it looks a lot better now than
Speaker 2: the version I saw about fifteen years ago. One more
Speaker 2: note about one of the movies you mentioned, I've actually
Speaker 2: seen a Lizard in Woman's Skin. That's a fulchy jallo
Speaker 2: movie that is very strange. It involves I think it's
Speaker 2: one of the number of these Italian jalli that take
Speaker 2: place in London, if I remember correctly, and it involves
Speaker 2: it involves like a like a party house. There's like
Speaker 2: a it's like a total I think the plot is
Speaker 2: the main character and her husband live in one part
Speaker 2: apartment and then right next door there's a total party
Speaker 2: house and she has these like dreams and visions about
Speaker 2: weird stuff going on in there. I think it's kind
Speaker 2: of there's like, I don't know, naked people and panthers
Speaker 2: wandering around and stuff.
Speaker 1: Now, if I'm not mistaken, the title on that one
Speaker 1: has to do with the success of doc Rio Argento
Speaker 1: is the Bird with a Crystal Plumage. And if you
Speaker 1: start looking at titles of Jallo films, you'll find that
Speaker 1: you have the Bird with a Crystal Plumage come out,
Speaker 1: and then various other titles that have a similar structure.
Speaker 1: You know, it'll be like, you know, the Rhino with
Speaker 1: a diamond toenail, you know, something like that that seems
Speaker 1: to get him on the same trend.
Speaker 2: Oh man, there's so many Jello movies with great titles,
Speaker 2: totally independent. A lot of times I don't even remember
Speaker 2: which movie the title goes with. There's one that always
Speaker 2: sticks in my mind called Your vice is a locked
Speaker 2: Room and only I have the key.
Speaker 1: Got to make copies of that key. Well, anyway, back
Speaker 1: back to Fulchi he again. He died in nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 1: and his output slowed down later in life as he
Speaker 1: wrestled with health issues, but his next to last film
Speaker 1: was nineteen nineties A Cat in the Brain, which I
Speaker 1: have not seen and really didn't know much about it.
Speaker 1: I just kind of assumed it was just another standard,
Speaker 1: you know, body Fulcy affair, but it apparently stars a
Speaker 1: fictionalized version of himself. He plays this fictionalized version of
Speaker 1: himself in the film, seeking the aid of a twisted
Speaker 1: psychiatrist over his own violent visions. So I watched the
Speaker 1: trailer for it, and it looks it looks amazing. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of Fulcy ranting, you know, dubbed into English
Speaker 1: for the you know, the version we would watch where
Speaker 1: he's saying things like the man was all red and
Speaker 1: I wanted to kill him, and then you'll, you know,
Speaker 1: cut to some sort of a bizarre sequence.
Speaker 2: Trying to understand the reception history of Fulci is interesting
Speaker 2: because he seems like a figure who simultaneously evokes a
Speaker 2: disgust reaction from people, and I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people would sort of look down on as a kind
Speaker 2: of low brow pervert of gore, somebody who made these
Speaker 2: gross movies full of almost hilarious quantities of gratuitous blood
Speaker 2: and guts. And yet at the same time, I think
Speaker 2: there's a lot of film scholarship on Fulgi. I sense
Speaker 2: that he enjoys a kind of special aura of artistic
Speaker 2: respect set apart from most other directors of lowbrow B
Speaker 2: horror movies of this kind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think part of it may be that he's
Speaker 1: important enough and ultimately impressive enough that he stands out,
Speaker 1: you know, he kind of emerges out of that world
Speaker 1: of Italian B cinema, and therefore he might be the
Speaker 1: most notorious name that someone is familiar with from that world.
Speaker 1: But of course, if you if you dig dig a
Speaker 1: little deeper into Italian B cinema, you find plenty of
Speaker 1: other more notorious names. You know, there are a lot
Speaker 1: more arguably unsavory characters than Luccio Fulci.
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess the weird distinction here is that,
Speaker 2: I bet at multiple colleges out there in the world,
Speaker 2: there are entire courses on Fulci, Like, you know, he's
Speaker 2: at that level of subject matter worthy of critical analysis.
Speaker 1: I think, well, let's look at some of the other
Speaker 1: other names involved here. We also have Alisa Braganti, who
Speaker 1: has a story credit. This is an Italian screenwriter who
Speaker 1: wrote on such films as Zombie Manhattan, Baby nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: The Bronx Warriors, A Blade in the Dark, Hands of Steel,
Speaker 1: which we've discussed on the show before, and many more.
Speaker 2: Hands of Steele was the Italian terminator ripoff that had
Speaker 2: the big beefy guy who comes to the desert bar
Speaker 2: and then ends up in an arm wrestling scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, an Arizona movie filmed by Italians and also featuring
Speaker 1: John Saxon.
Speaker 2: Oh Yeah, John Saxon and oh in that movie was
Speaker 2: the one where we encountered the worst song of all
Speaker 2: time because the lead actress in it sings that pop
Speaker 2: single Teddy Bear.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I kind of like teddy Bear, tyer
Speaker 1: like teddy Bear. Okay, I look back fondly on teddy Bear.
Speaker 1: I don't remember it though, I don't remember how it goes. Oh,
Speaker 1: let me remind you no no afterwards after Okay. So
Speaker 1: the next name worth pointing out Dardano Sachetti, who has
Speaker 1: a screenplay credit born nineteen forty four, Italian screenwriter who
Speaker 1: worked on the likes with the likes of Lomberto Bava,
Speaker 1: Luccio fulci Zo g Castellari, Dario Argento. His first credit
Speaker 1: was Argento's The Cat of Nine Tales. He worked with
Speaker 1: Fulci quite a bit, including some of his most well
Speaker 1: known films, some of the ones we've mentioned here already.
Speaker 1: He worked on Lomberto Bava's Monster, Shark and Demons, and
Speaker 1: he also worked on nineteen ninety The Bronx Warriors. So
Speaker 1: another important name in Italian b cinema. And there's another
Speaker 1: screenplay credit to Giorgio Mariuzzo, who also wrote on the
Speaker 1: ful Chi films The Beyond and Enigma, as well as
Speaker 1: some others.
Speaker 2: Now is House by the Cemetery sometimes considered part of a.
Speaker 2: I'm afraid I'm getting this wrong with part of A's
Speaker 2: sort of conceptual trio of horror films that she did
Speaker 2: along with Gates of Hell and The Beyond. Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yes, the so called Gates of Hell trilogy of films.
Speaker 1: And I'm personally not sure if I was dubbed a
Speaker 1: trilogy by Folk she himself, or if this is something
Speaker 1: that commentators and fans have come up with, But at
Speaker 1: any rate, yeah, we have these three films, City of
Speaker 1: the Living Dead from nineteen eighty and The Beyond and
Speaker 1: House by the Cemetery both from nineteen eighty one, and
Speaker 1: it is just so happens. We have an actor that
Speaker 1: is in all three of these. It is Catherine McCall
Speaker 1: or Katrianna McCall, and she plays Lucy Boyle, the wife
Speaker 1: in this picture. She was born in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: British born ballet dancer turned actor again in all three
Speaker 1: of the Gates of Hell films. She also was in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty's Hawk the Slayer, which starred Jack Palance as
Speaker 1: well as John Terry Patricia Quinn. And it looks pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: I can't remember I've seen it or not. I may
Speaker 1: have seen it. She was also in nineteen ninety one's
Speaker 1: Afraid of the Dark, which starred James Fox, Paul McGann
Speaker 1: and David Thulis.
Speaker 2: Right, So I guess if we're getting into the cast,
Speaker 2: we should say that there's a main family in this movie,
Speaker 2: and Catherine McCall plays the mother and the family. The
Speaker 2: father is played by this guy named Paolo Malco.
Speaker 1: Yeah, plays doctor Norman Boyle. Malco was born in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty seven an Italian actor who was also in Ful Cheese,
Speaker 1: New York Ripper, was in Sergio Martinez The Scorpion with
Speaker 1: Two Tales. He was in Castellari's Escape the Bronx, as
Speaker 1: well as Limberto Baba's Demons three, the Ogre that came
Speaker 1: out in nineteen eighty nine, and this one's it's kind
Speaker 1: of a weird connection here because the ogre is apparently
Speaker 1: very similar to this film, to House by the Semi Terry,
Speaker 1: and it is apparently based on Sachetti's original script for
Speaker 1: House by the Cemetery. So they went back. This is
Speaker 1: according to Lomberto Bava. So basically they're like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: full she did some some slightly different things with the script.
Speaker 1: Let's go back and we'll just do the script as
Speaker 1: it was before full she did what he did with it.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I have not seen Demons three.
Speaker 1: I think I've only seen Demons one, so I speak
Speaker 1: to it personally.
Speaker 2: I didn't know there was a Demon's three, Demons one
Speaker 2: and Demons two. Demons one has a bunch of people
Speaker 2: go to a movie theater and they watch a movie
Speaker 2: and then Demon's attack. Demons two has a bunch of
Speaker 2: people in an apartment building and then Demon's attack. Demons three.
Speaker 2: I guess it must be a house. So they're scaling back.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it was very much a case of
Speaker 1: them making a film called the Ogre again based on
Speaker 1: this older script, and then they were like, well, maybe
Speaker 1: this will perform better if we just call it Demons three.
Speaker 1: Why not are people going to complain that it doesn't
Speaker 1: match up? Although well with the plot of Demons Demons
Speaker 1: one and two.
Speaker 2: I think Demons too, I don't recall much continuity between them.
Speaker 2: In fact, I even seem to recall that there are
Speaker 2: actors who are in the first movie playing different characters
Speaker 2: in the second Demons movie.
Speaker 1: Well, anyway, Malcom as doctor Norman Boyle in this pretty
Speaker 1: entertaining and has great hair in most of the scenes.
Speaker 1: There are some scenes of him standing on wind swept
Speaker 1: streets in New York City and you're like, wow, that's
Speaker 1: a good head of hair.
Speaker 2: As Vincent Price would say, his hair is loos urious,
Speaker 2: just absolutely wonderful hair. This is hair first casting, to
Speaker 2: be sure.
Speaker 1: And you know it runs in the family because his
Speaker 1: son in the film, his son Bob, also has an
Speaker 1: impressive head of hair.
Speaker 2: This is really the star of the film. Here is Bob.
Speaker 2: Years ago, when I first saw this movie, the movie
Speaker 2: in general didn't make all that much of an impression
Speaker 2: on me, except I remembered Bob. This movie has this weird,
Speaker 2: haunting child in it that's maybe actually the scariest thing
Speaker 2: in the movie, but also the funniest because he's named Bob,
Speaker 2: and characters are constantly yelling out Bob.
Speaker 1: Yes, Bob, an adult's name that is here given to
Speaker 1: a child, a child that is also the child. His
Speaker 1: voice is dubbed into English and performed by an adult
Speaker 1: woman doing a child's voice, so that adds this extra
Speaker 1: level of the uncanny to it. And also the actor
Speaker 1: playing Bob, Giovanni Freza, who was born in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: just a very cute child, just objectively extremely cute child
Speaker 1: who just comes off like a cheruld, like an actual
Speaker 1: angelic being that seems to glow on the screen and
Speaker 1: in a way that just feels unnatural, just unnaturally cute.
Speaker 1: This kid.
Speaker 2: The glowing quality also, like you say, it, takes after
Speaker 2: his dad in this film luxury hair, like glowing hair.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just basically platinum. Now. The child actor here, Giovanni Frezo,
Speaker 1: pops up in an excellent assortment of Italian genre pictures
Speaker 1: from this time period, including Manhattan Baby, the excellent Warriors
Speaker 1: of the Wasteland, A Blade in the Dark, and the
Speaker 1: first Demons movie. Demons came out in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: and that was his last acting role. He grew up,
Speaker 1: apparently to become a product development director, and I think
Speaker 1: still works and resides in the United States. I looked
Speaker 1: up some footage of him from a I think from
Speaker 1: a DVD or Blu Ray extra, and I'm pleased to
Speaker 1: see that he did not turn into like a terrifying
Speaker 1: klaus Kinsky looking adult duode, because there's something about like,
Speaker 1: he's so innocent and you know, and cute in this film.
Speaker 1: You're like, you can easily imagine it twisted into the
Speaker 1: grotesque and the cruel instead of growing up into what
Speaker 1: seems like probably a normal adult.
Speaker 2: But you can confirm normal adult.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know the guy, but you look
Speaker 1: at a picture of him, you're like, oh, that's a
Speaker 1: that's a grown human being, normally looking adult. Yes, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I mean product development sounds normal enough, So I.
Speaker 2: Think that could be the stands out there that can
Speaker 2: be final processing.
Speaker 1: All right, So that is the family that's our central
Speaker 1: trio here, But then you could basically look at the
Speaker 1: rest of the cast is by dividing them into like ghosts, monsters,
Speaker 1: and victims. So the main ghost is May May, the
Speaker 1: ghost girl played by Sylvia Colatina born nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1: And she's the interesting thing. And I guess this makes
Speaker 1: sense because of the raid at which girls and boys mature.
Speaker 1: But she's actually the same age as the actor playing
Speaker 1: Bob in this. She was also a child actor, active
Speaker 1: only from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty four, but
Speaker 1: with fewer credits. She acted in Sergio Martinez The Great
Speaker 1: Alligator in nineteen seventy nine, a movie that has a
Speaker 1: story credit by George Eastman, and then she was also
Speaker 1: in ful Che's Murder Rock Dancing Death in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 2: I did not know Sergio Martino had an alligator movie.
Speaker 2: I got to look into that.
Speaker 1: Penned by George Eastman.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean perfect Italian Crocodilian movies can be quite
Speaker 2: have you ever seen I forget the director's name. There
Speaker 2: are a couple of Italian horror films called Killer Crocodile
Speaker 2: and Killer Crocodile Too. I don't think i've seen that
Speaker 2: were they're just they're extremely bad, but very funny.
Speaker 1: Well, as for our ghost here, may I feel like
Speaker 1: called Attina's really good in this. You know, it's hard
Speaker 1: to judge a child actor, particularly if they're dubbed probably
Speaker 1: by like a different person, But I don't know. There's
Speaker 1: a certain quality to her delivery here where I totally
Speaker 1: buy her sense of like occasional detachment but also kind
Speaker 1: of like shocked outrage at the danger that is lurking
Speaker 1: on the screen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she has a lot of like look into the camera,
Speaker 2: wide eyed and gasp kind of moments.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The next character is kind of perplexing because depending
Speaker 1: on where you are in the film, it's hard to
Speaker 1: tell where she falls into these divisions of victims and
Speaker 1: ghosts and monsters. This is the character of an the Babysitter,
Speaker 1: played by Ania Perni. She was born in nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: an Italian actor. She also appeared in Daria Argenta's Tenebre
Speaker 1: and Inferno, in which she apparently plays the mother of Tears.
Speaker 1: She's fun in this as a mysterious character who does
Speaker 1: a lot of suspicious staring, a lot of silent staring.
Speaker 1: And I have to say this new two K release,
Speaker 1: this new two K Master of House by the cemetery.
Speaker 1: It reveals every follicle in her lush, loupine eyebrows. It's
Speaker 1: pretty great.
Speaker 2: I was going to point out those eyebrows. So if
Speaker 2: Paulo Malco, if he was hair first casting, I think
Speaker 2: this actress was eyebrow first casting. It's all about the
Speaker 2: eyebrows here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean she has really tense eyes as well,
Speaker 1: but luscious eyebrows. You've never seen eyebrows like these before.
Speaker 1: And she a lot of the scenes again getting back
Speaker 1: to like fulchi, never letting the plot get in the
Speaker 1: way of a good scene. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: his direction was like, yes, stare hauntingly into the camera,
Speaker 1: keep doing it. Okay, good, that's great. Now we'll move
Speaker 1: on to.
Speaker 2: The next sent You almost wonder if a lot of
Speaker 2: scenes in this movie could have been done with the
Speaker 2: actor is not even knowing yet what they were going
Speaker 2: to be looking at. It's just we get a lot
Speaker 2: of footage of the actor going like oh, and then
Speaker 2: later we figure out what the image is that they're seeing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or sometimes we don't exactly Yeah, one more actor
Speaker 1: to highlight that. We may come back to one or
Speaker 1: two more when we get into the plot. But we
Speaker 1: also have this realder character. We have multiple realder characters,
Speaker 1: but the main one is Laura, played by the actor
Speaker 1: Dagmar Alassander. She was born nineteen forty three, a checkborn
Speaker 1: actor who pops up in a lot of Italian films.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, perhaps she's just more memorable because
Speaker 1: of her name, you know, Dagmar Lassiter. Lasseners tends to
Speaker 1: stand out in the credits of a film. Her credits
Speaker 1: include Mario Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Lumberto Bava's Devilfish,
Speaker 1: and also Fool Cheese the Black Cat. Also a picture
Speaker 1: unrelated to these filmmakers titled were Wolf Woman.
Speaker 2: So she plays a character in this named well, you said, Laura,
Speaker 2: missus Gidtleson, right, Yeah, yeah, missus Gidtleson. She's the real
Speaker 2: estate agent. And there's a great scene where she is
Speaker 2: trying to back out of the driveway of the titular house,
Speaker 2: the house by the cemetery, and she like drives over
Speaker 2: a tombstone and just like swears at it. She's just
Speaker 2: like a damn tombstones.
Speaker 1: She's fun. All right. Well, let's get to the music,
Speaker 1: because the music on this film is definitely worth highlighting
Speaker 1: this is a this is a fun score. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit Uh, it's a little bit, a
Speaker 1: little bit funky. Uh, definitely synthy and apparently highly influential.
Speaker 1: I saw it pointed out that the muse some of
Speaker 1: the music that was used or created for Garth Marenghi's
Speaker 1: Dark Place years later. It's kind of like like a
Speaker 1: direct reference to the score to this film.
Speaker 2: That makes so much sense. And a lot of what's
Speaker 2: funny about Garth Maringhi's Dark Place is just slightly tweaking
Speaker 2: things that are already true about House by the Cemetery,
Speaker 2: like some of the kind of the vibe in the
Speaker 2: dialogue scenes with these long pauses between lines and awkward staring.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, In fact.
Speaker 2: I even thought of Garth Murringay's Dark Place. And there's
Speaker 2: one part of the movie where where Paolo starts listening
Speaker 2: to a tape by the old doctor that starts talking
Speaker 2: about blood, blood, blood, and I wanted to complete it
Speaker 2: with and bits of bits of sick.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I had the same thought. That's a great sequence too,
Speaker 1: by the way, Yeah, listening to that and it aren't
Speaker 1: we get it represented with visuals of blood flowing over
Speaker 1: a tombstone.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yeah, all right.
Speaker 1: So the individuals responsible for this music primarily Walter Rizzodi.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure when this Italian composer was born or
Speaker 1: if he's still with us. I couldn't find any dates
Speaker 1: on him, but he seems to have been primarily active
Speaker 1: from nineteen sixty six through nineteen ninety three. His notable
Speaker 1: scores include this one, nineteen ninety The Bronx Warriors, as
Speaker 1: well as some various action films. I think this is
Speaker 1: the main standout, but you also have Alexander Blanksteiner on
Speaker 1: this with an additional music credit. You might remember him
Speaker 1: as the guy who gave us that fabulously funky disco
Speaker 1: score for Cannibal Apocalypse. He has composition credit on five
Speaker 1: of the scorer's tracks. So it all comes together again
Speaker 1: into just a very fun score that is, you know,
Speaker 1: occasionally definitely gets into this kind of cheesy groove that
Speaker 1: that only works with this film, but I think is
Speaker 1: overall pretty excellent and has some wonderful moments of horror.
Speaker 1: Synth organ I thought we might have a taste of
Speaker 1: it right here.
Speaker 2: Yes, I love the synth pipe organs, and I also
Speaker 2: at a couple of points. I was hearing a plinking
Speaker 2: walk down that reminds me of the melody from Banana
Speaker 2: Rama's Cruel Summer.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think I know which part you're talking about. I
Speaker 1: need to go back and listen to that though, And
Speaker 1: speaking of going back and listening to it, I should
Speaker 1: point out that that there have been some excellent re
Speaker 1: releases of this score. I don't I can't really speak
Speaker 1: to its digital availability on streaming sites, but you've had
Speaker 1: some fabulous vinyl additions put out by both Death Waltz Records,
Speaker 1: which you know excels at this sort of thing, as
Speaker 1: well as Burning Witch Records. So if you're if you're
Speaker 1: into the into the vinyl uh, and you're into scores
Speaker 1: like this, definitely check those out. So though, oh wait,
Speaker 1: those were the humans. But there's also one non human
Speaker 1: credit I need to give, and that's the house itself.
Speaker 1: This is one of those those fabulous movies where we
Speaker 1: have a central haunted house or haunted location, and that
Speaker 1: at location actually exists in the real world and you
Speaker 1: can you can technically go and see it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, of ob obey local laws as far as
Speaker 1: approaching it. But the house here is the The Freudstein House
Speaker 1: is actually the Bailey Ellis House, located on the Ellis
Speaker 1: Estate in the coastal Massachusetts town of Let's see, I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm sure. I'm going to busher the name of
Speaker 1: this skitchuwat.
Speaker 2: No idea s c I t U a t E
Speaker 2: situate sketchy Watts.
Speaker 1: Done in any rate. It's about thirty miles southeast of Boston,
Speaker 1: and according to Atlas Obscura, it's currently owned by the
Speaker 1: Sketchwat Arts Association, and if you go to their website
Speaker 1: you can see recent photos of it. The website states
Speaker 1: quote the Ellis House is a unique Gothic Romanesque mansion
Speaker 1: and home to the SAA's indoor classes and workshops. It
Speaker 1: also provides studio space for half a dozen artists. So hey,
Speaker 1: oh oh, go there, sign up to create your own
Speaker 1: entry for the night gallery. Uh this, Yeah, this house
Speaker 1: is still standing and there and there's there's still wonderfully
Speaker 1: creative things going on inside it.
Speaker 2: I will drop everything in my life and go to
Speaker 2: Massachusetts to become a part of doctor Freudstein's art collective.
Speaker 1: Uh. And, by the way, this house was also used
Speaker 1: in Umberto Lindsay's ghost house, so you get to double
Speaker 1: dip by visiting this place.
Speaker 2: It's a really good house, I will say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's a handsome house, and they fix it
Speaker 1: up nicely for the film because they're just they're they're
Speaker 1: just uh, headstones everywhere, just all through the yard and
Speaker 1: then also in the surrounding woods.
Speaker 2: All right, Now, here's the part of the episode where
Speaker 2: we would normally start getting into a full plot breakdown.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's quite the terminology to use here.
Speaker 2: I think what happens is we are going to be
Speaker 2: able to describe a bunch of scenes that happened in
Speaker 2: the movie. But I don't know if we can really
Speaker 2: explain the plot.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean, I still have there's still things I
Speaker 1: do not understand, and I've I've seen this film more
Speaker 1: than I've seen some truly, you know, you know, subjectively
Speaker 1: great works of art. I've also, especially on this last viewing,
Speaker 1: I really tried to understand everything. You know. It was
Speaker 1: like I was gonna be quizzed on it. Can I
Speaker 1: really speak to what's happening in this movie? And I
Speaker 1: really can't explain some of the choices and elements here,
Speaker 1: though I will try.
Speaker 2: We will at least try to describe a number of
Speaker 2: the dioramas that ful She creates in the shoe box
Speaker 2: of this film. Yes, so from the very opening, I
Speaker 2: gotta say, especially with this restoration, it looks great. The
Speaker 2: house is beautifully framed on the opening shot with the
Speaker 2: you know it's it's got the dark in the background,
Speaker 2: with tombstones and dead limbs in the foreground. I assume
Speaker 2: I could. I can't remember if you mentioned this a
Speaker 2: minute ago. Is there actually a cemetery by the house
Speaker 2: or with the tombstones added for the film?
Speaker 1: I think the tombstones were added for the film. I'm
Speaker 1: not one clear on that, but but I didn't I
Speaker 1: didn't see anybody pointing out, you know, there being an
Speaker 1: actual cemetery surrounding this house.
Speaker 2: Okay, well we see it in the opening frame like this,
Speaker 2: this this beautiful old house with the darkness behind it
Speaker 2: and the tombstones and the dead trees with bare limbs
Speaker 2: in the foreground. And this, of course is setting up
Speaker 2: a classic horror movie style opening in which some people
Speaker 2: are in a place they're not supposed to be and
Speaker 2: they're probably about to meet an ill end.
Speaker 1: Right, It's it's ultimately a familiar scene I feel like
Speaker 1: I've seen and other films. A woman is dressing and
Speaker 1: then she starts looking around the house for her boyfriend,
Speaker 1: assuming he's preyanking her by suddenly disappearing. And then, you know,
Speaker 1: so she wanders around being like, oh, what is his name?
Speaker 1: Is it Mike?
Speaker 2: Steve?
Speaker 1: It's Steve. She's like, Steve, are you there, Steve? Steve,
Speaker 1: stop kidding around, Steve. And then, of course what happens.
Speaker 1: She discovers Steve. Steve is dead. He's been nailed at
Speaker 1: the backside of a door with a pair of surgical scissors,
Speaker 1: and his brain has been surgically or through blunt trauma exposed.
Speaker 1: And then an unseen killer stabs her through the back
Speaker 1: of the head with a kitchen knife so that the blade,
Speaker 1: the end of the blade, emerges out of her mouth,
Speaker 1: and then she falls to the floor dead, and then
Speaker 1: a pair of well a pair of hands, one of
Speaker 1: which appears human and one of which appears to be
Speaker 1: a monster hand drags her away into the cellar.
Speaker 2: So a standard B horror opening, but there's a lot
Speaker 2: stylistically about it that's just very elegant and very much
Speaker 2: a cut above what you would see in movies like
Speaker 2: this normally. So one thing I wanted to draw attention
Speaker 2: to is a wonderful shot where while she is wandering
Speaker 2: around calling out to Steve, saying like, Steve, are you
Speaker 2: trying to scare me? I don't think it's funny, But
Speaker 2: she's coming down a hallway that is lit from behind,
Speaker 2: and in the foreground we are looking through the gaps
Speaker 2: in an iron spiral staircase that's just covered in cobwebs,
Speaker 2: and it's a gorgeous shot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And a great shot of this seemingly endless
Speaker 1: sellar in this house. I mean, it's supposed to be
Speaker 1: a haunted house, so it makes sense that maybe the
Speaker 1: seller doesn't obey the laws of reality and space and time.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it seems enormous, and it seems like there
Speaker 1: are corners of it that haven't been explored in like
Speaker 1: a century and a half. I ultimately love the unreality
Speaker 1: of this cellar.
Speaker 2: But then after the opening murders, you get some music,
Speaker 2: of course, this electronic organ fugue. You get the title
Speaker 2: it says House by the Cemetery, and then there's an
Speaker 2: interesting compositional shift coming up, so you see the same
Speaker 2: house and a girl standing in the window looking out
Speaker 2: making kind of a scary screaming face, which then cross
Speaker 2: fades to a black and white photograph hanging on a
Speaker 2: wall of that house with the girl looking out the
Speaker 2: window with the screaming face. Then you see a title
Speaker 2: that says New York pulls back. The wall is in
Speaker 2: a modern apartment, modern at the time the film was made.
Speaker 2: And then sitting there staring at the photo is a
Speaker 2: profoundly uncanny blonde child. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Bob.
Speaker 1: I want to come back to that ghost girl for
Speaker 1: a second, because yes, she's haunting in the photo, but
Speaker 1: the face she's making it could be interpreted as fear.
Speaker 1: But it's also the kind of face that a child
Speaker 1: like this would make when somebody does a cannon ball
Speaker 1: into a swimming pool and a kool Aid commercial. You
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Wow, Yeah, yeah, that's radical.
Speaker 1: And it is radical. But yes, now we meet Bob,
Speaker 1: and we say we meet the whole family. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: doctor Norman Boyle, there's his wife, Lucy Boyle. There is
Speaker 1: adorable Bob, who we've already described disturbingly cherubic and speaks
Speaker 1: in the dubbed voice of an adult woman doing a
Speaker 1: kid's voice, so uncanny. Yeah, and in there, yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of thought of scenes too, of Bob playing just
Speaker 1: way too diligently with his toys. I'm like, who has
Speaker 1: ever given a remote control car to a child and
Speaker 1: seeing them and get that this much usage out of it?
Speaker 1: It's really not fair.
Speaker 2: Well this movie. Also, I'm not sure if it understands
Speaker 2: that remote control cars don't work in the woods where
Speaker 2: the ground is covered in leaves and is not flat.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, but so here's a question I have. Is Bob
Speaker 2: like Danny Torrance like, is he psychic or is just
Speaker 2: the ghost girl picking him as a regular, non psychic
Speaker 2: person to send messages to.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I may only speaks to Bob, right,
Speaker 1: Bob seems to be the only one who can see her,
Speaker 1: So it's here she can speak to him because he's
Speaker 1: a child, or he's a special child. But I have
Speaker 1: a suspicion that the idea is that children are weird
Speaker 1: and can see ghosts.
Speaker 2: Okay, Okay, so it's it's not him in particular, He's
Speaker 2: just a child and the child, the child's mind is
Speaker 2: open to the spirit world in a way that the
Speaker 2: adult's mind is closed.
Speaker 1: I guess so, but ultimately that's just how I choose
Speaker 1: to interpret it. And there's I'm not sure where ful
Speaker 1: she actually stood on this.
Speaker 2: Well, immediately what happens here is that Lucy the mother
Speaker 2: comes in. It is like hey, Bob, and Bob's like, well,
Speaker 2: I'm hearing voices talking to me out of this photograph
Speaker 2: and she's just like oh haha, And he's like, Mommy,
Speaker 2: why does that girl in the photograph keep telling us
Speaker 2: we shouldn't go to the house. And the mom can't
Speaker 2: see the girl in the window in the photo, so
Speaker 2: she just kind of shrugs it off. But then we
Speaker 2: see a kind of alternate reality where may the ghost
Speaker 2: girl and I guess her mom are standing in the
Speaker 2: woods somewhere. I guess they are standing among the tombstones
Speaker 2: and the cemetery outside the house. And we're told that
Speaker 2: this is in New Whitby, Boston.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this film most of these scenes were filmed
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts, take place in Massachusetts, and this is ultimately
Speaker 1: a Massachusetts film, maybe our first I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: we've I can't remember if any of the previous films
Speaker 1: we've watched have been set or filmed there.
Speaker 2: I believe this film is sort of trying to tap
Speaker 2: into some Miskatonic magic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think so, But that doesn't mean we
Speaker 1: don't have a brief stop over in New York City.
Speaker 1: On the streets of New York, Doctor Norman Boyle is
Speaker 1: seen chatting with Professor Mueller, who is played by the
Speaker 1: director Luccio Folci, and they're discussing Boyle's research. He is
Speaker 1: about to move his entire family out of the city
Speaker 1: into rural Massachusetts so that he can continue the suicide
Speaker 1: research that his colleague, doctor Peterson, was doing right before
Speaker 1: said colleague murdered his mistress and committed suicide himself. Now,
Speaker 1: what sort of research could this possibly have been? What
Speaker 1: breakthroughs was he making? I have no idea, and there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of of There are not really any
Speaker 1: answers to be found in the film.
Speaker 2: What a setup. And yeah, this scene on the sidewalk
Speaker 2: is hilarious, and I think maybe it's supposed to be.
Speaker 2: I don't think this is unintentional because Fulchi is talking
Speaker 2: to this lead actor here with you know, the glorious
Speaker 2: head of hair, and Fullchi's I guess playing playing an
Speaker 2: older colleague who's got this ridiculous huge red bow tie
Speaker 2: and these thick glasses and uh. And as he's talking
Speaker 2: to Ta Paolo, here to what's a Norman Boyle, he says,
Speaker 2: and there he was researching suicide times. We have to
Speaker 2: live in taxi. He just nails a taxi, hops in
Speaker 2: and takes off.
Speaker 1: That's just that's just New York living. Yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: you gotta keep moving otherwise the Manhattan babies will catch
Speaker 1: up with you.
Speaker 2: So next the family is driving out to the house.
Speaker 2: And this is one of the parts where I heard
Speaker 2: that that that walk down melody that sounds like a
Speaker 2: music version of Cruels Summer. But this is also the
Speaker 2: part where the dad says. The dad is talking about
Speaker 2: how if it weren't for so and so, I don't
Speaker 2: remember who he's talking about, we wouldn't have a house
Speaker 2: to live in where we're going, we'd have to live
Speaker 2: in a tent. And Bob yells, I wish.
Speaker 1: Well, that's pretty authentic. That's pretty good.
Speaker 2: There's a scene that comes up in a minute here
Speaker 2: that is great. That has May the ghost girl, who
Speaker 2: by the way, doesn't look like a she just looks
Speaker 2: like a normal person, just like a kid. Yeah, not like,
Speaker 2: you know, translucent or anything. So it's just like a
Speaker 2: kid is out on a street. I think this is
Speaker 2: supposed to be in Boston or this town outside of
Speaker 2: Boston that they're going to, and she is staring into
Speaker 2: the window of a storefront that has mannikins dressed up
Speaker 2: in I guess the clothes the store is selling. And
Speaker 2: so one of these mannequins looks like a very evil
Speaker 2: Denise Richards type face, and it's wearing one of the
Speaker 2: what do you call those frilly white collars, kind of
Speaker 2: like Doiley's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of like like a like a witch costume.
Speaker 1: I guess it looks.
Speaker 2: At sort of. But then it's like May hallucinates the
Speaker 2: the mannequin getting decapitated and it bleeds everywhere. So this
Speaker 2: is a mannequin, but it's full of blood and organs
Speaker 2: and stuff. The head falls off and it's just splatter
Speaker 2: for a moment, and then somehow this leads into the
Speaker 2: meeting of May and Bob, which is very funny as well.
Speaker 2: Like Bob shows up in town his parents going to
Speaker 2: talk to the realtors, and he's just sitting in the car,
Speaker 2: I think, playing with the toy, and then suddenly they're
Speaker 2: like psychic mind melding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like she's a block or two away, and they're
Speaker 1: just chatting with each other like they're right next to
Speaker 1: each other through their brains.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, and somehow this sequence ends with Bob like
Speaker 2: sitting in a park cradling this gigantic, horrible doll.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this giant garbage doll that he's been given. I
Speaker 1: guess by May. He's like, Mom, we're taking this home, right,
Speaker 1: and they're like, yeah, yeah, load it up, load up
Speaker 1: your garbage doll.
Speaker 2: But so from here we get the family moving into
Speaker 2: the new house, and there's a lot of great photography.
Speaker 2: We get to see them interacting with the realtors. This
Speaker 2: is where there's that funny scene where MSUs Giddleson drives
Speaker 2: over a tombstone and then yells at it, and Lucy
Speaker 2: the mother, has this strange freak out about the doll
Speaker 2: that Bob found. It's like, but it's after they get
Speaker 2: back to the house, so I didn't really understand that
Speaker 2: he brings this disgusting doll home. And then it's sitting
Speaker 2: there in the house and she sees it and she's like,
Speaker 2: does the little whip zoom on her eyes? This movie
Speaker 2: loves whip zooms. By the way, did you notice.
Speaker 1: That now that you pointed out, Yeah, there's a lot,
Speaker 1: a lot of whip zooming going.
Speaker 2: On sometimes in situations where it wouldn't seem to make
Speaker 2: total sense, like it will happen in cases where somebody
Speaker 2: is having a horrible vision, but it also sometimes just
Speaker 2: happens in the middle of a conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, this is the point in the film where
Speaker 1: we introduce one of my favorite characters. And we've already
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about her the actor playing her,
Speaker 1: But Anne and the babysitter with the magnificent eyebrows shows up,
Speaker 1: and apparently we're supposed to connect her to the mannequin
Speaker 1: that we saw, the mannequin that's head fell off in
Speaker 1: the window is supposed to look like this actor, even
Speaker 1: though she really doesn't. And I got more caught up
Speaker 1: on the fact that she looks like a particular former
Speaker 1: First Lady of the United States. But I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: be Anne. It's supposed to be Anne. Apparently I didn't
Speaker 1: notice that, but yeah, you're right. But yeah, well I
Speaker 1: was thinking Denise Richards. But either way, yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 1: exactly look like Ann. I guess it has long brown
Speaker 1: hair and in intense eyebrows, So there you go. But anyway,
Speaker 1: when Anne shows up, she's just a lady in their house.
Speaker 1: Suddenly they're unpacking or something, and suddenly a person's there
Speaker 1: and they're like huh, and she says, miss Gettleman sent me,
Speaker 1: I'm Anne, the babysitter, and then just zoom whip zoom, zoom,
Speaker 1: cut zoom. So this is just instantly just so insane,
Speaker 1: because I mean, in what universe does a realitter provide
Speaker 1: your babysitter? In which case does a babysitter just sort
Speaker 1: of appear without you know, there're no credentials, Like the
Speaker 1: parents weren't involved in this at all. They just suddenly
Speaker 1: they have this strange woman in their house babysitting for them.
Speaker 1: And then various other questions come up regarding Anne and
Speaker 1: this whole babysitting arrangement and her relationship with any other
Speaker 1: entity in the film. It's bonkers.
Speaker 2: For a moment one Anne appears to be up to
Speaker 2: no good like, so from here the family starts going
Speaker 2: about their business and Norman is I think trying to
Speaker 2: discover what the scholar who lived in this house before
Speaker 2: him was up to, like what he had found out
Speaker 2: and what had led him to do these horrible things.
Speaker 2: And meanwhile, there's like a scene where Lucy is walking
Speaker 2: around at night having heard strange sounds in the house
Speaker 2: and she just like comes up on Anne, who is
Speaker 2: trying to pry her way into the boarded up basement
Speaker 2: with a shovel. She give gives her the most evil
Speaker 2: just hyena eyes.
Speaker 1: So Anne lives in the house with them, right, she's
Speaker 1: like a living yeah, babysitter, Like basically she's a nanny,
Speaker 1: even though they don't really use the word that's that's
Speaker 1: apparently what they mean nanny. But but then at the
Speaker 1: same time, like the relationship is so weird. There's a
Speaker 1: point later on where Anne disappears from the film for
Speaker 1: good and the mom comes home finds that Anne is no, no,
Speaker 1: no longer around. It's just bob by himself, and she
Speaker 1: just dismisses it. She's like, oh, I guess Anne went
Speaker 1: home to see her parents. They're like there's no communication
Speaker 1: with the babysitter slash nanny. It's just like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: she's done. She wandered off. That's fine, that's what babysitters do.
Speaker 2: That is the end of Anne the the O pair.
Speaker 1: And yet there's still more questions about Ann. We'll get
Speaker 1: to as we proceed.
Speaker 2: So where is it? After this? We follow Norman for
Speaker 2: a bit because he's trying to figure out what was
Speaker 2: going on with doctor Peterson's research, and he goes to
Speaker 2: some place as a library. I guess it's supposed to
Speaker 2: be a university, Like, is this Miskatonic University or something?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we're getting kind of kind of vibe.
Speaker 1: You know, this is the this is the Arkham Horror
Speaker 1: section of the movie where he's going and researching the
Speaker 1: strange research of his predecessor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so he meets a scholar there, a scholar
Speaker 2: who's got like this awesome looking beard, and the scholars like,
Speaker 2: you've been here before with your daughter, and Norman is like, nope,
Speaker 2: I've never been here before and I don't have a daughter.
Speaker 2: And does that ever come up again? I don't recall
Speaker 2: that connecting to anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't really understand that, Like what are they
Speaker 1: At first? I was like, they just mistook Bob for
Speaker 1: a girl, which, you know, it's The misgendering of children
Speaker 1: happens all the time, sure, you know, with with when
Speaker 1: you're when you're a parent, or when you're you're talking
Speaker 1: to parents. So I thought, well, maybe that's it. But no,
Speaker 1: but I don't think so.
Speaker 2: He'd never been there.
Speaker 1: But then who was it? But we get to meet
Speaker 1: the librarian in this Yes, right, the librarian was It
Speaker 1: was a lot of fun. It's a small role, but
Speaker 1: it's played by this guy. Uh Dimpolo sachar Rola ska
Speaker 1: Rolla perhaps playing the librarian. Uh yeah, and he's I
Speaker 1: really like this guy. He has some real Ronald Lacy energy.
Speaker 1: You know, he's got kind of a you know, a
Speaker 1: devious babyface.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, he reminds me a little bit of
Speaker 2: Dylan Baker, you know.
Speaker 1: The actor. Yeah, yeah, but either.
Speaker 2: Way, he's a stupendous baby faced Renfield, boiling over with
Speaker 2: nervous laughter. I loved his scenes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he ultimately doesn't play a particularly devious character.
Speaker 1: He doesn't. You know, this is not a character that
Speaker 1: turns out later to be a ghost or a cult
Speaker 1: member or anything weird like that. He just is this
Speaker 1: this slightly suspicious librarian, and it's he's a fun screen
Speaker 1: presence apparently shows up in a number of number of
Speaker 1: other Italian B movies of this this time period, just
Speaker 1: a bookish weirdo.
Speaker 2: There's also an awesome scene later on in the movie
Speaker 2: where he's wearing a green sweater. It looks like it's
Speaker 2: made of felt. So he comes in, he's like a
Speaker 2: walking pool table. I loved it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it actually got some fun dialogue in
Speaker 1: that part because it's it's like he's coming off a
Speaker 1: little passive aggressive. He's like, I was just checking on
Speaker 1: the room because the library he's closed on Sundays. And meanwhile,
Speaker 1: our hero I was like, I'm here to research.
Speaker 2: Yeah, have you seen my hair? Do you know who
Speaker 2: I am?
Speaker 1: Look? How handsome I am? How dare you question my
Speaker 1: presence here.
Speaker 2: There's a scene somewhere after this that's really funny where
Speaker 2: Bob is out in the woods with his remote control
Speaker 2: race car again like you can't really play with a
Speaker 2: remote control car in the woods, and he's wandering around
Speaker 2: and he finds a tombstone for somebody named Mary Freudstein,
Speaker 2: and then he immediately has this incomprehensible encounter with the
Speaker 2: ghost girl May, where May says she says a line
Speaker 2: like it's only it's all a lie. She's not really
Speaker 2: buried there. Oh, I know, she's not really buried there.
Speaker 2: I don't know what that means.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know either, because she's she's a ghost.
Speaker 1: But I guess I don't know where she's buried if
Speaker 1: she's not buried here.
Speaker 2: So this is all while Norman in his library is
Speaker 2: learning about the sort of unsavory history of a doctor,
Speaker 2: Jacob Freudstein, who I think at one point lived in
Speaker 2: the house that they're staying in now. So this is
Speaker 2: not the guy who was there before them, but the
Speaker 2: guy who was there before that.
Speaker 1: Guy, right, And this is when we find out that
Speaker 1: this isn't just a house by the cemetery, it is
Speaker 1: perhaps a house on the cemetery, or more specifically, the
Speaker 1: cemetery is also inside the house.
Speaker 2: The cemetery is coming from inside the house. And the
Speaker 2: scene that sets that up, by the way, begins with
Speaker 2: an absolutely gorgeous framing. So, like, this house has these
Speaker 2: stained glass windows with these like green and yellow and
Speaker 2: purple flower shapes that are that are framed. It's this
Speaker 2: blue stained glass. It's just wonderful. And this is the
Speaker 2: framing for when Lucy's like washing the floor and she
Speaker 2: pulls aside a rug and discovers under the rug there's
Speaker 2: just a tomb. There's like a gravestone inside the house.
Speaker 1: And we'll we'll later find out that in kind of
Speaker 1: Scooby Doo fashion, this tombstone is also a secret door,
Speaker 1: like a trapdoor that gives you entryway into the cellar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in addition to the door that nobody can open
Speaker 1: yet that clearly goes to.
Speaker 2: The cellar, right yeah, yeah, yeah, And like in this scene,
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of grunts and jostling and whatnot coming
Speaker 2: from the basement, so it sort of indicates the trapdoor thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a lot of haunted sounds in this house,
Speaker 1: Like there's creaking, there's progressively grunting, and also like ghost
Speaker 1: baby weeping. There's a lot of a lot going on
Speaker 1: in this house from an auditory point of view here.
Speaker 2: So Lucy is not happy about this, and she screams,
Speaker 2: but eventually she and Norman are discussing it and Lucy's like, wow,
Speaker 2: it's weird that there's a tomb inside the house, and
Speaker 2: Norman says, it's just something you'll have to get used
Speaker 2: to this ain't New York.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's implied like this is just what they do
Speaker 1: out here. Yeah, And I remember thinking, is it is
Speaker 1: this ever a thing? I don't think I've ever visited
Speaker 1: a historic home where they're like, and now you'll notice
Speaker 1: there's a gravestone in the middle of the house. This
Speaker 1: is what they did.
Speaker 2: I'm open minded, but a little doubtful on that. I
Speaker 2: don't know. Listeners right in do houses in New England
Speaker 2: all have bodies buried in the floors? Oh and another thing,
Speaker 2: by the way, that was right in the middle of
Speaker 2: the sequence, there's a part where Norman is standing in
Speaker 2: the kitchen and it's one of those things where I
Speaker 2: think we've talked about how a great thing with some
Speaker 2: of these Italian horror directors is they really know how
Speaker 2: to put a colorful item or two in the middle
Speaker 2: of an otherwise color drab shot to just really make
Speaker 2: it pop and add some contrast. And in one of
Speaker 2: these shots, the colorful item in the foreground is this
Speaker 2: big red box of something called fiddle fattle. It looks
Speaker 2: like it's a I don't know, it looks like crackerjacks
Speaker 2: or something. It might be caramel popcorn.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Watching this scene, I also I thought back to
Speaker 1: our recent viewing of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath and was
Speaker 1: thinking about, Yeah, how he'll put just some sort of item,
Speaker 1: it doesn't even matter what it is, in the center,
Speaker 1: and the color will just suck you in. This doesn't
Speaker 1: quite pull that off, but you can see that Fulci
Speaker 1: was going to the same sort of effect.
Speaker 2: But I guess this is all leading up to one
Speaker 2: of the finest sequences in the entire film, which is
Speaker 2: the bat scene. Oh God, the bat scene is so good,
Speaker 2: and it comes from the first time the family actually
Speaker 2: decides to venture into the base. So earlier, Anne was
Speaker 2: trying to pry her way into the basement in the
Speaker 2: middle of the night. Nobody ever explained that. I don't
Speaker 2: know why. She doesn't explain why. I don't think the
Speaker 2: movie addresses why she was trying to pry in, But
Speaker 2: if it does, that I missed it. But eventually the
Speaker 2: whole family goes in, and there's this great scene of Norman,
Speaker 2: the dad, trying to unlock the door to the basement
Speaker 2: by prying at the key with the sharp edge of
Speaker 2: a kitchen knife. So he's got a kitchen kick like
Speaker 2: wedged in it, blade out like blade poking into the
Speaker 2: metal of the key and just twisting and twist, wrenching
Speaker 2: it over to turn the lock.
Speaker 1: One of several scenes where people were open it, trying
Speaker 1: to open or are opening doors using knives in the
Speaker 1: most unsafe manner possible. In a way, it's very effective
Speaker 1: because you can't help but cringe watching them do this.
Speaker 2: Fulci Actually, scenes from this movie could be used as
Speaker 2: a video version of the Don't Do What Donnie Don't
Speaker 2: Does book about knife safety.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's basically it's shake hands with danger, but generally
Speaker 1: but I guess the thing is you keep expecting that
Speaker 1: knife to slip in there to be a real bloody
Speaker 1: gore effect, and then there's not. But then what happens
Speaker 1: instead is, yeah, they open the door successfully with their knife,
Speaker 1: and then they start heading down there to check it out.
Speaker 1: I think Dad's in front right with the flashlight and
Speaker 1: all yeah, yeah, And then in swoops the bat, the bat,
Speaker 1: and this is a great scene because the bat latches
Speaker 1: onto Norman's hand and then he still has a knife,
Speaker 1: so he stabs it like a million times, like backing
Speaker 1: up out of the cellar into the kitchen, just still
Speaker 1: stabbing at this bat. It's a fix to his hand,
Speaker 1: producing about six bats worth of blood in the process,
Speaker 1: and just getting it everywhere.
Speaker 2: A flinging bat, blood on everyone in the room, and
Speaker 2: it's just stuck on his hand like a leach, like
Speaker 2: it's just all you can't pull it off, and he's
Speaker 2: just stabbing and stabbing and getting blood on his whole family,
Speaker 2: and it's absolutely ludicrous. This scene is everything. By the way,
Speaker 2: I got to say, it compares quite favorably to another
Speaker 2: bat attack film from an Italian horror movie. Do you
Speaker 2: remember the bat scene in Suspiria? I do not very funny,
Speaker 2: but underwhelming compared to this one. So whereas this bat
Speaker 2: attack is just the paragon of excess, the bat attack
Speaker 2: in Suspiria is where Jessica Harper is in her room
Speaker 2: at the school and suddenly she gets creeped out by
Speaker 2: It's just like a ball of black socks with wings.
Speaker 2: It's not a good.
Speaker 1: Bat one to ten on the bat believability scale. What
Speaker 1: do you give the Suspiria beat.
Speaker 2: The Suspiria bat would be like a two or three.
Speaker 2: This one. I don't know if believability is the word,
Speaker 2: but it so overwhelms the senses that one need not
Speaker 2: believe either way. Is just there. It's just in.
Speaker 1: You, all right, So I'm gonna mark you down for
Speaker 1: a five.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: But the other thing is this scene reminded me of
Speaker 1: The Simpsons where Homer gets his hand stuck in the toaster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it still has his hand stuck in the toaster.
Speaker 2: Dad, it's in there again, all right.
Speaker 1: So event eventually the bat is vanquished. And at that point,
Speaker 1: I think everybody's had enough of the seller and they
Speaker 1: have agreed not to go back in there for the time.
Speaker 2: P Well, and we're to understand that after the scene
Speaker 2: the family expresses their desire to leave the house, because
Speaker 2: the next one is at the real estate office. You've
Speaker 2: got the real ittors, the two realtors sitting there and
Speaker 2: they're just talking about how, oh yeah, everybody always wants
Speaker 2: out of this house. Why won't people just stay in
Speaker 2: the house.
Speaker 1: And this is great because we don't get enough scenes
Speaker 1: of realtors talking to real litters in our movies, particularly
Speaker 1: on a haunted house films. You know, maybe the owners
Speaker 1: of the renters are talking with the realtor, but but
Speaker 1: not this kind of inside realortor talk you get.
Speaker 2: So one of the real ittors is the one we've
Speaker 2: already met, miss Gidtleson Gitttleston.
Speaker 1: In one played by Dagmar Yes.
Speaker 2: And then the other one is this guy who I
Speaker 2: don't know if he has a name, but he has
Speaker 2: a powerful aura of sleeves.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: And then so after this, I don't know if this
Speaker 2: has any causal relationship to anything else in the movie,
Speaker 2: but we get at least one scene of like the
Speaker 2: ghost people in their own environment, like May and her
Speaker 2: mom just in a house, hanging out, and May is
Speaker 2: depicted as dwelling within a gin pop of a supermax
Speaker 2: prison for dolls. It's, you know, just dolls everywhere, crammed in.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: You imagine that the dolls are like, you know, shoving
Speaker 2: each other for more personal space, and they have some
Speaker 2: kind of conversation here in the house. And I think
Speaker 2: this is implied to be the same house, but like
Speaker 2: not in a different reality version of the house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'm not sure where to fall on this,
Speaker 1: like this room and also so to a large extent,
Speaker 1: the seller are these places that are that physically exist
Speaker 1: and are closed off from the rest of the house,
Speaker 1: like the main I presume rental house. I forget if
Speaker 1: they were supposed to purchase this house or surely they're renting.
Speaker 1: You don't don't just buy a haunted house you want
Speaker 1: to rent. But I don't know if these are rooms
Speaker 1: that physically exist or if they are essentially ghost rooms
Speaker 1: and ghost domains. And ultimately, the house by the Cemetery
Speaker 1: is kind of like the House of Leaves and it
Speaker 1: doesn't obey, you know, the typical laws of time and space.
Speaker 2: Mmm, that's a nice comparison, except I would say House
Speaker 2: of Leaves is somehow less confusing than House for Cemetery.
Speaker 2: So from here the movie kind of ramps up more
Speaker 2: into into attack mode. So multiple characters are going to
Speaker 2: get slaughtered by the monster. Here there's a scene where
Speaker 2: the real estate agent Ms. Gidtlson just kind of pops
Speaker 2: into the house to wander around. There's some beautiful, eerie
Speaker 2: shots of the house, like that same window, the bay
Speaker 2: of windows with the stained glass and all that, and
Speaker 2: there are these lamps, these globe shaped lamps beside them.
Speaker 2: Is wonderful, wonderful composition. But so this lady's wandering through
Speaker 2: the house and she gets attacked by the tomb like
Speaker 2: the stone slab over the tomb that Lucy discovered there,
Speaker 2: it bites her leg essentially, and then she is killed
Speaker 2: by the monster hand guy from the beginning of the movie.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the doctor. That's doctor freud Stein, who
Speaker 1: will we will increasingly see a lot.
Speaker 2: More off right, Well, we don't see it's still just
Speaker 2: his hands here, Like, that's the big reveal at the
Speaker 2: end of the movie, is getting to see his full form.
Speaker 2: Here you just get hands. And then this lady gets
Speaker 2: murdered in a scene of an absolutely ridiculous excess of blood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a I think he stabs her with
Speaker 1: a poker multiple times.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So sometime around this point in the movie, also
Speaker 2: Norman discovers the cassette tapes made by his predecessor, by
Speaker 2: the previous scholar who was working in this house and
Speaker 2: this guy Peterson, and Peterson's recording himself talking into a
Speaker 2: tape recorder about the the freud Steen house. He seems
Speaker 2: to be losing his mind, he says, the house it
Speaker 2: draws me like an infernal magnet. How many have wandered
Speaker 2: into the waiting spider web. The smell of the rooms
Speaker 2: terrifies me, and then eventually we get to him saying blood, blood, blood,
Speaker 2: which of course it will be irresistible to all the
Speaker 2: Garth Morangi fans out there. But then then the scenes
Speaker 2: right after that are really full of stoppin' shop. So
Speaker 2: like the you know, mom comes home with the grocery
Speaker 2: bag that has at the Stop and Shop logo on them.
Speaker 2: Honest values are what stopping shop is all about. And
Speaker 2: then there's Stop and Shop brand cartons of milk everywhere.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, adding that you know, some level of that
Speaker 1: red Mario Bova pop to the background.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But here characters really start going down in the basement,
Speaker 2: so like Anne's going to go down in the basement,
Speaker 2: Bob's gonna go down in the basement, and and this
Speaker 2: this is third act territory here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So so first of all, I want so one
Speaker 1: of the people that goes down into the basement is Anne.
Speaker 1: And this is ultimately a sequence that really raises a
Speaker 1: lot even more questions for me because after the so
Speaker 1: after the real estate lady is again just brutally murdered
Speaker 1: in the upper portion of the house and then dragged
Speaker 1: into the into the cellar, it appears that Anne has
Speaker 1: spent quite a bit of time cleaning up after this murder,
Speaker 1: like the mom comes back. Apparently they went out to
Speaker 1: a restaurant last night. They had invited Anne, but Anne
Speaker 1: was going to go quote unquote visit her parents, which
Speaker 1: apparently means clean up after the murderous creature slash, ghosts,
Speaker 1: slash whatever that lives in the cellar. And then and
Speaker 1: then she just kind of avoids the topic about what
Speaker 1: she's doing. But she's like clearly cleaning up all this blood.
Speaker 1: So it's like, is Anne work looking for the presence
Speaker 1: in the basement? Is she a thrall of the forces
Speaker 1: in this house? What is it? It's not explained. And
Speaker 1: then when Anne goes looking for Bob wanders into the basement,
Speaker 1: the force brutally murders her, like chops her head off
Speaker 1: with a knife, and and so it's like, well, what
Speaker 1: was that all about? Then? But did she work for
Speaker 1: the thing in the basement? Did she work for some
Speaker 1: other force? Like what is the arrangement here? I have
Speaker 1: no idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could not understand it all. At first, it
Speaker 2: seems like she is working for the monster, and then
Speaker 2: she's surprised when she encounters it and so yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't know, I don't know. Yeah, why was she cleaning
Speaker 2: up the blood?
Speaker 1: Yeah, she died like she lived. A complete mystery. Okay,
Speaker 1: But when Bob's in the basement, then this is where
Speaker 1: the cellar really takes on. This this strange, otherworldly to mention,
Speaker 1: because there are the sounds and you know, creepy and
Speaker 1: also creepy sits. We keep seeing these big beast eyes
Speaker 1: glowing in the dark that remind me of the eyes
Speaker 1: of the Great Dweller from Stephen King's Creep Show. And
Speaker 1: it's easy to think when you first see them, oh,
Speaker 1: these must be the eyes of the presence in the basement.
Speaker 1: These are the eyes of doctor Freudstein. But as we'll
Speaker 1: explain when we finally see doctor Freudstein, he does not
Speaker 1: have these eyes. No, So what was this? Is this
Speaker 1: another presence? Is this another?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 1: Is this? Like? I have so many questions about the
Speaker 1: whole arrangement here with ghosts and potentially de mat demonic
Speaker 1: presences and also you know, artificially living undead creatures. It's
Speaker 1: really out there. I have no idea what's going on?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the same here, just these these weird glowing yellow
Speaker 2: and red catlike eyes in the dark that don't correspond
Speaker 2: to any creature or monster we see later in the film.
Speaker 1: But one of the key sequences is this scene, you know,
Speaker 1: where Bob is shut into the closet. Whatever's in the
Speaker 1: basement is able to close the door at will and
Speaker 1: trap people who wander down. Bob is stuck in the basement.
Speaker 1: Mom's trying to free him from the other side, and
Speaker 1: something's coming up the stairs to get him, and of
Speaker 1: course he is the doctor, uh, doctor freud Stein.
Speaker 2: Now we don't I think this part, we don't fully
Speaker 2: see his face yet. That reveal is still coming. But
Speaker 2: one of the funniest parts again is that Lucy is
Speaker 2: trying to get in to help Bob and she's literally
Speaker 2: prying at the basement door with a kitchen knife. It's
Speaker 2: just the knife in the door, in the door jam,
Speaker 2: just prying. And then that doesn't work. And then I
Speaker 2: think this is when Norman comes home and he attacks
Speaker 2: the door with a hatchet to try to get in
Speaker 2: and save Bob. There again was a very funny moment
Speaker 2: where he goes keep away from the door and Bob
Speaker 2: goes yep.
Speaker 1: I will and then here comes the monster hand and
Speaker 1: polds Bob's head against the door while Dad's trying to
Speaker 1: hack through it with the with the with the with
Speaker 1: the hatchet. Yes, it's it's pretty great. I mean, it's terrified.
Speaker 1: It's really an ingenious scene. I don't think I've ever
Speaker 1: seen anything quite like this.
Speaker 2: And the dad accidentally chops the monster's arm off with
Speaker 2: the hatchet, then also keeps hacking at the door in
Speaker 2: a very inefficient way, like hitting the door in completely
Speaker 2: different places, like in the middle and then at the side.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and finally we do get to see our monster,
Speaker 1: our doctor Freudstein in full and oh man, I've long
Speaker 1: loved this monster design. So he is apparently one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty year old surgeon with a who really liked
Speaker 1: illegal surgeries. He's beat death through some mix of butchery
Speaker 1: and cell theft. And when I say beat death, you
Speaker 1: know it's it's arguable, like how close the score was here,
Speaker 1: because his body is just this desiccated husk of scars
Speaker 1: and rot with seemingly new parts at it is needed.
Speaker 1: I think that's the reason he has one monster arm
Speaker 1: and one seemingly normal arm. He's clearly lost all of
Speaker 1: his humanity and now just exists. Is this thing that
Speaker 1: lures people into the cellar so he can cut them
Speaker 1: to ribbons and you know, maybe harvest some of their
Speaker 1: cells or their body parts. He boasts amazing strength to
Speaker 1: match his brutality. He can't speak, or doesn't seem to.
Speaker 1: He seems to only emit guttural sounds, and we don't
Speaker 1: know if this is due to his state of mind,
Speaker 1: like is his brain just rotting in there, or is
Speaker 1: it just because he doesn't have you know, functional speak
Speaker 1: chapparatus anymore. He also may have supernatural powers, like he
Speaker 1: may be the one that's opening and closing in that door,
Speaker 1: or he's aided by the ghosts of his family, or
Speaker 1: I was trying to figure out, well, maybe it has
Speaker 1: something to do with those those beast eyes in the cellar.
Speaker 1: Maybe like he's somehow horre cruxed himself and so he
Speaker 1: exists both as an incorporeal like presence in the cellar.
Speaker 1: But then also this this uh, this doomed you know,
Speaker 1: corporeal rotting creature. It's it's wonderful, Like the suit looks
Speaker 1: really good. You can basically smell him.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah. The design of the monster is absolutely fabulous,
Speaker 2: especially the head where his head is it's almost like
Speaker 2: a wax helmet of a kind, with these deeply recessed
Speaker 2: eye sockets that don't appear to have eyes in them,
Speaker 2: and and no mouth. Yeah, the mouth part is just
Speaker 2: kind of smoothed over and it's just this vertical scar.
Speaker 2: Now it's excellent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's kind of a bodies exhibit sensibility to his head,
Speaker 1: like he's been plasticized. Oh and then when Dad, Dad
Speaker 1: gets in there and it stabs him. And when Dad
Speaker 1: stabs him, another one of the most minervable scenes in
Speaker 1: the film is what comes out is not blood, but
Speaker 1: this just kind of rotted sludge filled with squirming maggots.
Speaker 1: I mean, just packed with maggots and not meal worms.
Speaker 1: Is sometimes the case, sometimes you have meal worms standing
Speaker 1: in for maggots. But this is the real deal. This
Speaker 1: is just a big maggoty sludge that starts dripping out
Speaker 1: of his body.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Tremendously gross and in some ways beautiful monster design.
Speaker 1: Now Here the big spoilers what happens when the family,
Speaker 1: the final three go up against doctor Freudstein. Well it
Speaker 1: doesn't go so well. Dad, you know, gets in there
Speaker 1: and gets the stabbing in on doctor Freudstein. But then
Speaker 1: doctor Freudstein rips Dad's throat out in a very grizzly sequence.
Speaker 1: And then Mom and Bob are going up these stairs
Speaker 1: to that tombstone trap door and trying to force it
Speaker 1: open so that they can escape, and Freudstein ends up
Speaker 1: grabbing Mom and like dragging her down the stairs, bonking
Speaker 1: her head on each rung. And then and I think
Speaker 1: this must have been a I don't know if this
Speaker 1: was a cut scene, but like the next scene you
Speaker 1: see is like her head has been dashed to pieces
Speaker 1: on the concrete floor, and then the creature's coming back up.
Speaker 1: Freudstein's coming back up to get Bob, and Bob manages
Speaker 1: to squeeze his way out and is pulled to safety
Speaker 1: by May, the ghost girl.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was confused about the ending. Does Bob
Speaker 2: escape the monster by becoming a ghost?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Does Bob does mean Bob dies or
Speaker 1: Bob crosses over or has Bob been saved in the
Speaker 1: physical world by May. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: I really don't. Yeah, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I think it's intentionally haunting and vague and in Fulci
Speaker 1: does nothing to clear it up by having the final
Speaker 1: shot in the film be this wide shot of the
Speaker 1: house again, and then there's a quote there attributed to
Speaker 1: Henry James, says, no one will ever know whether children
Speaker 1: or monsters or monsters are children.
Speaker 2: So I want to reveal something. This didn't exactly sound
Speaker 2: like Henry James to me, and I was like, I
Speaker 2: wonder if that's an authentic quote. I looked it up.
Speaker 2: It appears it is not. I could not find this
Speaker 2: as a Henry James quote anywhere, and I could find
Speaker 2: people saying that she made this up and attributed it
Speaker 2: falsely to Henry James. Why pick Henry James, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: I mean Henry James, Like, what's the connection there? I
Speaker 2: guess James wrote Turn of the Screw, which is a
Speaker 2: horror classic. Otherwise, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I have no idea. I mean, maybe it was just
Speaker 1: inspired by the works of Henry James, and yeah, just
Speaker 1: wanted to throw in a quotation, but then not a
Speaker 1: real quotation. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Good choice either way, good choice.
Speaker 1: So there you have it, House by the Cemetery. There's
Speaker 1: so much to love in this one.
Speaker 2: Well, so one of the things I did think was
Speaker 2: actually kind of interesting toward the end was did I
Speaker 2: understand correctly that a lot of the times the characters
Speaker 2: have heard a sound of a child sobbing and they
Speaker 2: thought it was Bob, and so they were looking for Bob,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't Bob. It turns out it was the monster,
Speaker 2: and the monster was sobbing with the voice of a child.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Possibly, but also I think those are
Speaker 1: possibly just ambient ghost noises, like ghosts of all the children,
Speaker 1: because we get these scenes of all these other bodies
Speaker 1: that have been cut to pieces down there. We see
Speaker 1: at one point, like a slaughtered child that looks a
Speaker 1: little bit like Bob. And I don't know if this
Speaker 1: is a vision of the potential future or this is
Speaker 1: a child that was killed in the past. I think
Speaker 1: there's that's during the playing of the Haunted tape.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the Haunted cassette tape where.
Speaker 1: Doctor Peterson is like, oh not that children. The children.
Speaker 2: It's labeled I think it says Peterson personal.
Speaker 1: Yes, And you remember what Norman does with that. After
Speaker 1: he's through listening to it, He's like, well, this is
Speaker 1: going directly into the fire burning in the library on
Speaker 1: a Sunday when it's closed. Why is there an open
Speaker 1: brazier in the library, so that to keep the tape,
Speaker 1: keep the place warm, or just in case cursed documents
Speaker 1: or recordings are found. There's like a sign saying, remember,
Speaker 1: if you find a cursed document in our cassette tape
Speaker 1: in the library, incinerate immediately, be considerate of others.
Speaker 2: I mean, I got to say, we're deep enough in
Speaker 2: the dream logic of the plot by that point it
Speaker 2: feels right. Yeah, So I guess that's house by the cemetery.
Speaker 1: That is a house by the cemetery. So this one is.
Speaker 1: This one's pretty widely available at this point. You can
Speaker 1: find you can ultimately find it streaming a lot of places,
Speaker 1: and the version streaming you can, you know, purchase a
Speaker 1: rent digitally. I find that it tends to be the
Speaker 1: restored version. That's the version I watched. I watched the
Speaker 1: first half of it on my trial of AMC Plus
Speaker 1: in Apple, and then my trial ran out and I
Speaker 1: had to switch to a trial of like Showtime or
Speaker 1: something to finish watching it. So I took the cheapskate approach,
Speaker 1: but I was also very tempted to pick up the
Speaker 1: handsome blue Underground Blu ray of this, which has fully restored,
Speaker 1: but also well with the version I was looking at.
Speaker 1: It comes with all these behind the scenes features, and
Speaker 1: also it comes with the soundtrack as a CD, which
Speaker 1: was very tempting as well.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, sounds like a steal.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it
Speaker 1: up here. We're gonna we're gonna close up the house
Speaker 1: by the cemetery. We're gonna put the reorder's lock on
Speaker 1: the front door, and we'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: another another weird film. But yeah, thanks again for everyone
Speaker 1: who's who's enjoyed these or put up with these episodes
Speaker 1: over the past year. If you want to listen to
Speaker 1: weird more episodes of Weird House Cinema, we air it
Speaker 1: every Friday in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed.
Speaker 1: We're primarily a science podcast, believe it or not, and
Speaker 1: we do our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I
Speaker 1: know it's kind of hard to tell during the month
Speaker 1: of October because we have a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of creepy content thrown in there if you're just discovering
Speaker 1: us or something, But yeah, core episodes on Tuesdays and
Speaker 1: Thursday's Artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesday. On Monday we
Speaker 1: have a listener mail and over weekend we air a rerun.
Speaker 2: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 2: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 2: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 2: to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
Speaker 2: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: your Mind dot com.
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