Ah, The House by the Cemetery, Fulci’s 1981 love letter to decomposing corpses and questionable hygiene. Watching this film is like being invited to a family reunion where everyone has been dead for a century—but don’t worry, they’re lively enough to murder you with scissors, fireplace pokers, and the occasional overenthusiastic hand. If horror were a buffet, this movie serves cold meatloaf with a side of maggots, sprinkled liberally with nonsensical plotting.
The plot attempts to straddle supernatural dread and slasher chaos but trips over its own legs in the process. A family moves into a decrepit Massachusetts mansion, which apparently doubles as an amateur morgue and a history lesson in Victorian surgical malpractice. Our protagonist, Norman, has the investigative skills of a particularly distracted mole, and the rest of the Boyle family wanders the house like extras in a low-budget haunted tour—screaming when convenient, refusing to acknowledge glaringly obvious threats, and generally demonstrating why none of us should leave our kids alone with babysitters who have a taste for blood.
Fulci’s flair for grotesque visuals is on full, unapologetic display here. Limbs are hacked, heads are banged, and the occasional hand makes an appearance that seems half-conceived, half-regretted. Yet, for all its ambition in body horror, the narrative logic is a sieve. The villains’ motives are as murky as the basement lighting, and the characters’ choices range from “laughably naïve” to “why are you still alive?” levels of stupidity. One wonders if the film secretly intended to double as a lesson in poor decision-making.
Cinematography and set design do provide a certain charm, if your charm involves peeling wallpaper, creaky floorboards, and a basement that looks like it was decorated by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe after a very bad day. The score scratches along the nerves but often feels as chaotic as the script, leaving you alternately frightened, confused, and wondering whether your DVD player has gone rogue.
The cast wrestles valiantly with Fulci’s corpse-strewn circus, with Catriona MacColl’s Lucy Boyle standing out for managing to look simultaneously terrified and exasperated in roughly equal measure. Giovanni Frezza as Bob is about as convincing a child witness as a deer caught in headlights, which is fair—any child in that house would be traumatized forever.
In short, The House by the Cemetery is like that bizarre cousin who shows up uninvited, smells faintly of decay, and yet somehow convinces everyone at the party that it’s “fun to hang out with him.” It’s sloppy, it’s gruesome, it makes very little sense, and yet you can’t look away. There’s a perverse joy in its chaos, a twisted delight in its bloody absurdity. Just remember: don’t take your eyes off the basement, and whatever you do, never trust a hand that looks like it could fall off at any moment.
Verdict: A masterclass in how to terrify, confuse, and disgust in roughly equal measure—if you can stomach your own lack of plot comprehension, you’ll enjoy every maggoty, blood-soaked second.
Cast Catriona MacColl as Lucy Boyle (credited as Katherine MacColl) Paolo Malco as Dr. Norman Boyle Ania Pieroni as Ann (babysitter) Giovanni Frezza as Bob Boyle Silvia Collatina as Mae Freudstein Dagmar Lassander as Laura Gittleson Giovanni De Nava as Dr. Freudstein Daniela Doria as the first female victim Gianpaolo Saccarola as Daniel Douglas Carlo De Mejo as Mr. Wheatley Kenneth A. Olsen as Harold (credited as John Olson) Elmer Johnsson as the Cemetery Caretaker Ranieri Ferrara as a victim Teresa Rossi Passante as Mary Freudstein Lucio Fulci as Professor Mueller (uncredited)
