City of the Living Dead

Dunwich priest Father Thomas hangs himself, causing the Gates of Hell to open. If they are not closed by All Hallow's Eve the dead will not rest.

In New York a medium, Mary Woodhouse (Catriona MacColl) has a vision of Father Thomas's suicide and is sent into a state indistinguishable from death by the shock.

While "strange and terrible things" are happening in Dunwich, New York reporter, Peter Bell (Christopher George), dissatisfied with the official version of events around Mary and looking for a story, is on hand to rescue her from being buried alive.

Mary and Peter head for Dunwich in a desperate bid to close the Gates of Hell before it is too late…

As both the follow-up to Zombie and the first entry in the living dead trilogy starring Catriona MacColl, it's hard to view City of the Living Dead AKA The Gates of Hell in isolation. Certainly the film comes across as something of a transitional work, combining the visceral horrors of its predecessor Zombie with the deliberately nightmarish logic of its follow-up The Beyond.

With the mythical "Book of Enoch" containing dark prophesies and a supernatural rain of maggots at one poiint, the influence of Dario Argento's Suspiria is also apparent, though director Lucio Fulci and screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti up the apocalyptic ante somewhat.

City of the Living Dead is more successful as splatter than Surrealism. The undead priest's ability to make his victims vomit up their intenstines is spectacularly gross, the demise of John Morghen's Bob via a drill bit through the head not far behind. But ontologically there's an degree of hesitancy on the film-makers part, their clinging to the vestiges of conventional cause-effect narrative logic epitomised by the fact that the what-the-fuck ending was more a last minute salvage job than an integral part of the vision.

Otherwise, the film contains some of Fulci's strongest set pieces. Father Thomas's suicide in a mist-shrouded graveyard, accompanied by the seriously slow, doom-laden strains of Fabio Frizzi's score, establishes the film's mood and tone immediately. Likewise the scene where Peter realises that Mary is still alive and then proceeds to swing a pickaxe perilously close to her head, is a masterclass in building tension.

All told, City of the Living Dead is a film that simultaneously benefits from being seen in an intertextual light but also suffers from not being quite as accomplished as its models and successors.