Paura nella Città dei Morti Viventi
(City of the Living Dead/Twilight of the Dead/
Gates of Hell/The Fear)

Synopsis: Father Thomas, the priest of Dunwich, Massachussetts, hangs himself as a sacrifice to open the gates of Hell. Simultaneously, a woman involved in a seance in New York has a vision of the priest's death, and dies of shock. Just as she is about to be buried, however, she comes back to life and is rescued by an obnoxious reporter. Together, the woman and the reporter search for the town of Dunwich, to find the meaning of her terrible vision. When they arrive, they find Dunwich in a state of chaos, beset by murders, unexplainable happenings and visits by the walking dead.

I consider [Paura...] one of our least successful films in as much as it was thought out and shot in an atmosphere of sheer desperation.
-- Dardano Sacchetti, quoted in Palmerini & Mistretta,
Spaghetti Nightmares (Key West: Fantasma Books, 1996)

Want to see something really gross? Then fast-forward this tape and stop almost anywhere.
-- Mason & Potter, Video Movie Guide 1992

Notes: The best thing I can think of to say about this bravura, but senseless, movie is that it manages to create a very unsettling atmosphere of despair and decay. Fans of explicit gore usually refer to the power-drill-through-the-head scene as the high point of the film, but I think its strengths are in its moments of quiet vileness -- for instance, the scene involving the village idiot and the inflatable woman, beginning with the establishing shot of the old abandoned house and concluding with the discovery of something putrid.
         Two irritating things about this movie stick in my head: first, how is it possible that Fulci, the former medical student, should know so little about American methods of embalming that he has his heroine wake up in her coffin? In reality, she'd have her guts hooked out and her veins stuffed full of preservative... (all right, I know: willing suspension of disbelief in favor of the Artaudian dream-image, blah blah blah... but enough is enough!) Next, there's the ending... if you've seen it, you probably know what I mean:

Q: At the end of PAURA... Does the child turn into a zombie, too?
A: Yes. It was the editor's idea. The child started running and laughing again and then, at a particular moment, who knows what he saw... and the editor got the idea of splitting up the frame, which works very well All credit to the editor.
-- Lucio Fulci, answering Palmerini & Mistretta in
Spaghetti Nightmares (Key West: Fantasma Books, 1996)

         And yet this ending seems so hastily tacked-on that it's really unconvincing.
         Fulci himself has a brief cameo as a pathologist. Look quickly or you may miss him. And one of the scenes in the bar features music from the soundtrack of I Quattro dell'Apocalisse playing on the radio!