Shudder Brief- Fulci's Zombie(1979)

 There were a few films I didn't mention watching on Shudder besides what has been listed this weekend. I started Zombie (1979) on Thursday but got interrupted, finishing this bad boy Saturday morning. It remains as visceral and not-for-the-squeamish as ever. I want to say I found this on Showtime of all places, located on one of their premium channels one late night. I have actually grown to watch Fulci during the week and even Argento, with Tenebrae on like Tuesday later in the evening. Perusing Shudder for some Italian horror, here lately I've just been returning to the known shockers. It was probably for the best Siskel and Ebert didn't see Zombie. I'm sure Auretta Gay's throat ripped open with neck flesh gobbled up by a rotted Conquistador, the iconic zombie of the film seen on the cover or poster, would not go over well. And Olga Karlatos being dragged eye-first into a broken piece of door, later found a partially devoured half-eaten corpse munched on by island undead...yeah, the Chicago film critic duo might pull their creative forces towards condemning Fulci and his gore team. Those undead walking on the bridge towards New York, with some makeup quite obviously not dead flesh, is pure Fulci nihilism at its best. Frizzi's score could be trusted to give the rising and walking zombies distinctive eeriness. Fulci, credit to him, had his own very specific kinds of zombies and those close-ups were lit a certain way to differentiate his walking corpses from others. I had watched Richard Johnson defeated and browbeaten by Satan in Beyond the Door, while in Zombie he gets the side of his face torn into by an assistant turned by a patient who died and transitioned to a zombie. The voodoo angle and Caribbean-stylized music to emphasize the setting and possible cause for what is happening is a departure from the genre. And Johnson's inability to find a cure and cause, his work in vain, is a tragic figure. I think it's clear he wanted to make a difference. But the stacked deck was not on his side.