UK-based teacher, actor, musician and fearful film enthusiast Nigel Parkin ongoing column charting sexual perversion in classic horror films.
Lucio Fulci. Is there another director who has corroded our humanity more powerfully…or with such disgusting relish? His charnel house chef d’oeuvre ZOMBIE was released in the UK as ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS – that title is a sensational appeal to our basest instincts that also works as a perfect statement of Fulci’s corrupt carnal sensibilities. The three strands of Fulci’s vile vision are there in that phrase: his characters are ghouls, appearing to have a semblance of life and yet rotting on the inside, stumbling around a decaying and surreal world in which their dialogue and actions can seem absurd – a pathetic, illogical parody of humanity; flesh is ferociously and feverishly fetishised as something to magnify, manipulate, mutilate or moulder; and the number of images of solid matter being reduced to putrid slime calls to mind the process of regurgitation practiced by a fly as it consumes its food. Fulci is that fly, spewing over his own creation even as he holds it out in front of us. We then willingly, hungrily devour it, knowing that we will throw it up, at least in our minds, in a mixture of confusion, exhilaration and disgust, before watching it dissolve and transform into something even more repugnant and then eating it again.
We see ourselves in the zombies tucking into what has become of the body of Olga Karlatos’ hapless Mrs Menard. These creatures eat as if they are in some kind of exhausted trance. The slopping sounds of the wet strips of flesh peeled from the gelatinous carcass suggest secretions and fluids that in some distant, strange, perverse chamber of our minds we see as sexual. We’re wallowing in a bloody post-coital carnal soup.
Of course this is an outrageous idea but it is no less than Fulci intends. Consider the classic scene in which these zombies capture their beautiful feast. At the moment we begin to see Karlatos as prey she is in a shower. We know we are watching her through a zombie’s eyes and our inevitable arousal casts a new dimension on the zombie’s ‘hunger’. Fulci leers over her flesh while simultaneously stripping away our own to reveal the worm under the skin. We see the fingers of what was once a human hand press themselves against the glass of the window through which we are playing voyeur. By proxy these crawling, disembodied, grub-like fingers are moving over Karlatos’ body, expressing a hideous desire which we perceive with both revulsion and recognition.
We continue to be complicit with both camera and zombies in stalking Karlatos through the house. Her vulnerability is emphasised by the delicate, loose-fitting night gown falling away from one shoulder. Once she realises she is not alone she tenses with fear and we continue to observe her in this heightened state of awareness – eyes wide, body taut, needing some sort of release. The whole scene is framed and edited as a work of pornography. Listen to the thrusting of the door and Karlatos’ urgent gasps as she tries to push against the zombie assailant that has seemingly appeared from nowhere. Watch the rotting hand burst through a splintered opening in the slats of the door, grasp her hair and pull her head towards that opening as if she is being forced towards some sort of grotesque glory hole. And behold the phallic monstrosity protruding from that hole, the horrifically huge splinter pointing its finely whittled, sting-like tip at her right eye!
