Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you an older episode of Weird House Cinema. This is on Luccio Folcheese House by the Cemetery about as weird a movie as you could want. This episode originally published October twenty ninth, twenty twenty one.
It's a movie that literally has it all so dive right in. It's a great Halloween selection. Here.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick, and it's October. And though we cover horror movies a lot on this show, I guess we have to do some really intense horror this month. And so what better time to introduce our very first Luccio Fulci movie on Weird House.
That's right, Luccio Fulci's nineteen eighty one film, The House by the Cemetery. This is a just a bloody and bonker's tale that has multiple elements in it that I think are worth geeking out over, and it also feels
on some level. It feels like the perfect film too to discuss this week, because as of this week, Weird House Cinema has completed its first Journey around the Sun. We've been doing these episodes for a year now, and you've been either putting up with them or enjoying them with us for a year, and so we appreciate that.
Now, Rob, this movie was your pick, So I assume this must you must have some kind of personal history with it. What is your connection to House by the Cemetery.
I think it was the first Fulci film that I saw that really connected with me. That the first film where I felt like, I mean, they're even his worst film, his less celebrated films. Often there's generally something enjoyable in them, but sometimes if you don't, if you're not really a connoisseur, it's easy to get caught up on the things that don't work. And so I think i'd had that experience with some of his other films, like what New York Ripper? And is it New York Ripper? Yeah?
I think so, I've never seen that one.
In Manhattan Baby, which is a wonderful I love the title Manhattan Baby because it's kind of implies a certain unders like a b cinema international idea of what New York was, and therefore you could just put the word Manhattan in front of Baby and it takes on sinister qualities. But those are all films where I think I saw more of the flaws than the genius, and in this film,
the genius stood out to me. So I was really excited to revisit it, and I found that in revisiting it, I got to appreciate all the bonker stuff a lot more. I feel like my memory had kind of selectively cut out a lot of the weirder plot holes in this film, and I mainly remembered like a really great monster. I remembered some, you know, some weird scenes and some heightened tension, but ultimately this is just a wonderful weird pick. Well.
So we've been talking recently a number of times about specifically about these rubbed the Fur movies, movies that are more about a vision of audio visual texture than they are about the narrative contents of the film. And it's funny that that Folcie never came up when we were talking about these before, because I think in the most disgusting possible way. Folci was deeply committed to making rub the fur type movies cinema as a as a almost
purely esthetic exercise over a narrative one. And so I've seen a number of Fulcy horror movies and I can't remember a single one of them for its characters or plot. Instead, what you what you remember from these movies are and images. So I tend to think of a Fulci as a I think of his approach to movie making as kind of similar to a child creating shoebox dioramas, except of course they're strewn with ludicrous amounts of blood and gore. So he has like an extraordinary eye for these memorable
set pieces of weirdness and wet violence. But on the narrative level, these scenes and the characters in them always feel just barely held together by the vaguest of narrative logic. Every ful Chie movie I have ever seen feels like it takes place in a dream, where in every scene, you know, it's like that moment in a dream where some things are going on around you, but you couldn't necessarily explain how you got there or why.
Now, like a dream, you can, I think, what I do, or what I've done in the past with fullshoe movies is afterwards, I kind of reflect on the dream and sort of ascribe it a structure, you know, And I feel like you can certainly do that with a film like this. You can be like, Okay, well, this was at heart a film about a house that is haunted. People move into said haunted house, have encounters with the haunt, and you know, there are consequences for all of that.
I think that's basically the plot, but what we actually witness on screen is a lot more I don't know, frenzied, and like you say, it kind of definitely follows the logic or the lack of logic found in dreams.
Yeah, and like you're saying, I mean, actually, it's kind of hard to describe because his movies do, in fact have plots and they have characters. So Housed by the Cemetery, which we just watched, is a movie that technically has a story that you could summarize in words. It's more that it just doesn't really feel that way when you're watching it. You know, like you could write out a plot summary and it would more or less make sense.
It's just that seemed to see, and I at least don't feel the normal levels of narrative logic that you would in a movie where the plot hangs together like it should. Instead, once again, what we get is more like a collection of images, shots, set pieces, and scenes, as if billowing out of a dream and then kind of haphazardly strung together along a pretty standard kind of horror plot arc.
I think one aspect of this, or one reason for this, is that I don't think full two was ever the sort of director to let the plot get in the way of a great shot, right there was something visually interesting to be done, it seems like he would do it even if it wasn't really helping out the plot all that much.
Not even plot, I mean, just to let any kind of logic or reality get in the way of a good shot. So say the laws of physics. You know, he will show some kind of bizarre murder that he maybe came to him in a dream or whatever, and it doesn't really matter if this is not how like fluids flow in the real world, or if this is you know, it doesn't really gravity would interfere with what he wants to be showing you. He's just going to show it.
Yeah.
You know. Another thing that's kind of interesting about full Cheesse horror movies is that, though they are classifiable as horror and they generally have you know, ghosts and zombies, supernatural horror plot elements, I don't know if they're really intended to be scary. I never really find them scary. They're more like disgusting psychedelic art films.
Yeah, this film in particular, Yeah, it feels like it's trying to be haunting and supernatural. It's it's definitely going out there to be gory, but really there's only there's only like one sequence of a child in peril that felt suspenseful. I don't know, maybe the opening kill sequence is a little bit suspenseful, even though you don't really have a firm attachment to any of the characters.
Okay, so what's the elevator pitch on this one? Absurdly grizzly murders keep happening at the old freud Stein house. Let's watch what happens when a new family moves in.
Don't you mean oak manor isn't it? Oh yeah, the realtors keep insisting don't call it the Freudstein House.
God, I love the cutaways to the real estate office.
Yeah, we got we had a strong real estate agent subplot in this.
Yeah, and the real estate office was strangely political compared to you know, there was nothing else in the movie like this. But in the real estate office there are a bunch of flags. There's like an American flag and then some other flags. I don't know what they were, and then there's a might have been state flags or something. And then there's a framed portrait of John F. Kennedy and there's a big bust of an eagle. I don't know why it was so patriotic in there.
Interesting. All right, Well, let's go ahead and hear the audio for some of the trailer audio. Maybe we'll play the whole trailer because this was a fun win and I'll explain why after you hear it. Even where are you playing for me?
Stee in this house? What you don't know will hurt you.
It was to be a getaway dream.
It's becoming the runaway nightmare. Do you see anything? Some old steps coming down?
He has been awaiting the arrival of his new guests.
One by one.
They are disappearing, one by bloody one.
When you move to this house before you get locked in the fine friends, you may have just Morgan, you're right.
Due to the graphic nature of this film, no one under eighteen will.
Be admitted house by the cemetery.
All right. So you might have noticed, Well, that's not a Maybe that's not our typical movie narrator. That's not that's a slightly different voice of God. Doesn't sound like a god at all. Maybe a devil is narrating this. Well, that devil is brother Theodore, the comedian and character actor that we discussed in the Warhawk Tanzania film The Devil's Express. You might also know him from the Verbs and the
animated adaptations of The Hobbit in The Last Unicorn. He was the voice of Gollum in the animated Hobbit film, and here he is narrating a trailer. I love it.
In The Devil's Express he was the street preacher who, in one scene was giving a sermon by the subway entrance about how all your gods are dead and the rats are screaming.
I was looking around trying to figure out what other trailers he narrated, and I couldn't find evidence of a lot of them. So I don't know if this was like just a very brief gig for him, or if I'm missing a lot of trailers here, But oh, I wish he had done more. I wish he was still around to do film trailers. Like any kind of Oscar bait comes out, I want to hear Brothers Theodore narrated.
How would he say it featuring the personable Mark Damon.
It'd be good.
Well, speaking of humans, let's let's get into the humans involved in bringing this strange film to life first. I guess we'll begin with the director here, the key individual we've already we've already brought up already. That's Lucie Fulci, who lived nineteen twenty seven through nineteen ninety six. So we've mentioned him multiple times on Weird House Cinema, so it's it's ultimately nice to finally discuss him in one of his own films instead of just you know, referring
to people who worked with him. He's best remembered today for his horror films of the mainly the nineteen eighties era. I guess it's the big time for him, and he is, without a doubt, one of the titans of Italian b cinema from this era. But all this really kicked into high gear after nineteen seventy nine's Zombie came out. We've talked about this one before. This was a very prolific period of his career to produced some of his best remembered films.
Now this is Zombie with Justin and I instead of Is this the one that was marketed as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead.
Yeah, yeah, it was very much cashing in on the success of that film, and it is also you may remember us discussing the like some of the bonkers scenes in this this is another one where he didn't let the plot get in the way of an interesting scene, such as the one where what a shark and a zombie battle each other while a topless scuba diver swims by. Just you know, completely bonkers and definitely stands out in one's memory. But he'd been active for a while prior
to to Zombie. He'd been directing full length films for twenty years at that point, including some horror films such as nineteen seventy one's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin nineteen seventy twos, Don't Torture a Duckling. He also did a nineteen sixty nine Jalla film titled One on Top of the Other. But he directed a number of different genre films before the nineteen eighties, including Western spy, thrillers, comedies, and more. He did an adaptation of Jack London's White Fang.
He also did a fantasy film, nineteen eighty three's Conquest, which is quite entertaining and weird. Maybe we'll come back to that one.
Conquest can sometimes be kind of rough because it looks like it was filmed through cloth. Like it there is a just an impenetrable haze through the entire movie. It looks like there was a I don't know, gauze over the camera lens or something how I think they would normally describe it. It's just this gray, hazy look that
never ends. But Conquest star so it's like a you know, it's a one of those barbarian movies, sort of a cone and ripoff, but it's got a Jorge Rivera from from where Wolf as the Conan character.
Yes, yeah, yeah, it has a number of fun elements in it. I wonder though, if if you're one of the things about these films is that is that some of us saw them years ago with less than on less than great formats, you know, maybe we even saw
them on VHS. So I wonder if the version of Conquest you saw was like one of the was like a more recent restoration of it, or it was like it was older, because the film we're talking about here today was recently restored in two K and that was the version that I watched in preparation for this episode, and it really did seem a lot clearer than I remember watching it, you know, like ten or fifteen years ago the same.
Yeah, this one, it looks a lot better now than the version I saw about fifteen years ago. One more note about one of the movies you mentioned, I've actually seen a Lizard in Woman's Skin. That's a fulchy jallo movie that is very strange. It involves I think it's one of the number of these Italian jalli that take place in London, if I remember correctly, and it involves
it involves like a like a party house. There's like a it's like a total I think the plot is the main character and her husband live in one part apartment and then right next door there's a total party house and she has these like dreams and visions about weird stuff going on in there. I think it's kind of there's like, I don't know, naked people and panthers wandering around and stuff.
Now, if I'm not mistaken, the title on that one has to do with the success of doc Rio Argento is the Bird with a Crystal Plumage. And if you start looking at titles of Jallo films, you'll find that you have the Bird with a Crystal Plumage come out, and then various other titles that have a similar structure. You know, it'll be like, you know, the Rhino with a diamond toenail, you know, something like that that seems to get him on the same trend.
Oh man, there's so many Jello movies with great titles, totally independent. A lot of times I don't even remember which movie the title goes with. There's one that always sticks in my mind called Your vice is a locked Room and only I have the key.
Got to make copies of that key. Well, anyway, back back to Fulchi he again. He died in nineteen ninety six, and his output slowed down later in life as he wrestled with health issues, but his next to last film was nineteen nineties A Cat in the Brain, which I have not seen and really didn't know much about it. I just kind of assumed it was just another standard, you know, body Fulcy affair, but it apparently stars a
fictionalized version of himself. He plays this fictionalized version of himself in the film, seeking the aid of a twisted psychiatrist over his own violent visions. So I watched the trailer for it, and it looks it looks amazing. It's a lot of Fulcy ranting, you know, dubbed into English for the you know, the version we would watch where he's saying things like the man was all red and I wanted to kill him, and then you'll, you know, cut to some sort of a bizarre sequence.
Trying to understand the reception history of Fulci is interesting because he seems like a figure who simultaneously evokes a disgust reaction from people, and I think a lot of people would sort of look down on as a kind of low brow pervert of gore, somebody who made these gross movies full of almost hilarious quantities of gratuitous blood and guts. And yet at the same time, I think
there's a lot of film scholarship on Fulgi. I sense that he enjoys a kind of special aura of artistic respect set apart from most other directors of lowbrow B horror movies of this kind.
Yeah, I think part of it may be that he's important enough and ultimately impressive enough that he stands out, you know, he kind of emerges out of that world of Italian B cinema, and therefore he might be the most notorious name that someone is familiar with from that world. But of course, if you if you dig dig a little deeper into Italian B cinema, you find plenty of other more notorious names. You know, there are a lot more arguably unsavory characters than Luccio Fulci.
I mean, I guess the weird distinction here is that, I bet at multiple colleges out there in the world, there are entire courses on Fulci, Like, you know, he's at that level of subject matter worthy of critical analysis.
I think, well, let's look at some of the other other names involved here. We also have Alisa Braganti, who has a story credit. This is an Italian screenwriter who wrote on such films as Zombie Manhattan, Baby nineteen ninety, The Bronx Warriors, A Blade in the Dark, Hands of Steel, which we've discussed on the show before, and many more.
Hands of Steele was the Italian terminator ripoff that had the big beefy guy who comes to the desert bar and then ends up in an arm wrestling scene.
Yeah, an Arizona movie filmed by Italians and also featuring John Saxon.
Oh Yeah, John Saxon and oh in that movie was the one where we encountered the worst song of all time because the lead actress in it sings that pop single Teddy Bear.
I don't know, I kind of like teddy Bear, tyer like teddy Bear. Okay, I look back fondly on teddy Bear. I don't remember it though, I don't remember how it goes. Oh, let me remind you no no afterwards after Okay. So the next name worth pointing out Dardano Sachetti, who has a screenplay credit born nineteen forty four, Italian screenwriter who worked on the likes with the likes of Lomberto Bava, Luccio fulci Zo g Castellari, Dario Argento. His first credit
was Argento's The Cat of Nine Tales. He worked with Fulci quite a bit, including some of his most well known films, some of the ones we've mentioned here already. He worked on Lomberto Bava's Monster, Shark and Demons, and he also worked on nineteen ninety The Bronx Warriors. So another important name in Italian b cinema. And there's another screenplay credit to Giorgio Mariuzzo, who also wrote on the ful Chi films The Beyond and Enigma, as well as some others.
Now is House by the Cemetery sometimes considered part of a. I'm afraid I'm getting this wrong with part of A's sort of conceptual trio of horror films that she did along with Gates of Hell and The Beyond. Is that right?
Yes, the so called Gates of Hell trilogy of films. And I'm personally not sure if I was dubbed a trilogy by Folk she himself, or if this is something that commentators and fans have come up with, But at any rate, yeah, we have these three films, City of the Living Dead from nineteen eighty and The Beyond and House by the Cemetery both from nineteen eighty one, and it is just so happens. We have an actor that
is in all three of these. It is Catherine McCall or Katrianna McCall, and she plays Lucy Boyle, the wife in this picture. She was born in nineteen fifty four. British born ballet dancer turned actor again in all three of the Gates of Hell films. She also was in nineteen eighty's Hawk the Slayer, which starred Jack Palance as well as John Terry Patricia Quinn. And it looks pretty interesting. I can't remember I've seen it or not. I may
have seen it. She was also in nineteen ninety one's Afraid of the Dark, which starred James Fox, Paul McGann and David Thulis.
Right, So I guess if we're getting into the cast, we should say that there's a main family in this movie, and Catherine McCall plays the mother and the family. The father is played by this guy named Paolo Malco.
Yeah, plays doctor Norman Boyle. Malco was born in nineteen forty seven an Italian actor who was also in Ful Cheese, New York Ripper, was in Sergio Martinez The Scorpion with
Two Tales. He was in Castellari's Escape the Bronx, as well as Limberto Baba's Demons three, the Ogre that came out in nineteen eighty nine, and this one's it's kind of a weird connection here because the ogre is apparently very similar to this film, to House by the Semi Terry, and it is apparently based on Sachetti's original script for House by the Cemetery. So they went back. This is
according to Lomberto Bava. So basically they're like, well, you know, full she did some some slightly different things with the script. Let's go back and we'll just do the script as it was before full she did what he did with it. So I don't know. I have not seen Demons three. I think I've only seen Demons one, so I speak to it personally.
I didn't know there was a Demon's three, Demons one and Demons two. Demons one has a bunch of people go to a movie theater and they watch a movie and then Demon's attack. Demons two has a bunch of people in an apartment building and then Demon's attack. Demons three. I guess it must be a house. So they're scaling back.
Well, I think it was very much a case of them making a film called the Ogre again based on this older script, and then they were like, well, maybe this will perform better if we just call it Demons three. Why not are people going to complain that it doesn't match up? Although well with the plot of Demons Demons one and two.
I think Demons too, I don't recall much continuity between them. In fact, I even seem to recall that there are actors who are in the first movie playing different characters in the second Demons movie.
Well, anyway, Malcom as doctor Norman Boyle in this pretty entertaining and has great hair in most of the scenes. There are some scenes of him standing on wind swept streets in New York City and you're like, wow, that's a good head of hair.
As Vincent Price would say, his hair is loos urious, just absolutely wonderful hair. This is hair first casting, to be sure.
And you know it runs in the family because his son in the film, his son Bob, also has an impressive head of hair.
This is really the star of the film. Here is Bob. Years ago, when I first saw this movie, the movie in general didn't make all that much of an impression on me, except I remembered Bob. This movie has this weird, haunting child in it that's maybe actually the scariest thing in the movie, but also the funniest because he's named Bob, and characters are constantly yelling out Bob.
Yes, Bob, an adult's name that is here given to a child, a child that is also the child. His voice is dubbed into English and performed by an adult woman doing a child's voice, so that adds this extra
level of the uncanny to it. And also the actor playing Bob, Giovanni Freza, who was born in nineteen seventy two, just a very cute child, just objectively extremely cute child who just comes off like a cheruld, like an actual angelic being that seems to glow on the screen and in a way that just feels unnatural, just unnaturally cute. This kid.
The glowing quality also, like you say, it, takes after his dad in this film luxury hair, like glowing hair.
Yeah, just basically platinum. Now. The child actor here, Giovanni Frezo, pops up in an excellent assortment of Italian genre pictures from this time period, including Manhattan Baby, the excellent Warriors of the Wasteland, A Blade in the Dark, and the first Demons movie. Demons came out in nineteen eighty five, and that was his last acting role. He grew up, apparently to become a product development director, and I think
still works and resides in the United States. I looked up some footage of him from a I think from a DVD or Blu Ray extra, and I'm pleased to see that he did not turn into like a terrifying klaus Kinsky looking adult duode, because there's something about like, he's so innocent and you know, and cute in this film. You're like, you can easily imagine it twisted into the grotesque and the cruel instead of growing up into what seems like probably a normal adult.
But you can confirm normal adult.
I mean, I don't know the guy, but you look at a picture of him, you're like, oh, that's a that's a grown human being, normally looking adult. Yes, yeah, okay, I mean product development sounds normal enough, So I.
Think that could be the stands out there that can be final processing.
All right, So that is the family that's our central trio here, But then you could basically look at the rest of the cast is by dividing them into like ghosts, monsters, and victims. So the main ghost is May May, the ghost girl played by Sylvia Colatina born nineteen seventy two. And she's the interesting thing. And I guess this makes sense because of the raid at which girls and boys mature. But she's actually the same age as the actor playing
Bob in this. She was also a child actor, active only from nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty four, but with fewer credits. She acted in Sergio Martinez The Great Alligator in nineteen seventy nine, a movie that has a story credit by George Eastman, and then she was also in ful Che's Murder Rock Dancing Death in nineteen eighty four.
I did not know Sergio Martino had an alligator movie. I got to look into that.
Penned by George Eastman.
Well, I mean perfect Italian Crocodilian movies can be quite have you ever seen I forget the director's name. There are a couple of Italian horror films called Killer Crocodile and Killer Crocodile Too. I don't think i've seen that were they're just they're extremely bad, but very funny.
Well, as for our ghost here, may I feel like called Attina's really good in this. You know, it's hard to judge a child actor, particularly if they're dubbed probably by like a different person, But I don't know. There's a certain quality to her delivery here where I totally buy her sense of like occasional detachment but also kind of like shocked outrage at the danger that is lurking on the screen.
Yeah, she has a lot of like look into the camera, wide eyed and gasp kind of moments.
Yeah. The next character is kind of perplexing because depending on where you are in the film, it's hard to tell where she falls into these divisions of victims and ghosts and monsters. This is the character of an the Babysitter, played by Ania Perni. She was born in nineteen fifty seven, an Italian actor. She also appeared in Daria Argenta's Tenebre and Inferno, in which she apparently plays the mother of Tears.
She's fun in this as a mysterious character who does a lot of suspicious staring, a lot of silent staring. And I have to say this new two K release, this new two K Master of House by the cemetery. It reveals every follicle in her lush, loupine eyebrows. It's pretty great.
I was going to point out those eyebrows. So if Paulo Malco, if he was hair first casting, I think this actress was eyebrow first casting. It's all about the eyebrows here.
Yeah. I mean she has really tense eyes as well, but luscious eyebrows. You've never seen eyebrows like these before. And she a lot of the scenes again getting back to like fulchi, never letting the plot get in the way of a good scene. I think a lot of his direction was like, yes, stare hauntingly into the camera, keep doing it. Okay, good, that's great. Now we'll move on to.
The next sent You almost wonder if a lot of scenes in this movie could have been done with the actor is not even knowing yet what they were going to be looking at. It's just we get a lot of footage of the actor going like oh, and then later we figure out what the image is that they're seeing.
Yeah, or sometimes we don't exactly Yeah, one more actor to highlight that. We may come back to one or two more when we get into the plot. But we also have this realder character. We have multiple realder characters, but the main one is Laura, played by the actor Dagmar Alassander. She was born nineteen forty three, a checkborn actor who pops up in a lot of Italian films. And I don't know, perhaps she's just more memorable because of her name, you know, Dagmar Lassiter. Lasseners tends to
stand out in the credits of a film. Her credits include Mario Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Lumberto Bava's Devilfish, and also Fool Cheese the Black Cat. Also a picture unrelated to these filmmakers titled were Wolf Woman.
So she plays a character in this named well, you said, Laura, missus Gidtleson, right, Yeah, yeah, missus Gidtleson. She's the real estate agent. And there's a great scene where she is trying to back out of the driveway of the titular house, the house by the cemetery, and she like drives over a tombstone and just like swears at it. She's just like a damn tombstones.
She's fun. All right. Well, let's get to the music, because the music on this film is definitely worth highlighting this is a this is a fun score. You know, it's a little bit Uh, it's a little bit, a little bit funky. Uh, definitely synthy and apparently highly influential. I saw it pointed out that the muse some of the music that was used or created for Garth Marenghi's Dark Place years later. It's kind of like like a direct reference to the score to this film.
That makes so much sense. And a lot of what's funny about Garth Maringhi's Dark Place is just slightly tweaking things that are already true about House by the Cemetery, like some of the kind of the vibe in the dialogue scenes with these long pauses between lines and awkward staring.
Yeah. Absolutely, In fact.
I even thought of Garth Murringay's Dark Place. And there's one part of the movie where where Paolo starts listening to a tape by the old doctor that starts talking about blood, blood, blood, and I wanted to complete it with and bits of bits of sick.
Yeah. I had the same thought. That's a great sequence too, by the way, Yeah, listening to that and it aren't we get it represented with visuals of blood flowing over a tombstone.
Yes, yes, yeah, all right.
So the individuals responsible for this music primarily Walter Rizzodi. I'm not sure when this Italian composer was born or if he's still with us. I couldn't find any dates on him, but he seems to have been primarily active from nineteen sixty six through nineteen ninety three. His notable scores include this one, nineteen ninety The Bronx Warriors, as well as some various action films. I think this is the main standout, but you also have Alexander Blanksteiner on
this with an additional music credit. You might remember him as the guy who gave us that fabulously funky disco score for Cannibal Apocalypse. He has composition credit on five of the scorer's tracks. So it all comes together again into just a very fun score that is, you know, occasionally definitely gets into this kind of cheesy groove that that only works with this film, but I think is overall pretty excellent and has some wonderful moments of horror.
Synth organ I thought we might have a taste of it right here.
Yes, I love the synth pipe organs, and I also at a couple of points. I was hearing a plinking walk down that reminds me of the melody from Banana Rama's Cruel Summer.
Yeah.
I think I know which part you're talking about. I need to go back and listen to that though, And speaking of going back and listening to it, I should point out that that there have been some excellent re releases of this score. I don't I can't really speak to its digital availability on streaming sites, but you've had some fabulous vinyl additions put out by both Death Waltz Records, which you know excels at this sort of thing, as
well as Burning Witch Records. So if you're if you're into the into the vinyl uh, and you're into scores like this, definitely check those out. So though, oh wait, those were the humans. But there's also one non human credit I need to give, and that's the house itself. This is one of those those fabulous movies where we have a central haunted house or haunted location, and that at location actually exists in the real world and you
can you can technically go and see it. I mean, you know, of ob obey local laws as far as approaching it. But the house here is the The Freudstein House is actually the Bailey Ellis House, located on the Ellis Estate in the coastal Massachusetts town of Let's see, I'm not I'm sure. I'm going to busher the name of this skitchuwat.
No idea s c I t U a t E situate sketchy Watts.
Done in any rate. It's about thirty miles southeast of Boston, and according to Atlas Obscura, it's currently owned by the Sketchwat Arts Association, and if you go to their website you can see recent photos of it. The website states quote the Ellis House is a unique Gothic Romanesque mansion and home to the SAA's indoor classes and workshops. It also provides studio space for half a dozen artists. So hey, oh oh, go there, sign up to create your own
entry for the night gallery. Uh this, Yeah, this house is still standing and there and there's there's still wonderfully creative things going on inside it.
I will drop everything in my life and go to Massachusetts to become a part of doctor Freudstein's art collective.
Uh. And, by the way, this house was also used in Umberto Lindsay's ghost house, so you get to double dip by visiting this place.
It's a really good house, I will say.
Yeah, it's it's a handsome house, and they fix it up nicely for the film because they're just they're they're just uh, headstones everywhere, just all through the yard and then also in the surrounding woods.
All right, Now, here's the part of the episode where we would normally start getting into a full plot breakdown. I don't know if that's quite the terminology to use here. I think what happens is we are going to be able to describe a bunch of scenes that happened in the movie. But I don't know if we can really explain the plot.
Right, I mean, I still have there's still things I do not understand, and I've I've seen this film more than I've seen some truly, you know, you know, subjectively great works of art. I've also, especially on this last viewing, I really tried to understand everything. You know. It was like I was gonna be quizzed on it. Can I really speak to what's happening in this movie? And I really can't explain some of the choices and elements here, though I will try.
We will at least try to describe a number of the dioramas that ful She creates in the shoe box of this film. Yes, so from the very opening, I gotta say, especially with this restoration, it looks great. The house is beautifully framed on the opening shot with the you know it's it's got the dark in the background, with tombstones and dead limbs in the foreground. I assume I could. I can't remember if you mentioned this a
minute ago. Is there actually a cemetery by the house or with the tombstones added for the film?
I think the tombstones were added for the film. I'm not one clear on that, but but I didn't I didn't see anybody pointing out, you know, there being an actual cemetery surrounding this house.
Okay, well we see it in the opening frame like this, this this beautiful old house with the darkness behind it and the tombstones and the dead trees with bare limbs in the foreground. And this, of course is setting up a classic horror movie style opening in which some people are in a place they're not supposed to be and they're probably about to meet an ill end.
Right, It's it's ultimately a familiar scene I feel like I've seen and other films. A woman is dressing and then she starts looking around the house for her boyfriend, assuming he's preyanking her by suddenly disappearing. And then, you know, so she wanders around being like, oh, what is his name? Is it Mike?
Steve?
It's Steve. She's like, Steve, are you there, Steve? Steve, stop kidding around, Steve. And then, of course what happens. She discovers Steve. Steve is dead. He's been nailed at the backside of a door with a pair of surgical scissors, and his brain has been surgically or through blunt trauma exposed.
And then an unseen killer stabs her through the back of the head with a kitchen knife so that the blade, the end of the blade, emerges out of her mouth, and then she falls to the floor dead, and then a pair of well a pair of hands, one of which appears human and one of which appears to be a monster hand drags her away into the cellar.
So a standard B horror opening, but there's a lot stylistically about it that's just very elegant and very much a cut above what you would see in movies like this normally. So one thing I wanted to draw attention to is a wonderful shot where while she is wandering around calling out to Steve, saying like, Steve, are you
trying to scare me? I don't think it's funny, But she's coming down a hallway that is lit from behind, and in the foreground we are looking through the gaps in an iron spiral staircase that's just covered in cobwebs, and it's a gorgeous shot.
Yeah, yeah, And a great shot of this seemingly endless sellar in this house. I mean, it's supposed to be a haunted house, so it makes sense that maybe the seller doesn't obey the laws of reality and space and time. But yeah, it seems enormous, and it seems like there are corners of it that haven't been explored in like a century and a half. I ultimately love the unreality of this cellar.
But then after the opening murders, you get some music, of course, this electronic organ fugue. You get the title it says House by the Cemetery, and then there's an interesting compositional shift coming up, so you see the same house and a girl standing in the window looking out making kind of a scary screaming face, which then cross fades to a black and white photograph hanging on a wall of that house with the girl looking out the window with the screaming face. Then you see a title
that says New York pulls back. The wall is in a modern apartment, modern at the time the film was made. And then sitting there staring at the photo is a profoundly uncanny blonde child. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Bob.
I want to come back to that ghost girl for a second, because yes, she's haunting in the photo, but the face she's making it could be interpreted as fear. But it's also the kind of face that a child like this would make when somebody does a cannon ball into a swimming pool and a kool Aid commercial. You know what I'm saying.
Wow, Yeah, yeah, that's radical.
And it is radical. But yes, now we meet Bob, and we say we meet the whole family. Yeah, there's doctor Norman Boyle, there's his wife, Lucy Boyle. There is adorable Bob, who we've already described disturbingly cherubic and speaks in the dubbed voice of an adult woman doing a kid's voice, so uncanny. Yeah, and in there, yeah, a lot of thought of scenes too, of Bob playing just
way too diligently with his toys. I'm like, who has ever given a remote control car to a child and seeing them and get that this much usage out of it? It's really not fair.
Well this movie. Also, I'm not sure if it understands that remote control cars don't work in the woods where the ground is covered in leaves and is not flat.
Yeah.
Oh, but so here's a question I have. Is Bob like Danny Torrance like, is he psychic or is just the ghost girl picking him as a regular, non psychic person to send messages to.
I don't know. I mean, I may only speaks to Bob, right, Bob seems to be the only one who can see her, So it's here she can speak to him because he's a child, or he's a special child. But I have a suspicion that the idea is that children are weird and can see ghosts.
Okay, Okay, so it's it's not him in particular, He's just a child and the child, the child's mind is open to the spirit world in a way that the adult's mind is closed.
I guess so, but ultimately that's just how I choose to interpret it. And there's I'm not sure where ful she actually stood on this.
Well, immediately what happens here is that Lucy the mother comes in. It is like hey, Bob, and Bob's like, well, I'm hearing voices talking to me out of this photograph and she's just like oh haha, And he's like, Mommy, why does that girl in the photograph keep telling us we shouldn't go to the house. And the mom can't see the girl in the window in the photo, so
she just kind of shrugs it off. But then we see a kind of alternate reality where may the ghost girl and I guess her mom are standing in the woods somewhere. I guess they are standing among the tombstones and the cemetery outside the house. And we're told that this is in New Whitby, Boston.
Yeah, yeah, this film most of these scenes were filmed in Massachusetts, take place in Massachusetts, and this is ultimately a Massachusetts film, maybe our first I'm not sure if we've I can't remember if any of the previous films we've watched have been set or filmed there.
I believe this film is sort of trying to tap into some Miskatonic magic.
Yeah, yeah, I think so, But that doesn't mean we don't have a brief stop over in New York City. On the streets of New York, Doctor Norman Boyle is seen chatting with Professor Mueller, who is played by the director Luccio Folci, and they're discussing Boyle's research. He is about to move his entire family out of the city into rural Massachusetts so that he can continue the suicide research that his colleague, doctor Peterson, was doing right before
said colleague murdered his mistress and committed suicide himself. Now, what sort of research could this possibly have been? What breakthroughs was he making? I have no idea, and there's not a lot of of There are not really any answers to be found in the film.
What a setup. And yeah, this scene on the sidewalk is hilarious, and I think maybe it's supposed to be. I don't think this is unintentional because Fulchi is talking to this lead actor here with you know, the glorious head of hair, and Fullchi's I guess playing playing an older colleague who's got this ridiculous huge red bow tie and these thick glasses and uh. And as he's talking to Ta Paolo, here to what's a Norman Boyle, he says, and there he was researching suicide times. We have to
live in taxi. He just nails a taxi, hops in and takes off.
That's just that's just New York living. Yeah, you gotta you gotta keep moving otherwise the Manhattan babies will catch up with you.
So next the family is driving out to the house. And this is one of the parts where I heard that that that walk down melody that sounds like a music version of Cruels Summer. But this is also the part where the dad says. The dad is talking about how if it weren't for so and so, I don't remember who he's talking about, we wouldn't have a house to live in where we're going, we'd have to live in a tent. And Bob yells, I wish.
Well, that's pretty authentic. That's pretty good.
There's a scene that comes up in a minute here that is great. That has May the ghost girl, who by the way, doesn't look like a she just looks like a normal person, just like a kid. Yeah, not like, you know, translucent or anything. So it's just like a kid is out on a street. I think this is supposed to be in Boston or this town outside of Boston that they're going to, and she is staring into the window of a storefront that has mannikins dressed up
in I guess the clothes the store is selling. And so one of these mannequins looks like a very evil Denise Richards type face, and it's wearing one of the what do you call those frilly white collars, kind of like Doiley's.
Yeah, kind of like like a like a witch costume. I guess it looks.
At sort of. But then it's like May hallucinates the the mannequin getting decapitated and it bleeds everywhere. So this is a mannequin, but it's full of blood and organs and stuff. The head falls off and it's just splatter for a moment, and then somehow this leads into the meeting of May and Bob, which is very funny as well.
Like Bob shows up in town his parents going to talk to the realtors, and he's just sitting in the car, I think, playing with the toy, and then suddenly they're like psychic mind melding.
Yeah, Like she's a block or two away, and they're just chatting with each other like they're right next to each other through their brains.
Oh oh, and somehow this sequence ends with Bob like sitting in a park cradling this gigantic, horrible doll.
Yeah, this giant garbage doll that he's been given. I guess by May. He's like, Mom, we're taking this home, right, and they're like, yeah, yeah, load it up, load up your garbage doll.
But so from here we get the family moving into the new house, and there's a lot of great photography. We get to see them interacting with the realtors. This is where there's that funny scene where MSUs Giddleson drives over a tombstone and then yells at it, and Lucy the mother, has this strange freak out about the doll that Bob found. It's like, but it's after they get back to the house, so I didn't really understand that
he brings this disgusting doll home. And then it's sitting there in the house and she sees it and she's like, does the little whip zoom on her eyes? This movie loves whip zooms. By the way, did you notice.
That now that you pointed out, Yeah, there's a lot, a lot of whip zooming going.
On sometimes in situations where it wouldn't seem to make total sense, like it will happen in cases where somebody is having a horrible vision, but it also sometimes just happens in the middle of a conversation.
Yeah. Now, this is the point in the film where we introduce one of my favorite characters. And we've already talked a little bit about her the actor playing her, But Anne and the babysitter with the magnificent eyebrows shows up, and apparently we're supposed to connect her to the mannequin that we saw, the mannequin that's head fell off in the window is supposed to look like this actor, even though she really doesn't. And I got more caught up on the fact that she looks like a particular former
First Lady of the United States. But I'm supposed to be Anne. It's supposed to be Anne. Apparently I didn't notice that, but yeah, you're right. But yeah, well I was thinking Denise Richards. But either way, yeah, it doesn't exactly look like Ann. I guess it has long brown hair and in intense eyebrows, So there you go. But anyway, when Anne shows up, she's just a lady in their house.
Suddenly they're unpacking or something, and suddenly a person's there and they're like huh, and she says, miss Gettleman sent me, I'm Anne, the babysitter, and then just zoom whip zoom, zoom, cut zoom. So this is just instantly just so insane, because I mean, in what universe does a realitter provide your babysitter? In which case does a babysitter just sort of appear without you know, there're no credentials, Like the
parents weren't involved in this at all. They just suddenly they have this strange woman in their house babysitting for them. And then various other questions come up regarding Anne and this whole babysitting arrangement and her relationship with any other entity in the film. It's bonkers.
For a moment one Anne appears to be up to no good like, so from here the family starts going about their business and Norman is I think trying to discover what the scholar who lived in this house before him was up to, like what he had found out and what had led him to do these horrible things.
And meanwhile, there's like a scene where Lucy is walking around at night having heard strange sounds in the house and she just like comes up on Anne, who is trying to pry her way into the boarded up basement with a shovel. She give gives her the most evil just hyena eyes.
So Anne lives in the house with them, right, she's like a living yeah, babysitter, Like basically she's a nanny, even though they don't really use the word that's that's apparently what they mean nanny. But but then at the same time, like the relationship is so weird. There's a point later on where Anne disappears from the film for good and the mom comes home finds that Anne is no, no, no longer around. It's just bob by himself, and she just dismisses it. She's like, oh, I guess Anne went
home to see her parents. They're like there's no communication with the babysitter slash nanny. It's just like, oh, well, she's done. She wandered off. That's fine, that's what babysitters do.
That is the end of Anne the the O pair.
And yet there's still more questions about Ann. We'll get to as we proceed.
So where is it? After this? We follow Norman for a bit because he's trying to figure out what was going on with doctor Peterson's research, and he goes to some place as a library. I guess it's supposed to be a university, Like, is this Miskatonic University or something?
Yeah, I think we're getting kind of kind of vibe. You know, this is the this is the Arkham Horror section of the movie where he's going and researching the strange research of his predecessor.
Yeah, And so he meets a scholar there, a scholar who's got like this awesome looking beard, and the scholars like, you've been here before with your daughter, and Norman is like, nope, I've never been here before and I don't have a daughter. And does that ever come up again? I don't recall that connecting to anything.
Yeah, I didn't really understand that, Like what are they At first? I was like, they just mistook Bob for a girl, which, you know, it's The misgendering of children happens all the time, sure, you know, with with when you're when you're a parent, or when you're you're talking to parents. So I thought, well, maybe that's it. But no, but I don't think so.
He'd never been there.
But then who was it? But we get to meet the librarian in this Yes, right, the librarian was It was a lot of fun. It's a small role, but it's played by this guy. Uh Dimpolo sachar Rola ska Rolla perhaps playing the librarian. Uh yeah, and he's I really like this guy. He has some real Ronald Lacy energy. You know, he's got kind of a you know, a devious babyface.
Yes, yes, yes, he reminds me a little bit of Dylan Baker, you know.
The actor. Yeah, yeah, but either.
Way, he's a stupendous baby faced Renfield, boiling over with nervous laughter. I loved his scenes.
Yeah, and he ultimately doesn't play a particularly devious character. He doesn't. You know, this is not a character that turns out later to be a ghost or a cult member or anything weird like that. He just is this this slightly suspicious librarian, and it's he's a fun screen presence apparently shows up in a number of number of other Italian B movies of this this time period, just a bookish weirdo.
There's also an awesome scene later on in the movie where he's wearing a green sweater. It looks like it's made of felt. So he comes in, he's like a walking pool table. I loved it.
Yeah, yeah, And it actually got some fun dialogue in that part because it's it's like he's coming off a little passive aggressive. He's like, I was just checking on the room because the library he's closed on Sundays. And meanwhile, our hero I was like, I'm here to research.
Yeah, have you seen my hair? Do you know who I am?
Look? How handsome I am? How dare you question my presence here.
There's a scene somewhere after this that's really funny where Bob is out in the woods with his remote control race car again like you can't really play with a remote control car in the woods, and he's wandering around and he finds a tombstone for somebody named Mary Freudstein, and then he immediately has this incomprehensible encounter with the ghost girl May, where May says she says a line like it's only it's all a lie. She's not really buried there. Oh, I know, she's not really buried there.
I don't know what that means.
Yeah, I don't know either, because she's she's a ghost. But I guess I don't know where she's buried if she's not buried here.
So this is all while Norman in his library is learning about the sort of unsavory history of a doctor, Jacob Freudstein, who I think at one point lived in the house that they're staying in now. So this is not the guy who was there before them, but the guy who was there before that.
Guy, right, And this is when we find out that this isn't just a house by the cemetery, it is perhaps a house on the cemetery, or more specifically, the cemetery is also inside the house.
The cemetery is coming from inside the house. And the scene that sets that up, by the way, begins with an absolutely gorgeous framing. So, like, this house has these stained glass windows with these like green and yellow and purple flower shapes that are that are framed. It's this blue stained glass. It's just wonderful. And this is the framing for when Lucy's like washing the floor and she pulls aside a rug and discovers under the rug there's
just a tomb. There's like a gravestone inside the house.
And we'll we'll later find out that in kind of Scooby Doo fashion, this tombstone is also a secret door, like a trapdoor that gives you entryway into the cellar. Yeah, and in addition to the door that nobody can open yet that clearly goes to.
The cellar, right yeah, yeah, yeah, And like in this scene, there's a bunch of grunts and jostling and whatnot coming from the basement, so it sort of indicates the trapdoor thing.
Yeah, there are a lot of haunted sounds in this house, Like there's creaking, there's progressively grunting, and also like ghost baby weeping. There's a lot of a lot going on in this house from an auditory point of view here.
So Lucy is not happy about this, and she screams, but eventually she and Norman are discussing it and Lucy's like, wow, it's weird that there's a tomb inside the house, and Norman says, it's just something you'll have to get used to this ain't New York.
Yeah, it's implied like this is just what they do out here. Yeah, And I remember thinking, is it is this ever a thing? I don't think I've ever visited a historic home where they're like, and now you'll notice there's a gravestone in the middle of the house. This is what they did.
I'm open minded, but a little doubtful on that. I don't know. Listeners right in do houses in New England
all have bodies buried in the floors? Oh and another thing, by the way, that was right in the middle of the sequence, there's a part where Norman is standing in the kitchen and it's one of those things where I think we've talked about how a great thing with some of these Italian horror directors is they really know how to put a colorful item or two in the middle of an otherwise color drab shot to just really make
it pop and add some contrast. And in one of these shots, the colorful item in the foreground is this big red box of something called fiddle fattle. It looks like it's a I don't know, it looks like crackerjacks or something. It might be caramel popcorn.
Yeah. Watching this scene, I also I thought back to our recent viewing of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath and was thinking about, Yeah, how he'll put just some sort of item, it doesn't even matter what it is, in the center, and the color will just suck you in. This doesn't quite pull that off, but you can see that Fulci was going to the same sort of effect.
But I guess this is all leading up to one of the finest sequences in the entire film, which is the bat scene. Oh God, the bat scene is so good, and it comes from the first time the family actually decides to venture into the base. So earlier, Anne was trying to pry her way into the basement in the middle of the night. Nobody ever explained that. I don't know why. She doesn't explain why. I don't think the movie addresses why she was trying to pry in, But
if it does, that I missed it. But eventually the whole family goes in, and there's this great scene of Norman, the dad, trying to unlock the door to the basement by prying at the key with the sharp edge of a kitchen knife. So he's got a kitchen kick like wedged in it, blade out like blade poking into the metal of the key and just twisting and twist, wrenching it over to turn the lock.
One of several scenes where people were open it, trying to open or are opening doors using knives in the most unsafe manner possible. In a way, it's very effective because you can't help but cringe watching them do this.
Fulci Actually, scenes from this movie could be used as a video version of the Don't Do What Donnie Don't Does book about knife safety.
Yeah, it's basically it's shake hands with danger, but generally but I guess the thing is you keep expecting that knife to slip in there to be a real bloody gore effect, and then there's not. But then what happens instead is, yeah, they open the door successfully with their knife, and then they start heading down there to check it out.
I think Dad's in front right with the flashlight and all yeah, yeah, And then in swoops the bat, the bat, and this is a great scene because the bat latches onto Norman's hand and then he still has a knife, so he stabs it like a million times, like backing up out of the cellar into the kitchen, just still stabbing at this bat. It's a fix to his hand, producing about six bats worth of blood in the process, and just getting it everywhere.
A flinging bat, blood on everyone in the room, and it's just stuck on his hand like a leach, like it's just all you can't pull it off, and he's just stabbing and stabbing and getting blood on his whole family, and it's absolutely ludicrous. This scene is everything. By the way, I got to say, it compares quite favorably to another bat attack film from an Italian horror movie. Do you remember the bat scene in Suspiria? I do not very funny,
but underwhelming compared to this one. So whereas this bat attack is just the paragon of excess, the bat attack in Suspiria is where Jessica Harper is in her room at the school and suddenly she gets creeped out by It's just like a ball of black socks with wings. It's not a good.
Bat one to ten on the bat believability scale. What do you give the Suspiria beat.
The Suspiria bat would be like a two or three. This one. I don't know if believability is the word, but it so overwhelms the senses that one need not believe either way. Is just there. It's just in.
You, all right, So I'm gonna mark you down for a five.
Okay.
But the other thing is this scene reminded me of The Simpsons where Homer gets his hand stuck in the toaster. Yeah, and it still has his hand stuck in the toaster.
Dad, it's in there again, all right.
So event eventually the bat is vanquished. And at that point, I think everybody's had enough of the seller and they have agreed not to go back in there for the time.
P Well, and we're to understand that after the scene the family expresses their desire to leave the house, because the next one is at the real estate office. You've got the real ittors, the two realtors sitting there and they're just talking about how, oh yeah, everybody always wants out of this house. Why won't people just stay in the house.
And this is great because we don't get enough scenes of realtors talking to real litters in our movies, particularly on a haunted house films. You know, maybe the owners of the renters are talking with the realtor, but but not this kind of inside realortor talk you get.
So one of the real ittors is the one we've already met, miss Gidtleson Gitttleston.
In one played by Dagmar Yes.
And then the other one is this guy who I don't know if he has a name, but he has a powerful aura of sleeves.
Yes.
And then so after this, I don't know if this has any causal relationship to anything else in the movie, but we get at least one scene of like the ghost people in their own environment, like May and her mom just in a house, hanging out, and May is depicted as dwelling within a gin pop of a supermax prison for dolls. It's, you know, just dolls everywhere, crammed in.
Uh.
You imagine that the dolls are like, you know, shoving each other for more personal space, and they have some kind of conversation here in the house. And I think this is implied to be the same house, but like not in a different reality version of the house.
Yeah, And I'm not sure where to fall on this, like this room and also so to a large extent, the seller are these places that are that physically exist and are closed off from the rest of the house, like the main I presume rental house. I forget if they were supposed to purchase this house or surely they're renting. You don't don't just buy a haunted house you want to rent. But I don't know if these are rooms that physically exist or if they are essentially ghost rooms
and ghost domains. And ultimately, the house by the Cemetery is kind of like the House of Leaves and it doesn't obey, you know, the typical laws of time and space.
Mmm, that's a nice comparison, except I would say House of Leaves is somehow less confusing than House for Cemetery. So from here the movie kind of ramps up more into into attack mode. So multiple characters are going to get slaughtered by the monster. Here there's a scene where the real estate agent Ms. Gidtlson just kind of pops
into the house to wander around. There's some beautiful, eerie shots of the house, like that same window, the bay of windows with the stained glass and all that, and there are these lamps, these globe shaped lamps beside them.
Is wonderful, wonderful composition. But so this lady's wandering through the house and she gets attacked by the tomb like the stone slab over the tomb that Lucy discovered there, it bites her leg essentially, and then she is killed by the monster hand guy from the beginning of the movie.
And that's that's the doctor. That's doctor freud Stein, who will we will increasingly see a lot.
More off right, Well, we don't see it's still just his hands here, Like, that's the big reveal at the end of the movie, is getting to see his full form. Here you just get hands. And then this lady gets murdered in a scene of an absolutely ridiculous excess of blood.
Yeah, this is a I think he stabs her with a poker multiple times.
Yeah. So sometime around this point in the movie, also Norman discovers the cassette tapes made by his predecessor, by the previous scholar who was working in this house and this guy Peterson, and Peterson's recording himself talking into a tape recorder about the the freud Steen house. He seems to be losing his mind, he says, the house it draws me like an infernal magnet. How many have wandered
into the waiting spider web. The smell of the rooms terrifies me, and then eventually we get to him saying blood, blood, blood, which of course it will be irresistible to all the Garth Morangi fans out there. But then then the scenes right after that are really full of stoppin' shop. So like the you know, mom comes home with the grocery bag that has at the Stop and Shop logo on them.
Honest values are what stopping shop is all about. And then there's Stop and Shop brand cartons of milk everywhere.
Yep, yep, adding that you know, some level of that red Mario Bova pop to the background.
Yeah, But here characters really start going down in the basement, so like Anne's going to go down in the basement, Bob's gonna go down in the basement, and and this this is third act territory here.
Yeah. So so first of all, I want so one of the people that goes down into the basement is Anne. And this is ultimately a sequence that really raises a lot even more questions for me because after the so after the real estate lady is again just brutally murdered in the upper portion of the house and then dragged into the into the cellar, it appears that Anne has spent quite a bit of time cleaning up after this murder, like the mom comes back. Apparently they went out to
a restaurant last night. They had invited Anne, but Anne was going to go quote unquote visit her parents, which apparently means clean up after the murderous creature slash, ghosts, slash whatever that lives in the cellar. And then and then she just kind of avoids the topic about what she's doing. But she's like clearly cleaning up all this blood. So it's like, is Anne work looking for the presence in the basement? Is she a thrall of the forces
in this house? What is it? It's not explained. And then when Anne goes looking for Bob wanders into the basement, the force brutally murders her, like chops her head off with a knife, and and so it's like, well, what was that all about? Then? But did she work for the thing in the basement? Did she work for some other force? Like what is the arrangement here? I have no idea.
Yeah, I could not understand it all. At first, it seems like she is working for the monster, and then she's surprised when she encounters it and so yeah, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, why was she cleaning up the blood?
Yeah, she died like she lived. A complete mystery. Okay, But when Bob's in the basement, then this is where the cellar really takes on. This this strange, otherworldly to mention, because there are the sounds and you know, creepy and also creepy sits. We keep seeing these big beast eyes glowing in the dark that remind me of the eyes of the Great Dweller from Stephen King's Creep Show. And it's easy to think when you first see them, oh, these must be the eyes of the presence in the basement.
These are the eyes of doctor Freudstein. But as we'll explain when we finally see doctor Freudstein, he does not have these eyes. No, So what was this? Is this another presence? Is this another?
Like?
Is this? Like? I have so many questions about the whole arrangement here with ghosts and potentially de mat demonic presences and also you know, artificially living undead creatures. It's really out there. I have no idea what's going on?
Yeah, the same here, just these these weird glowing yellow and red catlike eyes in the dark that don't correspond to any creature or monster we see later in the film.
But one of the key sequences is this scene, you know, where Bob is shut into the closet. Whatever's in the basement is able to close the door at will and trap people who wander down. Bob is stuck in the basement. Mom's trying to free him from the other side, and something's coming up the stairs to get him, and of course he is the doctor, uh, doctor freud Stein.
Now we don't I think this part, we don't fully see his face yet. That reveal is still coming. But one of the funniest parts again is that Lucy is trying to get in to help Bob and she's literally prying at the basement door with a kitchen knife. It's just the knife in the door, in the door jam, just prying. And then that doesn't work. And then I think this is when Norman comes home and he attacks the door with a hatchet to try to get in
and save Bob. There again was a very funny moment where he goes keep away from the door and Bob goes yep.
I will and then here comes the monster hand and polds Bob's head against the door while Dad's trying to hack through it with the with the with the with the hatchet. Yes, it's it's pretty great. I mean, it's terrified. It's really an ingenious scene. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this.
And the dad accidentally chops the monster's arm off with the hatchet, then also keeps hacking at the door in a very inefficient way, like hitting the door in completely different places, like in the middle and then at the side.
Yeah, and finally we do get to see our monster, our doctor Freudstein in full and oh man, I've long loved this monster design. So he is apparently one hundred and fifty year old surgeon with a who really liked illegal surgeries. He's beat death through some mix of butchery and cell theft. And when I say beat death, you know it's it's arguable, like how close the score was here, because his body is just this desiccated husk of scars and rot with seemingly new parts at it is needed.
I think that's the reason he has one monster arm and one seemingly normal arm. He's clearly lost all of his humanity and now just exists. Is this thing that lures people into the cellar so he can cut them to ribbons and you know, maybe harvest some of their cells or their body parts. He boasts amazing strength to match his brutality. He can't speak, or doesn't seem to.
He seems to only emit guttural sounds, and we don't know if this is due to his state of mind, like is his brain just rotting in there, or is it just because he doesn't have you know, functional speak chapparatus anymore. He also may have supernatural powers, like he may be the one that's opening and closing in that door, or he's aided by the ghosts of his family, or I was trying to figure out, well, maybe it has something to do with those those beast eyes in the cellar.
Maybe like he's somehow horre cruxed himself and so he exists both as an incorporeal like presence in the cellar. But then also this this uh, this doomed you know, corporeal rotting creature. It's it's wonderful, Like the suit looks really good. You can basically smell him.
Oh yeah, yeah. The design of the monster is absolutely fabulous, especially the head where his head is it's almost like a wax helmet of a kind, with these deeply recessed eye sockets that don't appear to have eyes in them, and and no mouth. Yeah, the mouth part is just kind of smoothed over and it's just this vertical scar. Now it's excellent.
Yeah, there's kind of a bodies exhibit sensibility to his head, like he's been plasticized. Oh and then when Dad, Dad gets in there and it stabs him. And when Dad stabs him, another one of the most minervable scenes in the film is what comes out is not blood, but this just kind of rotted sludge filled with squirming maggots. I mean, just packed with maggots and not meal worms. Is sometimes the case, sometimes you have meal worms standing
in for maggots. But this is the real deal. This is just a big maggoty sludge that starts dripping out of his body.
Yeah. Tremendously gross and in some ways beautiful monster design.
Now Here the big spoilers what happens when the family, the final three go up against doctor Freudstein. Well it doesn't go so well. Dad, you know, gets in there and gets the stabbing in on doctor Freudstein. But then doctor Freudstein rips Dad's throat out in a very grizzly sequence. And then Mom and Bob are going up these stairs to that tombstone trap door and trying to force it open so that they can escape, and Freudstein ends up grabbing Mom and like dragging her down the stairs, bonking
her head on each rung. And then and I think this must have been a I don't know if this was a cut scene, but like the next scene you see is like her head has been dashed to pieces on the concrete floor, and then the creature's coming back up. Freudstein's coming back up to get Bob, and Bob manages to squeeze his way out and is pulled to safety by May, the ghost girl.
Yeah, so I was confused about the ending. Does Bob escape the monster by becoming a ghost?
I don't know. Does Bob does mean Bob dies or Bob crosses over or has Bob been saved in the physical world by May. I'm not sure.
I really don't. Yeah, I'm not sure.
I think it's intentionally haunting and vague and in Fulci does nothing to clear it up by having the final shot in the film be this wide shot of the house again, and then there's a quote there attributed to Henry James, says, no one will ever know whether children or monsters or monsters are children.
So I want to reveal something. This didn't exactly sound like Henry James to me, and I was like, I wonder if that's an authentic quote. I looked it up. It appears it is not. I could not find this as a Henry James quote anywhere, and I could find people saying that she made this up and attributed it falsely to Henry James. Why pick Henry James, I'm not sure. I mean Henry James, Like, what's the connection there? I guess James wrote Turn of the Screw, which is a
horror classic. Otherwise, I don't know.
I have no idea. I mean, maybe it was just inspired by the works of Henry James, and yeah, just wanted to throw in a quotation, but then not a real quotation. I don't know.
Good choice either way, good choice.
So there you have it, House by the Cemetery. There's so much to love in this one.
Well, so one of the things I did think was actually kind of interesting toward the end was did I understand correctly that a lot of the times the characters have heard a sound of a child sobbing and they thought it was Bob, and so they were looking for Bob, but it wasn't Bob. It turns out it was the monster, and the monster was sobbing with the voice of a child.
I'm not sure. Possibly, but also I think those are possibly just ambient ghost noises, like ghosts of all the children, because we get these scenes of all these other bodies that have been cut to pieces down there. We see at one point, like a slaughtered child that looks a little bit like Bob. And I don't know if this is a vision of the potential future or this is a child that was killed in the past. I think there's that's during the playing of the Haunted tape.
Oh yeah, the Haunted cassette tape where.
Doctor Peterson is like, oh not that children. The children.
It's labeled I think it says Peterson personal.
Yes, And you remember what Norman does with that. After he's through listening to it, He's like, well, this is going directly into the fire burning in the library on a Sunday when it's closed. Why is there an open brazier in the library, so that to keep the tape, keep the place warm, or just in case cursed documents or recordings are found. There's like a sign saying, remember, if you find a cursed document in our cassette tape in the library, incinerate immediately, be considerate of others.
I mean, I got to say, we're deep enough in the dream logic of the plot by that point it feels right. Yeah, So I guess that's house by the cemetery.
That is a house by the cemetery. So this one is. This one's pretty widely available at this point. You can find you can ultimately find it streaming a lot of places, and the version streaming you can, you know, purchase a rent digitally. I find that it tends to be the restored version. That's the version I watched. I watched the first half of it on my trial of AMC Plus in Apple, and then my trial ran out and I had to switch to a trial of like Showtime or
something to finish watching it. So I took the cheapskate approach, but I was also very tempted to pick up the handsome blue Underground Blu ray of this, which has fully restored, but also well with the version I was looking at. It comes with all these behind the scenes features, and also it comes with the soundtrack as a CD, which was very tempting as well.
Oh yeah, sounds like a steal.
All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close it up here. We're gonna we're gonna close up the house by the cemetery. We're gonna put the reorder's lock on the front door, and we'll be back next week with another another weird film. But yeah, thanks again for everyone who's who's enjoyed these or put up with these episodes over the past year. If you want to listen to weird more episodes of Weird House Cinema, we air it every Friday in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed.
We're primarily a science podcast, believe it or not, and we do our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I know it's kind of hard to tell during the month of October because we have a lot of a lot of creepy content thrown in there if you're just discovering us or something, But yeah, core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday's Artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesday. On Monday we have a listener mail and over weekend we air a rerun.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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