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Connections, in both directions
And Father Burke's unfortunate experience of being buried alive comes to an end when his rescuer's shovel cracks through a coffin lid and nearly splits his skull (a la 1980's City of the Living Dead).
It seems to be a rule of the Conjuring universe that each film should have a homage to a classic Italian horror film — Annabelle reprised one of the best scares in Mario Bava’s filmography, and this revisits a memorable buried-alive shock from Lucio Fulci’s City Of The Living Dead.
In addition to its many cultural signifiers (New Coke! John Parr’s theme song from “St. Elmo’s Fire”! Cocaine!), “MaXXXine” also homages many different directors and films of the period—the most glaringly obvious to me being Vernon Zimmerman’s “Fade to Black” (1980), Lucio Fulci’s “The New York Ripper” (1982), Gary Sherman’s “Vice Squad” (1982), Robert Vincent O’Neil’s “Angel” (1983), and Brian De Palma’s “Body Double” (1984).
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by City of the Living Dead (1980)
Visuals
"The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz", in which our heroine is placed in a seemingly inescapable situation by Budd, comes off as a nod to the works of legendary Italian director Lucio Fulci in the way it deploys sadism, obsessive close-ups of eyeballs and shots that uncannily echo the key scene of "City of the Living Dead".
The film, which was written by Elisa Briganti (who later worked with Fulci on Manhattan Baby and House by the Cemetery), opens with a nod to F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized Dracula adaptation Nosferatu (1922) as an abandoned sailboat slowly wanders into the New York harbor.
The film definitely borrows liberally from haunted house lore, but the two most obvious sources are Fulci’s House By the Cemetery and The Beyond, and since those are two of my favorites, those aspects really worked for me.
There’s a touch of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond in writer/director Brendan Muldowney’s film.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by Four of the Apocalypse (1975)
Visuals
(The film’s snowbound backdrop recalls fringe Westerns like Lucio Fulci’s Four of the Apocalypse, too; it’s ending has a dash of Tales from the Crypt.)
There’s a particularly nasty nod to Lucio Fulci that almost tips into gross-out sadism – even if you haven't see The Beyond (1981), you’ll know it when you see it.
From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
Jumping back to my horror side though, I did immensely appreciate all the little nods to past horror films Warm Bodies threw in, be something as simple as showing the DVD for Lucio Fulci’s Zombie or something more implied like R’s constant commentary about typical everyday zombie knowledge.
Even in a grim rip-off like Lucio Fulci's Zombie there's the well-loved underwater face-off between a zombie and a shark (guess who wins).
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
influenced Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)
Plot
I had just recently seen George A. Romero’s zombie trilogy (1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, and 1985’s Day of the Dead), and I couldn’t get past the fact that Fulci’s film was such an unapologetic rip-off.
Hellraiser seems inspired more by the Italian horror masters Dario Argento ( Suspiria ), Mario Bava ( Black Sunday ), and Lucio Fulci ( The Beyond ) than by any American horror films.
Braindead (1992)
Directed by Peter Jackson
influenced by City of the Living Dead (1980)
Visuals Themes
At about this point, were we watching a Lucio Fulci film, City of the Living Dead for instance, we might conclude "and now all hell breaks loose…" with complete confidence.
After Lionel�s mum is bitten at the zoo by a Sumatran rat-monkey, family life becomes Night of the Living Dead.
Fulci made a film called Don’t Torture a Duckling .
There's little of the invasive intensity of Lustig's Maniac or Fulci's The New York Ripper, but there isn't meant to be -- Zodiac traces the crime through Southern California and throughout the 1970s, and deliberately dilutes the tension with ongoing temporal jumps ("8 months later... 11 hours later... 1 day later") emphasizing not the escalating spread of fear but the numbing feel of a flailing bureaucratic investigation.
Also notable are Lucio Fulci's Italian exports, Zombie and City of the Living Dead.
In effect, CEMETERY MAN is part of the tradition of Italian horror films that prize imagery over substance, rather like Argento’s Suspiria and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond.
The critical longevity of perplexing Euro-horror masterworks like Blood and Black Lace (1964), A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and Suspiria (1977) certainly suggest the latter.
I constructed it as a parody of influential movies like The Psychic and Bay of Blood but instead of resourceful protagonists, good with weapons, I wanted ordinary dorky people who dithered around as if they’d stumbled in from the real world…
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
influenced by A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971)
Films whose florid labels such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, and Black Belly of the Tarantula gave an arty dimension to what were basically paperback thrillers.