Movie Review of Horror Film "City of the Living Dead" -- Fear Stems from the Unknown
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear; the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the unknown.
——H.P Lovecraft
Lucio Fulci has always been controversial due to his extremely inconsistent film quality. Some people appreciate some of his works, but others have strong hostility towards them. For example, everyone hopes he will follow the path of "Zombi", but he almost never makes similar things. Indeed, some works' logic and storylines are really hard to convince people that they are Fulci's works. The chaotic and inexplicable cause-and-effect relationships make many people criticize them heavily. At this point, we can only reconsider what Fulci is pursuing.
This movie, "City of the Living Dead," was filmed in 1980, right between two classics ("Suspiria" and "The Beyond"). Watching this one can help understand why "The Beyond" felt like such a big stylistic leap to audiences. The story roughly tells of a priest who commits suicide and then mutates, starting to harm the town where he resides. People in the town are gradually turned into zombies. A psychic and her friends sense this and start figuring out ways to save the situation. Strange things happen next: bodies move mysteriously, children see their sister's ghost, windows break and blood flows from the walls, and people are killed one by one. Then comes a historical moment: the father thinks the mentally challenged man is going to molest his daughter, so he drills through the man's head with a drill bit. The whole process feels like continuously pulling a bowstring until the second it pierces through, when the tension finally drops. Next, worms attack for no reason, zombies start teleporting and cannot be killed, their numbers increasing more and more, taking over the entire town. At this point, the movie reaches its climax of terror. In the end, the priest is killed underground, and other corpses burn into ashes along with him. The story ends with the heroine's scream.
