Rather strange that this ended up on the British video nasties list, as it had just finished run in the cinema prior to its ban. This version I saw at the ICA last year was the old British X cinema release, with a couple of cuts left in it, but nothing like as many as the 18 cert video release I used to have. As the violence is so comic book anyway, one does wonder what anyone could have possibly found offensive about this film. A case in point is the scene in which the bat attacks the father's hand, and he attempts to remove it by stabbing it repeatedly, as he flails his hand around spraying everyone in showers of blood; it's simply ridiculous (the shots of his son being spattered in blood were definitely excised from my video copy). The jarring way in which scenes are edited into each other notwithstanding, the film itself is well shot, with some gloomy atmospheric imagery, most prominent in the long tracking shots around the house itself. Fulci's approach does tend towards melodrama however, especially in the repeated reaction shots of close-ups of the characters eyes. Despite this, the brooding gothic atmosphere leads to a genuinely frightening film at times, and if the script hadn't been so trivial, derivative and devoid of any internal logic, this might have been quite impressive. As it is, it's fairly passable for the genre.
Review of The House by the Cemetery
