My mind's eye breathed new life into the gore and the images really got under my skin, disrupting my sleep process. So, while I do heartily recommend the movie, ensure you have sufficient unwind time following the viewing before attempting to sleep. Don't say I didn't warn you!
Beside making my night a waking nightmare, the movie is pretty darn good, too. Lucio Fulci made this as his horror follow-up to the hit Zombi 2 (aka Zombie), the film that reinvigorated his career and launched him along a career path that would make him a legend to horror fans around the world.
City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell) sees the budding auteur taking his stories into even more surreal and gore-filled realms. The film is also the first entry in his unofficial Death trilogy (followed by The Beyond and House by the Cemetery), a series of films linked by the common element of gates being opened to Hell, allowing the dead to return to the physical world.
As this film opens we get a sequence that takes us between Dunwich, where a priest is walking through a cemetery, and New York where a small group are conducting a seance after reading from the Book of Eibon. The psychic of the group, Mary (Fulci regular Catriona MacColl), sees the priest, watching as he proceeds to hang himself in the cemetery. This hanging results in the opening of the gates of Hell, which is never a good thing. The dead begin returning in Dunwich, proceeding to kill the townsfolk. Mary, having witnessed this during the seance, consults the Book of Eibon and discovers that they must find this dead priest in order to stop the coming of the dead by All Saints Day, a mere three days away.
Mary, joined by reporter Peter Bell (Christopher George of Pieces), heads off for Dunwich in an attempt to stop the oncoming apocalypse. Once there, they team with a couple of survivors, proceeding to dodge the dead and head into the catacombs beneath the local cemetery.
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