Sodoma's Ghost

I do have to say, this poster is pretty baller. They should have used this for THE KEEP.

Sodoma’s Ghost (1988)

Dir. Lucio Fulci

Written by Lucio Fulci, Carlo Alberto Alfieri

Starring Claudio Aliotti, Maria Concetta Salieri, Robert Egon, Al Cliver

Well, one minute and 30 seconds into SODOMA’s GHOST, including credits (which play over stygian blackness in total silence) we’ve got a Nazi cocaine orgy. Unfortunately it’s the same Nazi orgy I already saw in CAT IN THE BRAIN, which blunts a little bit of the shock value they were probably counting on here. And in CAT IN THE BRAIN you also had the added bonus of watching director Lucio Fulci intensely staring at everything from behind the camera, which gave it a little more pizzazz. But still, Nazi coke orgy! I guess that lets you know what kind of party it’s gonna be right off the bat, anyway. Six minutes later it’s still going. Finally, a Nazi shoots a pool ball into a reposing woman’s vagina, and there’s an explosion, and then we’re on to the actual plot. Which is not exactly as severe a pivot as you might assume, because that plot turns out to also be mostly porn, and a lot of it with Nazis, though admittedly the beginning is the only orgy. I realize that to the casual filmgoer, the idea that a movie could just unexpectedly turn out to be Nazi porn* seems even more alien than the idea that you could unintentionally stumble upon the same Nazi porn twice, but I assure you that in the particular cultural beat I report on, this is an ever-present possibility and you just have to learn to roll with it. Well, this is no time to self-reflect about the genre I’ve spent my life studying, come on guys let’s move on nothing to see here.

Once we’ve established the narratively “vital” fact that there is this Italian villa where one time there was a Nazi coke orgy, we’re introduced to the six blandest actors in Italy as they arrive at the very same Nazi villa in modern times, and find it deserted. They hang out there, and one of them has a Nazi S&M dream. Then they leave. And then they come back, and this time they find they can’t leave, the doors and windows are locked (and can’t be broken open). So they prattle obnoxiously at each other for awhile. This takes up roughly 50 minutes of an 84 minute movie. Finally, at 50 minutes, some kind of horror part starts to kick in; it seems there’s an evil, possibly Nazi, ghost and/or ghosts in the house that can tempt you by showing you things in a mirror. “Things” which, in every case, turn out to be boobs. There are endless, endless amounts of boobs in this movie (every female cast member gets topless, with no exceptions) and although this is an admittedly friendly gesture on the part of the movie, it gets old pretty fast when you’re hoping for some kind of horror. Plenty of hustling genre movies try to hedge their bets by dumping a bunch of softcore nonsense into the inevitable downtime that arises from the necessity of putting something on-screen for a minimum of 75 minutes, but this seems like a case where they started to shoot some filler nudity and then just got distracted and kept shooting more and more and then forgot to go back and add the genre stuff. I’m unclear if the Nazis are able to tempt you with other things too, and it just never occurs to them to try. But at any rate, boobs seem to consistently do the trick, so why mess with a winning strategy?

There are literally almost no screenshots from this movie that can be posted unedited on a wholesome family site like this one.

Director Lucio Fulci  (ZOMBI 2, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE NEW YORK RIPPER, CAT IN THE BRAIN, DOOR INTO SILENCE) is one of those slippery genre auteurs who is justifiably ranked with the greats, but did not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality. Probably his most widely recognizable auteurial trademark is that his films have boldly nonsensical, haphazard narratives redeemed by a few absolutely stellar setpieces. It’s been maybe a decade since I’ve seen it, but my recollection is that even his arguably most famous film, ZOMBI 2, is almost entirely absolutely unwatchable dreck except that it also happens to have maybe the three best zombie gore scenes ever put on celluloid. That forgives a lot -- and to be a Fulci fan is inherently to forgive a lot-- but SODOMA’S GHOST is, regrettably, almost entirely unwatchable dreck, minus any of the good parts.

But even this deep into his late-career decline, Fulci was still Fulci, and so, from about minute 50 to minute 60, suddenly Fulci the thriller director, not Fulci the softcore porn director, turns up out of the blue. For a hot moment, things get inexplicably good, with a disquieting, intense Russian Roulette sequence, a surreal walk through an impressionistically lit house with unsourced, untranslated German being shouted from somewhere, and a crazy sex nightmare which ends with the guy grabbing his paramore's boobs, only to find they're filled with decay and maggots. They follow that up by dragging the guy’s body downstairs, where it suddenly starts decaying really disgustingly while the camera digs in close to check out the gnarly detail. Granted, that may not sound like a universally appealing description of a fun night at the movies, but at least it’s making some effort. Stephen King famously said, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.” Nothing in this movie was ever going to terrify or horrify, but at least going for the gross-out means they were trying.

Anyway, starting right at minute 50 there’s a legitimately functional 10 minute stretch of a movie which otherwise barely has a worthwhile 10 seconds. It’s enough to get your hopes up that maybe the movie will manage to stick the landing and redeem itself. Alas, immediately thereafter the Fulci who cares checks out again, and things settle right back into the previously established standard routine of people taking their tops off and having sinister Germans offer them more boobs through a mirror, none of which really goes anywhere (for example, there's a long scene where a topless German woman makes a lesbian think her girlfriend is getting it on with another girl, but then she storms downstairs to catch them and they’re not, so nothing happens with that. Not sure why someone felt it was worth including in a movie).

As the MIRROR MIRROR series unequivocally demonstrated, evil mirrors are not exactly the stuff of gripping cinema. Nazis have a slightly better track record, as least as far as sleazy genre entertainment goes, so no real surprise, then, that the best part (of a movie almost entirely lacking in good parts) is Robert Egon (“Italian Street Boy” in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, “Perfect Young Italian” [seriously] in 1990’s CAPTAIN AMERICA) as the young Nazi who is filming the orgy (not participating) and shows up to tempt two of our “heroes” in the present. He has an arresting presence, half smug Aryan malice and half infuriatingly mild politeness. I prefer the idea that he’s not a Nazi at all, but rather some sort of ancient spirit in the house which got to the venal Nazis even more than he’s able to with the horny teens. There’s never anything specific to suggest that, but if there’s anything at all interesting about the movie, it’s the inhuman, opaque quality of the antagonists, which Egon embodies best. Most ghost stories are fundamentally built around the mystery of who the ghosts were and what they want. Here, that question is never raised, and the answer never appears. Do they want, like, revenge, or corruption of the innocent, or what? Does their being Nazis and trying to seduce the youth read like a metaphor? The movie never even seems aware that you might have these questions, which is certainly a symptom of its abject idiotic incompetence more than its narrative boldness, but at least the effect is a little exotic. Anyway, Egon’s only really in two scenes, which is a shame since the whole climax could really use him.

Speaking of which, the climax is such a wispy bit of tired nothing that it feels wrong to even describe it with that term, but I do sort of like the film’s final, insipid twist of a coda. (SPOILERS) See, it turns out that after a long night of obnoxious arguing and death and boobs and Nazis, everyone just… wakes up on the lawn, apparently having dreamed the whole thing! They just laugh it off and drive away, and that’s the end of the movie! Obviously, an ending so amazingly corny and insulting has drawn quite a bit of ire over the years. And it’s not hard to see why; if you somehow managed the seemingly impossible feat of taking the movie seriously up to that point (and there’s certainly nothing in the movie itself which would suggest you aren’t meant to) one can well imagine how an ending this flagrantly dismissive would be an absolutely mortifying affront (see [SPOILERS for THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW]: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW). But I actually sort of enjoy the dorky, sincere niceness of it; you get the feeling Fulci ended up kinda liking these dumbass kids and wanting to give them a happy ending, especially after so many of them were nice enough to show him their tits. It’s sort of sweet, really, which is a weird and possibly psychotic thing to have to say about a movie which opens with a full five minutes of Nazi orgy, but here we are. And here we will leave it.

PS: I have no idea who Sodoma is.

Alternate take: “The problem with this movie is it’s just not sleazy enough. So, a sleazy Nazi film without sleaze? Yep, that’s all we have here. While it’s not entirely true that there’s no sleaze as actresses like to shuck their clothes to show us their very modest endowments – though most are small enough that it seems like Fulci did his casting calls at junior high schools – there’s no eroticism or sizzle with the sleaze. It just plain doesn’t feel sexy or even dirty.” --Cult Review’s “Perfesser Deviant” who probably needs to take a break from Italian movies for awhile.

* Hello there, Academy-Award-For-Best-Picture-Nominee THE READER.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	None, but with a title that lurid, what else do you need to say?
TITLE ACCURACY	Since I have no idea what it means, I can’t begin to tell you. There does seem to be one or more ghost, anyway.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted Houses, Nazis
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, but I do want to point out that Art Director Franco Vanorio performed the same duties on PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING, which means he worked with James Cameron.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lucio Fulci behind the camera.
NUDITY?	Almost non-stop
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Probably, but if you didn’t stop reading at “Nazi coke orgy” I doubt anything else the movie can throw at you is going to upset you.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Not really
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes
MORAL OF THE STORY	Whatever moral this movie is trying to get you to learn, I would resist it.

Cat In The Brain

Cat In The Brain (1990)

Dir. Lucio Fulci

Written by Lucio Fulci, Giovanni Simonelli, Antonio Tentori

Starring Lucio Fulci, recycled footage of other actors from older movies

           CAT IN THE BRAIN is an unusual movie.

Well, sort of. By which I mean, it’s definitely unusual. It’s only sort of a movie.

Let me be more clear: what CAT IN THE BRAIN is, is the “story” (in the loosest possible sense) of an aged Italian horror director named Lucio Fulci (Lucio Fulci, ZOMBI 2, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE NEW YORK RIPPER, DOOR INTO SILENCE, CAT IN THE BRAIN), who spends his days directing gorey horror films, and his nights haunted by gruesome images of murder and violence which make him grimace a lot. His psychologist, (David L. Thompson, THE GODFATHER PART II [“party guest, uncredited”]) is worried about him, and reasonably so, as his patient reflects, “I feel like I’m going crazy… as if my brain’s being eaten by a cat.” That comparison seems independently demented enough to justify Fulci’s concern, but he needn’t be worried, or at least not about his own mental state. It seems that it’s actually the shrink who’s insane, and is cleverly committing murders in such a way that Fulci’s grand guignol visions seem to implicate him. Now the director not only suspects he’s losing his marbles, but that he may be a murderer. Which doesn’t help his already unsettled state of mind, and means he can hardly do anything without experiencing intense visions of context-free clips from various gorey movies he previously directed or produced.

            ...Wait, what? He’s haunted by… clips of his old movies? And most of this film is about him walking around grimacing and then seeing one? Uh, yeah. Therein lies the “only sort of a movie” problem. On the surface, this is actually a fun meta concept, right? Fulci, the famed horror director, is now cast into one of his movies, and has to deal with being a horror movie character at the mercy of… Fulci, the famed horror director! It offers the 63-year old (who sold his first script at 26 and directed his first film at 32) a chance to reflect on his own work and the way it has infiltrated his subconscious over the years (like a cat eating his brain, I guess? I think a lot of us can relate to that). “Lucio Fulci’s 8 ½!” raves the internet. Yeah, sure, if 8 ½ had been composed mostly of recycled footage from old films with a meta wraparound story probably shot in two weekends to serve as filler.

Look, you can’t fault the gore, which is plentiful, or the nudity, which is equally plentiful* -- and even though nearly every bit of genre payoff here is recycled, the clips are not from anything I’m so familiar with that they’re distractingly recognizable (they’re mostly late Fulci, and sometimes films that he produced but didn’t direct).** But at the same time… even if you’ve never seen this stuff before, there’s no getting around the fact that this is a clip show episode. The film stock constantly changes and the new footage is just barely making any effort to match the old (and sometimes none at all!), so it’s never less than blindly obvious what kind of trickery the movie is up to. It tries to duck the obvious mismatches by presenting the inserts as “visions” Fulci is experiencing, not literal events, but that just means that sometimes Fulci will just be standing around somewhere, and suddenly look at the camera, and it will cut to noticeably poorer film of some woman we’ve never seen before, and will never see again, in some weird set which is nowhere else in the movie, being drowned by a monster hand belonging to something we’ll never see. And when that’s done, he’ll kind of wince, and go back to doing whatever he was doing before, and it will never be mentioned again. That’s not just a cost-saving technique they threw in a few times to save some cash, mind you -- it pretty much describes the entire movie.

The genre goods are technically there --you’re never more than a few minutes from another bloodbath-- but the impact isn’t. It’s just so completely free of context or meaning that it’s hard to get too into it. That’s rich coming from a Fulci fan, of course -- his movies are infamous for being free-associative, nonsensical strings of over-the-top stepieces -- but this is good evidence that even a tiny bit of narrative context goes a long way. Even at his most narratively hazy, you at least knew there was a character in danger. It’s hard to get too invested in a movie which is just an old man’s scary dreams with nothing whatsoever at stake. Especially when it’s just so unapologetically lazy! It even has the gall to not just recycle scenes from other movies, but to then replay those scenes multiple times within this movie, in some cases as many as three or four times! It’s just a damned insult to pad a movie which is already so low effort. Especially since they’re all from movies which were only a year or two old at the time!

I mean, I dunno. It’s kinda charming to see Fulci play himself, and the framing story --with the suggestive elements that all these years of horror may not have been psychologically great for him, but his REAL problem is that a shrink is trying to gaslight him-- is worth mulling over a little. What does watching horror do to us? Should we be worried, or is our fear of damaging ourselves causing us to overlook the cultural scolds (psychiatrists) who we should really be worried about? The ending, where it seems like maybe all this finally HAS caused Fulci to snap, only to be revealed as one more meta joke, only pushes the point further.

But while all that could be interesting, I must concede that it’s mostly not, in actual practice. Fulci doesn’t have a ton of dialogue, and what little there is only glancingly offers even a hint of self-reflection. One of the most tantalizing things the film offers is seeing a fictionalized Fulci behind the scenes shooting a film-within-a-film, a scenario which should offer both a window into his artistic process and a chance for him to comment directly on his own work. But they mostly don’t even bother to actually recreate that, instead just recycling old footage with some new inserts of him, in close up, intensely “directing.” Let that sink in; they have a camera, they have a set, and they’re still too cheap or lazy to hire a few actors to play “actors” in a fictional Fulci film so we could get a sense of what the actual behind-the-scenes work looks like. The film just isn’t interested.

To my way of thinking, that’s not just a missed opportunity; that’s a crippling flaw. Among the, ahem, several noteworthy ways in which CAT IN THE BRAIN is different than 8½, the most important is probably that 8 ½ isn’t just a meta exercise; it’s an introspective and probing self-portrait of Fellini, professionally and personally. CAT IN THE BRAIN obstinately resists introspection, even when it seems intrinsically integral to the plot (how does a movie which finds the main character visiting a psychiatrist manage to be so fucking opaque about his thoughts and feelings?!). We just don’t really learn much about Fulci the artist, or Fulci the man, through any of this. So while it’s a fun idea, and Fulci himself is a reasonably captivating protagonist, it feels pretty empty. It’s a promisingly meta scenario, but with disappointingly little interest in actually saying anything about the artist or the genre or the profession that it’s supposedly a meta take on. It’s a clever way to save money while still technically making a new film, but it’s never more than that. The best clip show in the world is still just a clip show, and it’s just not gonna scratch that itch for the real thing.

*Female nudity only, of course. This is an Italian film, did you even have to ask?

**Wikipedia lists SODOMA’S GHOST, TOUCH OF DEATH, BLOODY PSYCHO, MASSACRE, THE MURDER STREET, and music from THE BEYOND, and I don’t know enough to dispute that.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Italics
TITLE ACCURACY	They say the title aloud as if it makes sense, or is something that anyone other than Fulci would be able to understand or relate to.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	No, more of a recycle
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Gaslighting, slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Fulci
NUDITY?	Tons
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	You know what, I actually don’t think so. Amazing in any Italian movie, and doubly amazing in one with so many kill scenes and topless chicks.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Cat puppets eat brains over the credits, and a cat eventually uncovers a buried corpse, but that’s more helpful than harmful.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Not really, unless you wanna speculate about what some of the clips meant in the original context
POSSESSION?	No, although sort of some hypnotic mind-control or something
CREEPY DOLLS?	One murder occurs in a room with a bunch of creepy dolls, though they don’t do anything
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Yes
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Definitely, especially Fulci intensely watching and “directing” clips from a Nazi orgy scene
MORAL OF THE STORY	Even a Fulci movie needs to be a little closer to a story than a sizzle reel.

Door Into Silence

Door Into Silence (1991)

Dir and written by Lucio Fulci (as “H. Simon Kittay” and “Jerry Madison” respectively)

Starring John Savage, Sandi Schultz

There are a surprisingly amount of films by Lucio Fulci (THE BEYOND, ZOMBI 2, THE NEW YORK RIPPER) that I haven’t seen, and there’s a very good reason for that. At his peak, he was making what I consider to be the perfect Italian horror films, which is to say they hit that exact sweet point between hilariously abject terribleness and great cinematic art, resulting in a potent, nightmarish combination of nonsensical plotting, anti-acting and genuinely effective horror imagery. Unfortunately, towards the end of his career in the late 80’s and early 90’s, he seems to have started neglecting the “great cinematic art” part of that equation and focusing on the “hilarious abject terribleness” aspect more and more, resulting in a series of films which are, by all accounts, close to completely unwatchable. But desperate times, etc, etc, bad decisions, alcoholism, etc, and here I am, watching his very last film as a director. From 1991, which is way too late to expect anything but despair from any Italian film, let alone one from a director who even hardcore horror fans would probably agree hadn’t made a worthwhile film since nearly a decade before.

The result is somewhat surprising: DOOR INTO SILENCE is not what I expected at all. In fact, it’s simultaneously more and less interesting than I assumed. Less interesting because the one thing you can usually count on from Fulci -- elaborate, over-the-top tasteless gore scenes and horror set pieces-- are conspicuously missing. But more interesting because despite a pretty tired premise, Fulci seems to be trying harder than I would have guessed by this point in his career, and for something a little more offbeat. The film is shot on location in Louisiana, and even with what one would assume is virtually no budget at all, Fulci seems determined to wring some atmosphere and style out of the proceedings, which is something that he only ever seemed sporadically interested in before.

The “story” such as it is, involves Melvin Devereux (John Savage, a career which includes everything from THE DEER HUNTER and THE NEW WORLD to ALIEN LOCKDOWN and CARNOSAUR 2, putting DOOR INTO SILENCE squarely in the middle), some rich asshole who has just attended a New Orleans funeral and subsequently drifts around having strange, surreal encounters with a hostile hearse driver (Richard Castleman, who acted only in this but went on to a subsequent career as a location scout) and a mysterious, beautiful woman (Sandi Schultz, STAGE FRIGHT, and later Mrs. John Savage, awww). Gee, can you guess where this is going? Of course you can, because this is obviously yet another version of a tale which goes back at least to Ambrose Bierce’s 1980 story An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, and is probably most famously depicted on-screen in either the classic 1960 Twilight Zone episode The Hitch-Hiker or the classic 1962 indie film CARNIVAL OF SOULS.

I do not consider it a spoiler to reveal this fact to you, because if you’ve ever seen a movie before you’ll probably figure it out in the first two minutes of runtime, and the movie itself seems to pretty openly acknowledge that you know what’s going on by at least the halfway point, though it politely pretends the ending is a huge shocking twist anyway. But forget the premise, the fun here is watching Fulci stage odd, surreal little vignettes in ghostly Louisiana cemeteries, churches, dive bars and fortune tellers’ parlours. I’ll admit it, there’s nothing like the Southern Gothic aesthetic to get me in that dreamy, uncanny haze, which is exactly what you want for this kind of shenanigan. It’s also all you get; for better or for worse, this is a vibe movie, one which either sucks you into its otherworldly atmosphere, or is going to put you to sleep almost immediately.

For me, though, it worked, particularly at a reasonably sleek 87 minutes. At times the punishingly limited budget shows (they repeat the same exact fucking shots of a not-especially-elaborate car chase --no joke-- about five times, often right after we just fucking saw it) but mostly there’s no need for a lot of bells and whistles. Fulci, who I usually associate with fairly indifferent cinematography, actually sets up some subtly nice-looking shots here and gets most of his impact out of his staging and editing, to the movie’s great benefit. Unlike most of his efforts in the previous decade, this generally looks and feels like a real movie, as though someone took the time to set up the camera framing and edit it together with the goal of having people see it. That may seem like faint praise, but it’s really all that’s required for the story on hand, and it gets the job done with something hovering between competence and elegance, which is already vastly more than I had expected from a 1991 Fulci movie.

That having been said, there are a couple odd and quintessentially Italian moments peppered through here to make sure it’s never entirely predictable. In one, Devereux (since he shares a surname with Van Damme’s character from UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, I’m going to go ahead and assume they’re brothers or something and part of a shared cinematic universe), obsessed with learning the identity of the quiet cargo of the mystery hearse (hint, hint) crashes a funeral at a tiny roadside church and rips open the casket. Only, it turns out to be an all-black church, and the parishioners do not take kindly to this crazed white man running in and disrupting everything. Now, I think history proves that Italians don’t really understand American racism, but they at least get that it’s a thing, and Fulci correctly realizes that the added (but unspoken) racial antagonism is going to make this scene more intense, and, with the intense, feverish photography, maybe even a little great. Another great scene works because it suddenly takes an unexpected turn: as the situation gets increasingly nightmarish and surreal, Devereux gets into a physical fight with the hearse driver and rips open the coffin to see a grotesquely burned figure. This is a bizarre moment which is clearly not meant to be taken literally… and then they cut to the next scene of Devereux in front of a judge. He’s been arrested and fined $500! The odd dissonance of the dream logic suddenly giving way to something so mundane and normal is both funny and disconcerting, similar (though obviously not as good) as the turn CANDYMAN takes at a crucial moment (you know the one).

Sequences like those two help DOOR INTO SILENCE stay lively enough to keep your attention, but obviously it’s not going to be a movie for everyone. All I can say is it actually did work for me; even knowing the labored “twist” almost immediately, the patient oddness of the film and its subtle, distinctly Italian atmosphere adds up to a elegantly creepy, quietly entrancing experience. Producer Joe D’Amato supposedly* called it “the best film I ever produced,” which is a phrase loaded with such disastrously low expectations that it barely has any meaning, but he might actually be right. While it’s nowhere near the top of Fulci’s filmography, it’s an interesting an unexpected grace note to an inconsistent but sporadically masterful career,

*Wikipedia lists this claim and even has a citation, except that the linked page is a broken link to a website with the title “The Project With Nude Milfs,” which I have no trouble at all believing is an official Joe D’Amato property but which offers scant confirmation for this claim.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	None apparent.
TITLE ACCURACY	I guess it makes some sort of poetic sense
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy, but shot in America
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Psychological horror, Mindfucks, Surreal horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Lucio Fulci
NUDITY?	Yes, a little bit in a completely extraneous sequence with a frisky hitchhiker
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Nah
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Arguably
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’ve gotta ask who’s in the mysterious coffin, it’s probably you, ya knucklehead.