Movie Review - The House by the Cemetery

The House by the Cemetery

AKA Quella villa accanto al cimitero

The audio review: 



The House by the Cemetery might catch one's eye because of its reliance on a simple title, one that evokes an image of classic horror movie tropes. And if you're intrigued by this premise from title alone, you can ratchet up the entertainment value of Lucio Fulci's "haunted" house story by 50%.

Fulci's plot doesn't drift much from the initial set-up that one can presume from the title. A family moves into a new house in Boston, where the husband resumes his research on suicides after his partner, strangely, commits suicide himself after killing his mistress. The family soon learns of the strange events that happen in the house, and mother and son are eeked out by a tomb that lies in the house and the cellar that is boarded up when they arrive. The son sees a little girl, too, who warns of the house, telling him to never go in.

So the presence of the house is immediately ominous, helped along by the prologue of the film where a woman is murdered explicitly by a knife through the head. Fulci weaves a haunted house story throughout, and although the presence of ghosts is already suspicious after we assume the role of the stalker in the opening scene, the atmosphere of the film is still unnerving because of the freakish characters that populate the town, including a babysitter who seems to have a strange connection between house and the husband of the family.

This is due in part to the visual nature of the film, which looks beautifully eerie in design. The house by the cemetery is spooky, and Fulci makes great use of the entirety of the house to give an idea of just how weird it is. The cellar, too, is utilized in at least three different stalking sequences, each more suspenseful than the last. The slow shamble of the killer heightens the terror, and the pacing seems slow but precise throughout.

But don't expect a lot in the way of plot. The House by the Cemetery never really succeeds in its story, perhaps in part because Fulci intentionally misleads the viewer with strange but anti-climactic events. The babysitter, as a whole, is most suspect here - she seems suspicious throughout, especially when cleaning up the blood trail of the killer, but then she devolves into just another victim. This begs the question of if all of the characters are slightly delusional.

There's a few more instances of this, but they feel more like plot holes than anything else. A crack in the house tomb is never questioned; the husband acts mighty suspicious throughout; the son's creepy friend, May, disappears about halfway through the film, only to reappear conveniently at the end as what seems like a ghost; blood trails are easily hidden; the mother apparently sees a trail of blood herself and looks beyond it. And the hastily-told tale of the Freudsteins is so rushed that it's confusing and not very convincing.

Yet the film never tries to appear like we should take everything the movie throws at us seriously, and though the plot might be convoluted, it's the special effects and atmosphere that are meant to be at the forefront. As the camera takes the point-of-view of the killer, we see vicious, brutal murders, that, while explicitly detailed, don't seem exploitative. Instead, they highlight the ferocity, the madness, of the killer himself (and maybe ourselves if you look at it in psychological terms, because I for one found the murders both fascinating and wonderfully shot).

The House by the Cemetery works really well as an intricately-shot slasher. There's not much to take away from the story, but the effects, visuals, creepiness, and overall fun of the film distract from the average script - and most likely, that's the way Fulci wanted it.

The House by the Cemetery on Rotten Tomatoes