The House by the Cemetery

Fulci at his least coherent and most atmospheric, which for Fulci is the good end of the scale.

A family moves into a New England house to continue a dead colleague's research. There is a boarded-up cellar. There is a doctor who has been keeping himself alive since the nineteenth century by harvesting people.

The plot does not survive scrutiny and Fulci is not attempting to make it. What he is doing is dread by accumulation: an oppressive score by Walter Rizzati, a house shot to feel much larger inside than out, and a child who is being warned by a girl nobody else sees.

The bat sequence and the poker are the ones people cite. The final title card, a quotation attributed to Henry James that James did not write, is the perfect ending to a film this indifferent to sense.

The English dub gives the young boy an adult woman's voice and it has to be heard.