35mm revival screening of Lucio Fulci's 1981 horror film HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY.

A New York academic, Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco) moves his wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl) and young son, Bob, to an old Victorian mansion in a small New England town to continue the scholarly research of his recently deceased colleague, who, we learn in the first few minutes, murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide in the same house. Before they even move from Brooklyn, Bob sees a young girl making a gesture of warning at the window of the home they are to soon inhabit, but she vanishes when his mother Lucy looks at the photo. It’s an omen the family should have heeded! Dark secrets are unearthed in the Old Dark House, along with murderous zombie corpses and a certain Doctor Freudstein – who Norman discovers was a Victorian surgeon who conducted unfortunate experiments on his family members.

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Is HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY possessed by the spirt of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu? Discuss. But without a doubt, Lucio Fulci’s giallo horror, and by extension his worldview, was arguably darker than his chief rival, Dario Argento. Like Lovecraft’s vision, Fulci’s world was one without heroes, without survivors and without pity. And certainly without happy endings.