The House by the Cemetery
Encyclopedia
The House by the Cemetery is a 1981
Italian
supernatural
horror film
directed by Lucio Fulci
and is the third instalment of the unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy which also includes City of the Living Dead
and The Beyond Its plot revolves around a series of murders taking place in a New England home - a home which happens to be hiding a particularly gruesome secret within its basement walls. Themes and motifs from popular horror films such as The Shining
, The Amityville Horror
and Frankenstein
are readily on display.
The film stars Catriona MacColl
, Paolo Malco
, Ania Pieroni
, Giovanni Frezza
, Silvia Collatina and Dagmar Lassander
. Dr. Jacob Freudstein is played by Giovanni De Nava, who appears in the Fulci film The Beyond as 'Joe the plumber'.
This movie was declared a video nasty
.
New York City, several months later. A young boy named Bob (Giovanni Frezzi), and his parents Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) are preparing to move to a new house in New England just outside Boston previously occupied by Norman's ex-colleague, Dr. Peterson, who recently murdered his mistress before committing suicide. The Boyles are to spend six months at the house, whilst Norman finishes his research project of old houses at the request of his employer Professor Muller (director Lucio Fulci). As his mother packs, Bob looks at the photograph of a sinister-looking old house hanging on the Boyles' wall. In it, he sees a young girl warning him to stay away.
In New Whitby, Boston, Bob waits in his parents' car while they pick up their house keys at the estate office. He makes further contact with the girl in the photo, who this time appears across the street. Despite the distance between them, Bob and the girl (Silvia Collatina), who introduces herself as Mae, can hear each other without opening the car windows. Mae again warns Bob to stay away. In the real estate office, the friendly Mrs. Gittelson (Dagmar Lassander) is annoyed with her laconic colleague Harold, who hands the couple "the Freudstein keyes." "It's Oak Mansion, Harold," she insists. She seems to recognize Dr. Boyle and asks him if he's been to New Whitby before. Norman says that he hasn't. Accompanying the family to Oak Mansion, Mrs. Gittelson promises to arrange for a babysitter to drop by. Lucy is struck by the resemblance between the house in the photograph and their new home. But Norman seems strangely uninterested.
Inside, the old house is spacious, but in a poor state of repair. They notice in the kitchen that the cellar door is locked and nailed shut. As they start unpacking, a strange young woman arrives and introduces herself as Anne the babysitter (Ania Pieroni). That night, Norman hears noises and on rising to investigate, finds Anne unblocking the cellar door. The next day, Norman goes to the local library to look over Dr. Peterson's materials. Mr. Wheatley the librarian (Carlo De Mejo) also seems to recognize him and asks if he's been to the town before. Norman again replies that he has not. The assistant librarian Daniel Douglas (Giampaolo Saccarola) informs Norman that Dr. Peterson has conducted private research at the old house. He'd been studying records of disappearances in the area over the last several years as well as medical reports and death certificates, none of which has any relevance to his official studies.
In the wild undergrowth around the house, Mae shows Bob a tombstone bearing the name of Mary Freudstein and says that the woman is not really dead. Indoors, Lucy finds a tombstone set into the floor. It bears the name Jacob Tess Freudstein. Scared and confused by her discovery, she hears noises emanating from all over the house and breaks down screaming. When Norman returns home, he reassures his distraught wife that it's quite normal for some old houses in the region to have indoor tombs, because of the hard wintry ground. Producing a set of keys and a flashlight, Norman opens the cellar door and proceeds to walk down the stairs only be attacked by a large bat, which sinks its teeth into his hand and proves incredibly hard to get off. Norman stabs it over and over in which the things oozes globs of blood before dropping dead to the kitchen floor. Now completely spooked, the family drives down to the estate office where they demand to be rehoused. Their demands are met with exaggerated yawns from Harold. They are told they will have to wait just a few more days before they can move somewhere else. "That Freudstein place" he intones as they leave.
The next day while the Boyles are at the hospital to look over Norman's injury caused by the bat, Mrs. Gittelson arrives at the house to tell the family that a property has been found for them. When no one answers her knock, she lets herself in. When she casually stands on the Freudstein tombstone, it cracks apart, grinding her ankle. As she struggles to free herself, an apparently cadaverous figure (unseen except for a normal left arm and a rotting right forearm) emerges from the cellar and attacks her with a fireplace poker, stabbing her repeatedly in the neck. Mrs. Gittelson bleeds to death when blood jets from her multiple wounds and she's dragged to the cellar.
The next morning, Lucy finds Anne scrubbing up a huge bloodstain on the kitchen floor leading to the closed cellar door. When asked what she is doing, Anne is noncommittal and eludes Lucy's attempts to talk. At a local coffee shop in town, Norman tells Lucy that he's discovered that the mysterious Dr. Freudstein was a turn-of-the-century surgeon with a penchant for illegal experiments. Norman tells Lucy that he will be traveling back to New York for more research on Dr. Freudstein, telling Lucy that he will be away until well after nightfall. On the way, Norman drops by the library and finds a cassette recording of Dr. Peterson, whose deranged ramblings explain the horrific circumstances which drove him to suicide. He was not the killer of his mistress and children, but the ghoulish Dr. Freudstein was.
Back at the house, Anne goes down into the cellar looking for Bob, when she is attacked and decapitated by the still-unseen Dr. Freudstein. Bob goes down to investigate, when he sees Anne's severed head come rolling down the metal stairs and runs back screaming, just in time to avoid being shut in with the monstrous denizen. Lucy at first refuses to believe the frantic Bob's wild tale about Anne being killed. However, Lucy cannot find any trace of Anne anywhere in the house. That evening, after his mother has gone to bed, Bob returns to the cellar with a flashlight to look for Anne. The door behind him slams shut, and glowing eyes peer at him from the darkness.
Lucy is woken up by Bob's frenzied shrieks for help, and she tries to open the cellar door. The key snaps. Lucy tries using a knife as jimmy, but it too snaps. As Lucy panics, Norman arrives back and attacks the cellar door with an axe. On the other side, the rotting hands of Dr. Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava) appear and hold Bob's head to the wooden panels. Norman's axe blows come dangerously close to Bob's head, missing his son by a fraction of an inch. One blow chops off the monster's left hand, and he staggers away in pain from the door, dragging the unconscious Bob with him.
At last, the cellar reveals its secrets opening up in full view to reveal a charnel house of mutilated bodies, its shadowy recesses dotted with surgical equipment and a gore-streaked pathology slab. The horribly deformed Dr. Freudstein is shown as a rotting living corpse with shrunken-in eyes, and rotting flesh. As the couple ventures into the cellar to rescue their son, Norman breathlessly fills Lucy in on the details of his find. The 150-year-old Freudstein has apparently discovered a way of keeping himself alive by using the hacked up body parts of his victims to regenerate his blood cells. Norman attempts to attack Freudstein, but the revolting-looking ghoul twists the axe from Norman's grip. Norman then grabs a knife off the surgical tray and rams it into Freudstein's gut releasing a sickening stew of maggots and corrupted blood. Although wounded, the monstrous Freudstein continues to attack. Lucy and Bob watch in horror as Freudstein picks up Norman and literally rips his throat out with his one rotting hand. Lucy and Bob spot a metal ladder in the corner of the basement which leads up to the cracked tombstone in the living room floor. With the ghastly monster standing between them and the cellar door, their only hope is to climb up the metal ladder and try to push apart the two stone segments to escape. Lucy strains desperately to shift the stone, but her ankle is grabbed by the pursuing Dr. Freudstein. As Bob clings to the topmost rung, he sees his mother pulled down, her head battered by each metal step on the way. Freudstein finishes off Lucy by ramming her head into the concrete cellar floor, splattering it like a melon. As Freudstein advances up the metal ladder to the helpless Bob, the little boy strains to escape by forcing his head through the jagged aperture. At the last minute, as Freudstein clutches the boy's ankle, Bob is yanked up and out of reach by unseen hands to find Mae standing before him. But with Mae is the 19th Century figure of her mother, Mary Freudstein (Teresa Rossi Passante), who gently urges them to leave for other people will no doubt drop in for her husband's continuing research for eternal life. Mrs. Freudstein leads Mae and Bob away from the house and down the wintry grove into a netherworld of ghosts and sadness.
The Anchor Bay DVD version was later released uncut, containing all the gore and violence from the original version.
The film was released by Blue Underground
on Blu-ray (as well as a new DVD edition) on 25th October 2011 with a new 2K transfer.
1981 in film
-Events:*January 19 - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquires beleaguered concurrent United Artists. UA was humiliated by the astronomical losses on the $40,000,000 movie Heaven's Gate, a major factor in the decision of owner Transamerica to sell it....
Italian
Cinema of Italy
The history of Italian cinema began just a few months after the Lumière brothers had patented their Cinematographe, when Pope Leo XIII was filmed for a few seconds in the act of blessing the camera.-Early years:...
supernatural
Supernatural
The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
horror film
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
directed by Lucio Fulci
Lucio Fulci
Lucio Fulci was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is perhaps best known for his directorial work on gore films, including Zombie and The Beyond , although he made films in genres as diverse as giallo, western, and comedy...
and is the third instalment of the unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy which also includes City of the Living Dead
City of the Living Dead
City of the Living Dead is an Italian horror film from director Lucio Fulci. It has numerous alternate titles, such as Gates of Hell. It is the first installment of the unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy which also includes The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. Fulci makes an uncredited cameo...
and The Beyond Its plot revolves around a series of murders taking place in a New England home - a home which happens to be hiding a particularly gruesome secret within its basement walls. Themes and motifs from popular horror films such as The Shining
The Shining (film)
The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, co-written with novelist Diane Johnson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. A writer, Jack Torrance, takes a job as an...
, The Amityville Horror
The Amityville Horror (1979 film)
The Amityville Horror is a 1979 American horror film based on the bestselling 1977 novel of the same name by Jay Anson. It is the first movie in the Amityville Horror franchise....
and Frankenstein
Frankenstein (1931 film)
Frankenstein is a 1931 Pre-Code Horror Monster film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff, and features...
are readily on display.
The film stars Catriona MacColl
Catriona MacColl
Catriona MacColl is an English actress who has worked extensively in both film and television across Europe.-Acting career:In 1979, MacColl made her debut in the title role of "Lady Oscar" directed by Jacques Demy in Japan...
, Paolo Malco
Paolo Malco
Paolo Malco is an Italian film actor, famous for his roles in Horror films, and later in many Italian TV mini-series'.From 1998 to 2006 he was cast in the drama 'Incantesimo'.Filmography* 1973 - Number one...
, Ania Pieroni
Ania Pieroni
Ania Pieroni is an Italian actress from the late 1970s and early 1980s.- Early life :Ania Pieroni was born in 1957 in Rome to a middle-class family. Her paternal grandfather was the mayor of Pescara, while her maternal grandfather was a German architect. Her father was a Knight of Malta, a pilot...
, Giovanni Frezza
Giovanni Frezza
Giovanni Frezza is an Italian former child actor who appeared in a number of horror films throughout the 1980s.-Career:He made his film debut with a minor role the 1980 Marco Bellocchio-directed comedy-drama Salto nel vuoto . Frezza then went on to play a variety of juvenile roles, most often in...
, Silvia Collatina and Dagmar Lassander
Dagmar Lassander
Dagmar Lassander is a German actress.She was born in Prague to a French father and Chilean-German mother, and began her career as a costume designer in the Berlin Opera. Her first role was in 1966 in a film by Will Tremper. Starting from 1969, she began to work regularly, especially in Italian...
. Dr. Jacob Freudstein is played by Giovanni De Nava, who appears in the Fulci film The Beyond as 'Joe the plumber'.
This movie was declared a video nasty
Video nasty
"Video nasty" was a colloquial term coined in the United Kingdom by 1982 which originally applied to a number of films distributed on video cassette that were criticized for their violent content by the press, commentators such as Mary Whitehouse and various religious organizations.While violence...
.
Plot
A young woman (Daniela Doria) in an old abandoned house is looking for her boyfriend, Steven, who has taken her there for sex. The young woman discovers her boyfriend's horribly mutilated dead body when she gets stabbed through the back of her head with a sharp kitchen knife by an unseen person. The killer drags the woman's body through a door leading to the cellar.New York City, several months later. A young boy named Bob (Giovanni Frezzi), and his parents Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) are preparing to move to a new house in New England just outside Boston previously occupied by Norman's ex-colleague, Dr. Peterson, who recently murdered his mistress before committing suicide. The Boyles are to spend six months at the house, whilst Norman finishes his research project of old houses at the request of his employer Professor Muller (director Lucio Fulci). As his mother packs, Bob looks at the photograph of a sinister-looking old house hanging on the Boyles' wall. In it, he sees a young girl warning him to stay away.
In New Whitby, Boston, Bob waits in his parents' car while they pick up their house keys at the estate office. He makes further contact with the girl in the photo, who this time appears across the street. Despite the distance between them, Bob and the girl (Silvia Collatina), who introduces herself as Mae, can hear each other without opening the car windows. Mae again warns Bob to stay away. In the real estate office, the friendly Mrs. Gittelson (Dagmar Lassander) is annoyed with her laconic colleague Harold, who hands the couple "the Freudstein keyes." "It's Oak Mansion, Harold," she insists. She seems to recognize Dr. Boyle and asks him if he's been to New Whitby before. Norman says that he hasn't. Accompanying the family to Oak Mansion, Mrs. Gittelson promises to arrange for a babysitter to drop by. Lucy is struck by the resemblance between the house in the photograph and their new home. But Norman seems strangely uninterested.
Inside, the old house is spacious, but in a poor state of repair. They notice in the kitchen that the cellar door is locked and nailed shut. As they start unpacking, a strange young woman arrives and introduces herself as Anne the babysitter (Ania Pieroni). That night, Norman hears noises and on rising to investigate, finds Anne unblocking the cellar door. The next day, Norman goes to the local library to look over Dr. Peterson's materials. Mr. Wheatley the librarian (Carlo De Mejo) also seems to recognize him and asks if he's been to the town before. Norman again replies that he has not. The assistant librarian Daniel Douglas (Giampaolo Saccarola) informs Norman that Dr. Peterson has conducted private research at the old house. He'd been studying records of disappearances in the area over the last several years as well as medical reports and death certificates, none of which has any relevance to his official studies.
In the wild undergrowth around the house, Mae shows Bob a tombstone bearing the name of Mary Freudstein and says that the woman is not really dead. Indoors, Lucy finds a tombstone set into the floor. It bears the name Jacob Tess Freudstein. Scared and confused by her discovery, she hears noises emanating from all over the house and breaks down screaming. When Norman returns home, he reassures his distraught wife that it's quite normal for some old houses in the region to have indoor tombs, because of the hard wintry ground. Producing a set of keys and a flashlight, Norman opens the cellar door and proceeds to walk down the stairs only be attacked by a large bat, which sinks its teeth into his hand and proves incredibly hard to get off. Norman stabs it over and over in which the things oozes globs of blood before dropping dead to the kitchen floor. Now completely spooked, the family drives down to the estate office where they demand to be rehoused. Their demands are met with exaggerated yawns from Harold. They are told they will have to wait just a few more days before they can move somewhere else. "That Freudstein place" he intones as they leave.
The next day while the Boyles are at the hospital to look over Norman's injury caused by the bat, Mrs. Gittelson arrives at the house to tell the family that a property has been found for them. When no one answers her knock, she lets herself in. When she casually stands on the Freudstein tombstone, it cracks apart, grinding her ankle. As she struggles to free herself, an apparently cadaverous figure (unseen except for a normal left arm and a rotting right forearm) emerges from the cellar and attacks her with a fireplace poker, stabbing her repeatedly in the neck. Mrs. Gittelson bleeds to death when blood jets from her multiple wounds and she's dragged to the cellar.
The next morning, Lucy finds Anne scrubbing up a huge bloodstain on the kitchen floor leading to the closed cellar door. When asked what she is doing, Anne is noncommittal and eludes Lucy's attempts to talk. At a local coffee shop in town, Norman tells Lucy that he's discovered that the mysterious Dr. Freudstein was a turn-of-the-century surgeon with a penchant for illegal experiments. Norman tells Lucy that he will be traveling back to New York for more research on Dr. Freudstein, telling Lucy that he will be away until well after nightfall. On the way, Norman drops by the library and finds a cassette recording of Dr. Peterson, whose deranged ramblings explain the horrific circumstances which drove him to suicide. He was not the killer of his mistress and children, but the ghoulish Dr. Freudstein was.
Back at the house, Anne goes down into the cellar looking for Bob, when she is attacked and decapitated by the still-unseen Dr. Freudstein. Bob goes down to investigate, when he sees Anne's severed head come rolling down the metal stairs and runs back screaming, just in time to avoid being shut in with the monstrous denizen. Lucy at first refuses to believe the frantic Bob's wild tale about Anne being killed. However, Lucy cannot find any trace of Anne anywhere in the house. That evening, after his mother has gone to bed, Bob returns to the cellar with a flashlight to look for Anne. The door behind him slams shut, and glowing eyes peer at him from the darkness.
Lucy is woken up by Bob's frenzied shrieks for help, and she tries to open the cellar door. The key snaps. Lucy tries using a knife as jimmy, but it too snaps. As Lucy panics, Norman arrives back and attacks the cellar door with an axe. On the other side, the rotting hands of Dr. Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava) appear and hold Bob's head to the wooden panels. Norman's axe blows come dangerously close to Bob's head, missing his son by a fraction of an inch. One blow chops off the monster's left hand, and he staggers away in pain from the door, dragging the unconscious Bob with him.
At last, the cellar reveals its secrets opening up in full view to reveal a charnel house of mutilated bodies, its shadowy recesses dotted with surgical equipment and a gore-streaked pathology slab. The horribly deformed Dr. Freudstein is shown as a rotting living corpse with shrunken-in eyes, and rotting flesh. As the couple ventures into the cellar to rescue their son, Norman breathlessly fills Lucy in on the details of his find. The 150-year-old Freudstein has apparently discovered a way of keeping himself alive by using the hacked up body parts of his victims to regenerate his blood cells. Norman attempts to attack Freudstein, but the revolting-looking ghoul twists the axe from Norman's grip. Norman then grabs a knife off the surgical tray and rams it into Freudstein's gut releasing a sickening stew of maggots and corrupted blood. Although wounded, the monstrous Freudstein continues to attack. Lucy and Bob watch in horror as Freudstein picks up Norman and literally rips his throat out with his one rotting hand. Lucy and Bob spot a metal ladder in the corner of the basement which leads up to the cracked tombstone in the living room floor. With the ghastly monster standing between them and the cellar door, their only hope is to climb up the metal ladder and try to push apart the two stone segments to escape. Lucy strains desperately to shift the stone, but her ankle is grabbed by the pursuing Dr. Freudstein. As Bob clings to the topmost rung, he sees his mother pulled down, her head battered by each metal step on the way. Freudstein finishes off Lucy by ramming her head into the concrete cellar floor, splattering it like a melon. As Freudstein advances up the metal ladder to the helpless Bob, the little boy strains to escape by forcing his head through the jagged aperture. At the last minute, as Freudstein clutches the boy's ankle, Bob is yanked up and out of reach by unseen hands to find Mae standing before him. But with Mae is the 19th Century figure of her mother, Mary Freudstein (Teresa Rossi Passante), who gently urges them to leave for other people will no doubt drop in for her husband's continuing research for eternal life. Mrs. Freudstein leads Mae and Bob away from the house and down the wintry grove into a netherworld of ghosts and sadness.
Home video history
The film has had a huge history of BBFC problems over the years. The original cinema version was heavily cut with edits to the poker murder and the slashing of Ann's throat, and this print was later released on video prior to the Video Recordings Act and subsequently banned as a video nasty. The film was made officially available in 1988 though the print had been pre-edited by 34 secs (removing the cinema cuts) and then additionally cut by 4 mins 11 secs with further cuts to the opening stabbing, the bat attack, Norman's throat being torn out by Freudstein, and tracking shots of mutilated bodies in the basement. The film was again released in 1992 though this print had been heavily pre-cut by the distributors and removed 7 mins 27 secs of footage, thus rendering much of the film unintelligible. The 2001 Vipco DVD issue restored nearly all of the film's prior edits but was cut by 33 secs by the BBFC with lesser edits made to the poker murder and a throat cutting. Although willing to release the movie uncut the film had recently been prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act following the discovery of bootleg copies of the uncut version, leaving the BBFC no choice but to cut the film. All the cuts were finally waived for the 2009 Arrow DVD.The Anchor Bay DVD version was later released uncut, containing all the gore and violence from the original version.
The film was released by Blue Underground
Blue Underground
Blue Underground is an American company specializing in releasing authoritative editions of cult and exploitation movies on Blu-ray Disc and DVD....
on Blu-ray (as well as a new DVD edition) on 25th October 2011 with a new 2K transfer.