Lucio Fulci (1990) 🇮🇹 🎼

"It's as if you were representing death and also the profound horror of Nazism. [...] Sadism. Nazism. What's the point anyway? […] Sadism.... Sadism... Nazism... Certainly, sadism, Nazism..." "What are you talking about?" "Don't worry about it."

If you can make it past the opening montage of cats eating bubbling brains and intestines without being ill, you are in for a treat with this film.

The opening had me laughing immediately as a feverish Fulci scribbles down a delirious sequence of ways women are to die in an upcoming film. He spends most of Cat in the Brain in a hallucinatory nightmare fighting the products of his own imagination, and the nervous breakdown is honestly credible. Watching him be unable to order meat at a restaurant after filming a cannibalism film was so familiar to me. Occasionally I will have this sort of issue.

Some of the death scenes we witness are shots that his character is filming for an upcoming movie, some are him hallucinating, and some are real copycat murders that he becomes terrified he may be committing. It's not always clear what is real, but you will witness an onslaught of grotesque violence that—well, it's a lot. Separated from the need for narrative excuses to see murders and gore, there is shot after shot of horror violence, generally cutting to a terrified and confused Fulci trying to cope with what he thinks he's experiencing. It is disgusting and it is absolutely wonderful as well.

Everything about this is playful mockery of the media environment at the start of the 90's. I remember very clearly the argument that violent media caused violence—in fact, I remember believing it. Half of this film is laughing at that misguided puritan mentality. It is not, here, the director of horrors who actually becomes violent: he is terrified he might be committing any fraction of what he sees, to the extent he tries to report himself to the police. No, here it is the psychiatrist who, laughing about how it is known that violent media causes violence, instead goes on the rampage and uses hypnosis and social dogma to try and frame the director.

There’s plenty of fond joking at Fulci’s expense: there’s the cat feast and the bowl of inadequate eyes, for example, but perhaps my favorite such moment is when he sees a neighbor using a chainsaw in front of his house to cut wood. The series of rapid zooms and cuts to his eyes, the chainsaw, the neighbor’s eyes, and back—absolutely perfect. That he takes a hatchet to the neighbor’s tins of blood-red paint is a great bonus.

I love Fulci, and seeing a film with him in front of the camera the whole time felt like a personal gift to me from the director. There are plenty of cameos, but this is different, and I expect many fans feel this way about this film. It feels like an invitation to his audience to join him in his world, and everyone who likes Fulci at all owes it to themselves to accept it. This is all the more poignant given how close this was shot to the end of his life. We're lucky this film was made for us, or at least, that's the way it's left me feeling.

I hope you'll take the time to watch this if you haven't yet. You will absolutely not be disappointed. Fully recommended.

Some Lists:

🎼 Spotlight on Composers in Horror: Fabio Frizzi
Following Fulci
🇮🇹 Italian films I have known and loved
💎 Slightly Hidden Horror Gems
🌱 Hidden Horror Candidates
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