all is fair in love and war, and currently my war is with time, with my scrambling thoughts about a movie that works but doesn’t work as well as it should
The House By the Cemetery serves as a remarkable example of extracting the most from any given moment, with Lucio Fulci juicing every ounce of self-reflection from this haunted house as humanly possible, taking time to study all the people affected by its unfathomable secrets—the children connected through trauma, the parents who exist on the periphery of such monstrosity, the detectives desperate to forge a discernible connection between the natural and the unknowable—as he gives life to a house built upon a grave, to a house that unflinchingly confronts kids and adults alike with humanity’s ugly past, to the point where mystical forces ultimately controlled by Fulci himself aren’t just communicating with children, but looking directly into the camera with a frozen expression of terror to beg those watching to help, and are even providing us with details the characters don’t know about, almost making us culpable in their misery as we watch knives plunged through mouths, as we watch bodies slowly dragged away after brutal torture, as we watch parents helplessly fail to protect the innocent, altogether crafting an immersive haunted house experience that, while undeniably ambitious from a psychological perspective, and while every scene (as Fulci put it) explodes with style, ultimately lacks nuance and acumen not because of its pretension, but because of its structure, its lack of fluidity—to put it plainly: how the message, how the reflection ultimately comes to fruition—because instead of feeling ethereal or ghostly like the house the film wishes to anatomize, instead imitating the villainous, impenetrable force with an existentially wayward approach (see The Beyond), The House By the Cemetery feels almost limp in its structure, eager to explain and dissect rather than exist in the unfamiliar, quickly moving between each brilliant moment without allowing time to breathe, to consider the daunting lack of answers and instead chase a new potential answer, resulting in a scattershot yet rigidly regimented story that’s too orderly for its own good, that’s too interested in crafting a coherent haunted house narrative that ultimately makes the movie feel cookie-cutter when it should feel malevolent, because this house and the monsters that populate it are parasites on this community, on a humanity desperate to investigate and finally move past such ugliness, and as we move into that house and delve deep into its basement of secrets, we should be terrified of the fantasy inspired by reality, not shrilly aware that we are, indeed, watching a movie.
