Perfect Halloween watch
City of the Living Dead (1980)
Directed by Lucio Fulci, starring Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Carlo de Mejo, and Janet Agren. During a seance in New York, a medium (MacColl) has a vision of a priest hanging himself in a village churchyard, followed by other 'glimpses' which convince her the dead are about to rise and take over the world. The intensity of her vision causes her to go into convulsions and she collapses. She's pronounced dead, and the police are called in. A reporter (George) hears of the case, and in the absence of any bigger stories decides to dig deeper. Some days later he attends the cemetery where the medium has been buried and hears the sound of a woman screaming. Eventually realising that it's coming from her grave he digs her up and saves her. She persuades him to help her search for the village where the priest hanged himself, a place she knows from her vision is called Dunwich. Eventually they find it and discover the dead are indeed rising and killing the villagers - causing some of them in turn to join the ranks of the undead.
Filmed mostly in the US (with the remainder shot in Rome) this has a fantastically eerie atmosphere (parts of it remind me of Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot, and John Carpenter's The Fog). The cast are excellent, as is the prog score by Fabio Frizzi. The practical gore effects look great - although the makeup effects are a mixed bag (some underwhelming, some very, very good). Fulci's direction has never been better; the scene where Christopher George rescues Catriona MacColl from being buried alive is one of the best sequences I've seen in any horror film, going as it does from her initial waking-up underground, to the dawning horror of what's happened, then her absolute panic as she screams and tries to claw her way out of the coffin, and finally George's pick-axe crashing through the lid inches from her face.
The very final scene of the film is a notorious, mystifying letdown (coming straight after a terrific sequence with our heroes surrounded by zombies in an underground crypt) but overall it's a great ride. 7.5/10.