Roots and Beginnings: Zombie, aka Zombi 2 (dir. Lucio Fulci)

The video store was a five-minute walk from my house growing up. It was called Video Quest, and the owner — Tony, I think his name was — was like our private cinema concierge. Via our sainted mother he’d guide us to comedies, action movies, cartoons, you name it. But there were two sections of the store I’d recoil from as if they were a hot stove. One was the shrouded “ADULT” section, a chamber of partially glimpsed bikini babes cordoned off by a folding door. The other was in plain sight, if you had the courage to look: HORROR.

Despite my love of Godzilla and the classic Universal Studios movie monsters, and despite my later predilection for horror in all its forms, I could not have been a wimpier kid about “real” horror movies. During sleepover parties, when the kids would put on a Poltergeist sequel or, god help me, a Nightmare on Elm Streetmovie, I’d hide behind a couch, cowering in my sleeping bag, pretending to be asleep. So my only contact with the genre in its full post-Psycho/Night of the Living Dead flowering, fully three decades long at that point, were the posters and cassette covers visible in Video Quest. And none of those stood out in my mind or my memory more clearly than this little number.

Years later I’d actually get around to seeing Zombie — originally and confusingly titled Zombi 2 as an unauthorized way for director Lucio Fulci to cash in on the success of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which despite being a sequel to Night of the Living Dead was simply called Zombi in Italy — and I’d be very disappointed. Alternately turgid and exploitative, its much-ballyhooed splinter-through-the-eye scene, despite strong staging and lighting, was embarrassingly phony even for the era (an apples-to-apples comparison to the practical effects pioneered in Dawn by Tom Savini does the film no favors), and the shark-vs-zombie fight just made me feel bad for the shark. Honestly, the only chill-inducing scene was the moment the rotting, worm-riddled zombie above rises from the grave. For perhaps the first time, the real horror of a reanimated corpse was communicated on screen, in a way it would take American cinema years to catch up with. (Unexpectedly, it was Michael Jackson and John Landis who’d take this image to the masses in the “Thriller” video.)

But you really don’t need to see the movie to understand this creature’s power. One look at that make-up, taken in tandem with the incredible tagline “WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOU!” provided by some anonymous copywriter, is all you need, whether you’re a little boy hiding behind your mother while she rents Clue for you for the tenth time, or a 35-year-old man writing about it years later.