The films of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror filmmaker, are usually lumped in with those of other “gore” specialists. It seems to me, however, that this gore is just one component of Fulci's work. Also running through all his films is a strangely dreamlike, hyper-violent abandonment of narrative which seeks to disrupt normative social preconceptions, perhaps as a result of Fulci's youthful excursions into Marxist political thought. In such films as The House by the Cemetery (1981), The Beyond (1981), City of the Living Dead (1980) and other works, Fulci continually operates against audience expectations in terms of both characterization and plot. In The Beyond, for example, a young blind woman's faithful guide dog turns on her without warning, tearing her throat out; in City of the Living Dead, a young couple is caught making out in the front seat of a car by the girl's father, who promptly drags the young man to a drill press and uses it to push a huge bolt through his skull.

Zombies roam hospitals, highways lead into the ocean with no end or beginning in sight, protagonists discover themselves trapped inside oil paintings and there's no logic to any of this. Fulci usually makes some desultory stab at a framing story, but once a central premise is set forth, the rest of the film is given over to unconnected and seemingly unmotivated sequences that follow with no discernible order or reason. I would argue that the chaotic non-narrative structure of Fulci's films is very much like the work of Luis Buñuel or Jean Cocteau; he creates a walking dream state from which the sleeper never awakes.

Born in Rome on 17 June 1927, Fulci studied medicine in college before becoming an art critic, then a screenwriter and then, oddly enough, breaking in as a specialist in comedy – although, when one considers it, perhaps this isn't so odd after all. Fulci had studied at the famed Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the Experimental Film Center, or Italian National Film School, founded by none other than Benito Mussolini in 1935) and, as he later told Robert Schlockoff: