November 28, 1989
Then the phone rang again and it was the costume person for DEMONIA. I couldn’t find my measurements, of course. Had to give them to her in American. She told me who I’m playing.
My name is to be Sean Kinsella. I am from Ireland. I’m a tough old archeologist. A digger. And I dance a mean jig. I am being born as a character in a C-film. But I will have a life and a death which will happen again and again every time someone replays the tape. But I won’t notice because I’m not real.
“Because I’m not real”... but who can boast of being real in the cinema, especially in Fulci’s cin- ema? Every moving presence in the transalpine director’s opera has a spectral touch, a special aura, emerging from the limits of the visible world. Every body is conscious of being, and becoming soon enough, a corpse. Some of these bodies entered into legend, such as Catriona MacColl; others remained anonymous.
Grady Clarkson’s presence certainly falls into the second category. In 1989, he was just a young man, willing to enter into the world of cinema. For all eternity, he gave his body to Fulci’s universe: a universe spinning around the passage of time, the presence of death in life and of life in death. From
his experience, Grady Clarkson made a diary, snatches of which will punctuate these pages. In 1989, Lucio Fulci was already an old man. He was just coming out of a long illness, after a life at the core of Italian popular cinema—an art form which was, like him, close to the end of its journey, threatened by almighty television. The Fulci who met Grady Clarkson for the first time was no longer the Fulci who, just a few years before, signed such masterpieces as THE BE- YOND and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD—radical films that moved cohorts of bloodthirsty view- ers to a new land of visual expression. The vi- sionary cinema that Fulci forged between ZOMBIE and MANHATTAN BABY anchored itself in moviegoers’ memories, casting a shadow over the rest of a rich and heterogeneous career. Af- ter his not-so promising beginning with a series of comedies, he made movies in every genre from westerns to gialli, and shot gems like PER- VERSION STORY and BEATRICE CENCI. And then something happened...
Fulci stole Romero’s figure of the living dead and remodeled it: emptying it of any socio-po- litical significance and bringing it back to its voodoo origins. This gave him the keys to new areas of consciousness, where dreamlike states and everyday life merged. After MANHATTAN BABY, willing to temporarily put aside the magic
The cast and crew of DEMONIA on location.
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