formula he had just found, Fulci tried his hand at heroic-fantasy (CONQUEST) and science-fic- tion (THE NEW GLADIATORS). Then he went back to horror, but the best movies he made during this subsequent period were very different, such as the erotic, venomous drama THE DEVIL’S HONEY. For Fulci, DEMONIA was, without a doubt, an attempt to go back to his former obsessions and the cinematographic forms that captured them so well. His cinema, from the time of his first, and most beautiful and cruel, western MASSACRE TIME on- wards was, in every way, an af- fair of recurring nightmares, of images repeated ad nauseam until the right pattern would
As Lilla the Medium, Carla Cassolla suffers a literal meltdown as the ghosts of five possessed nuns wreak havoc on a Sicilian seaside village.
appear. His horror cinema needed a conclusion, and DEMONIA was to be that conclusion. Fulci embarked on a quest for a producer will- ing to fund his movie. He turned to Ettore Spagnuolo, with whom he had worked three years before on AENIGMA. We can imagine Fulci pitch- ing the movie, in Spagnuolo’s office, as a direct follow-up to THE BEYOND: the sum of all fears. Spagnuolo wasn’t an experienced producer. He had invested money in a few movies since the beginning of the decade, but that was about it. As his good friend, the actor Michael Aronin (who plays the Lieutenant Andi in DEMONIA), puts it: “Ettore was never really a producer; he was an accountant. He risked his own money because he could do numbers but he never really was a guy who could look at a script and evaluate it. He re- lied on directors to tell him how much time they needed to shoot. He made a return on AENIGMA, which is why he went back to Fulci.” Spagnuolo trusted Fulci, as anybody would have done at that time: after all, he was a genre cinema veteran and a first-rate smooth talker.
Fulci soon found himself at the helm of a project he wanted to finish as soon as possible. In the ’70s, Fulci had worked for months at a time on his screenplays with skilled writers like Roberto Gianviti, a little-known master in the art and craft of B-movies. In the early ’80s, the new, cutting- edge, anti-narrative approach of a young author, Dardano Sachetti, became the head corner stone of his cinema. For DEMONIA, Fulci chose to work with the ambitious Antonio Tentori, who would
later become a historian of popular Italian cinema with with several books published by Luigi Cozzi for Profondo Rosso, but who was, back then, a fledgling screenwriter.
As Tentori recalls: “My friendship with Lucio Fulci started the day I met him, in 1986, for a radio interview. From this date, we stayed in touch because we had very similar tastes in matters of cinema, but also similar literary projects. In 1989, he was working on DEMONIA and he called me to work on the story with him. For production rea- sons, the screenplay was credited to Piero Regnoli, in collaboration with Fulci. There wasn’t much time before the beginning of the shooting, and Regnoli was a true specialist in screenwriting. His skills and fast pace were very helpful.”
These two steps took no more than a few days each. Fulci knew what he wanted. Tentori worked frantically as only a fiery admirer could. Regnoli showed all the knowledge he had acquired with his previous hundred-or-so screenplays. DEMONIA’s screenplay is designed as the ille- gitimate heir of Sachetti’s work: it tells the story of a young woman, Lisa, who can see a lot more than anybody else, and who will plunge into the heart of Hell during archaeological excavations. Fulci delivered the script to Spagnuolo, and the problems began. It was very clear that Fulci wanted to shoot a much bigger movie than could be made on a small budget and a four-week sched- ule. It’s very hard to know if Fulci, a perfectionist well aware of the set’s realities, tried to convince himself that the DEMONIA he had in mind could
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