December 2, 1989
Well, I didn’t write anything along the way. There was, of course, time, but purpose was nil. [...] It is currently 11:52:15 and I am in my room at the Grand Hotel delle Terme. Perhaps I should just spend a moment with this room and communicate the beautiful view out my window and across my tiny terrace (piú grande di quelle di Gene, ma piccolo). It is the sea. The Mediterranean Ocean that stretches as far as I can see to the point where the sun breaks through a crowded, clouded sky and makes a silver ribbon across the horizon. There are 15 or 20 colors in the water. There is blue, of course, but how many shades? There is a mauve, a purple, a turquoise, an aqua, a green—I cannot count. My room is white. All white except for the beds, which are two and covered in spreads with wide bands of yellow, white, and blue. It is far more interesting than I had thought it would be. Not bad. We begin work tomorrow with a meeting. The actual shooting begins Monday.
Everything looks as if the Renaissance was just a rumor in 15th century Sicily. For Lucio Fulci, the darkness of the Middle Ages still reigns on the island. Accused of a pact with the devil, five nuns are crucified under the vaults of their convent by an angry village mob, and die in horrible agony.
Five hundred years later, some archaeologists from the University of Toronto land in the small village, only to find an autarchic life, frozen in time: villag- ers living in terror of the curse their ancestors laid upon them. Day after day, the digging progresses. Night after night, Lisa has bad dreams. The opening of DEMONIA makes everything clear, as it is a synthesis of a whole section of Fulci’s work. The movie starts with two beautiful sequences which use strong images from the past. The first scene is a variation upon THE BEYOND’s opening: the unforgettable death of the painter. The second scene is a reprise of the medium ses- sion from CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. The two visual blocs concatenate, as if they’d never been in two different movies. Fulci’s sensory webs in- terweave, creating a new network from which the director, as an alchemist, tries to melt down a new story. Shot a few months later, CAT IN THE BRAIN (NIGHTMARE CONCERT) will flaunt itself too clearly as a cunning post-modern reflection. DEMONIA, on the other hand, doesn’t try to give conspiratorial winks at the audience, playing with gaps between shooting and finished movie, re- ality and fiction. “Because I’m not real...” the movie seems to say, which stands as a last ride in a crumbling fun house, a long ballad in the ruins of a lost art.
On the set, there was a total shortage of means and, if the actors were all eating together
Fulci intended DEMONIA as his grand summation and incorporated scenes like this one, of the crucified nuns, to evoke memories and resonance from scenes in earlier pictures like THE BEYOND.
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