between scenes. Every part of these films, their clunky dialogue and dead-end scenes, were im- portant. They are revisited in DEMONIA, of course, but nothing seems to be in the right place. Al Cliver is, as he was in ZOMBIE, the skipper of a sailboat called Perversion. The boat was christened Per- version by Fulci in honor of one of his most spellbindingly beautiful films (PERVERSION STORY): a hypnotic phantom or a distorted re- flection of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO. The same sail- boat reappears in the final scene of CAT IN THE BRAIN (NIGHTMARE CONCERT), during the shooting of which Fulci rarely took the boat out, despite his passion for the Mediterranean Sea and her deceptive glimmering mirror images. The ship remained moored for DEMONIA and never moved from the port. In another scene, Brett Halsey gets lost in an old amphitheater of which nothing re- mained but a few stones. In this crumbling ruin of former greatness and evaporated hope, we can almost see his dreams of success vanish on the screen in superimposition. All the characters drink boatloads of alcohol, just to be able to bear the total stasis and failure. We, the audience, stagger with Sean and Kevin to a blind death. The only one who seemingly continues to hope and look to the future is Meg Register, who received top billing for the first time. Her character Lisa’s in- vestigations are threefold: in the convent’s vestiges, in the cinema’s ruins, and the links between the murder suspects. The third line of investigation, is quickly relegated. Lisa knows that no one is guilty, no one that is alive. She leaves the case to Fulci himself, playing an Inspector Carter, the last incarnation of a long giallo tradition. Lisa’s field of vision grows, until she’s truly the double of her homonym, the haunting heroine of THE BEYOND played by Catriona MacColl. Fulci, delighted, filmed the young woman racked by anguish, struggling in her bed. He followed her down into the catacombs, capturing the universe shrinking around her blue almond-shaped eyes. But it was too late. You can’t start a jigsaw puzzle from the middle. The horror director needed the accuracy of a watchmaker to build mechanics able to reanimate long lost memories. His star was lost in a new place, virgin territory for cinema: a build- ing erected long before the movie camera existed. As Grady Clarkson powerfully recalls: “The shoot- ing site, the mountain monastery, was remarkable in its own way. Buildings in ruin have a mystery which they do not willingly disclose. But there is an aura of the past that enwraps one. It’s more than the sights of past human presence; it is more than the moist, cool aromas of history. What is it? Perhaps it is the
energy that lingers of strong emotion, of conflict, of love, of loss, of bored days watching the horizon for invaders. Perhaps it is all of these things that make a past invade the present so that it might be heard.” But the past is only a thin fog which fades, leav- ing only a gloomy shining sun. There are bodies with- out organs, dummies, organs without bodies, but no real cinema presence. No real body. DEMONIA will never be as good as its glorious predecessors, but it can offer a beautiful way to access their herme- neutics. From imperfection one can discover a lot. DEMONIA, after all, could be Fulci’s own private Rosetta Stone. The artifact we needed to translate his hieroglyph to our own, common language, with our very small understanding of cinema’s magic.
December 25, 1989
[The monastery] dates back to a time when it served as a watch-out spot for the Greeks. So high, it gives a good view of both the approach by the sea to the south and to all the land mass in the other directions.[...]
The first shot was done on an ancient set of stairs. It had, it seemed, once been covered, but the roof was gone and vegetation covered only one end of it, then long briar trails streamed down the wall.
For some unknown reason [Clarkson adds in undated postscript to this notation], I stopped the entries here. Perhaps I got work, got involved, and had no more time. But I do remember much of what happened, if not all. Twenty-three years is a long time to hold onto small details.
Lucio Fulci finished a movie that would not last more than 75 minutes. Additional scenes were requested by the producers, notably a long dia- logue exchange plucked from COLUMBO by Michael Aronin. Fulci, reluctant, apparently shot the scenes in haste but refused to follow the edit- ing process, which was left to Colangeli. The lat- ter did what he could with the storyline gaps, the burned images and the useless additions. The compromised DEMONIA was only distrib- uted on the video market. Most audiences re- mained unmoved by the movie. In the following months, Fulci shot two evocatively titled films, VOICES FROM BEYOND and DOOR TO SILENCE. He died on March, 13th, 1996.
All quotations found in this article are from unpublished interviews with the author, except the interview with Antonio Tentori which can be found, in a French version, on
www.luciofulci.fr.
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