City of the Living Dead
Short description
A séance in New York ends with a medium apparently dead of fright, but not before she sees a priest from the town of Dunwich hanging himself in a church cemetery. A reporter, Peter Bell, looks into the case and finds that the suicide has opened a passage between the living and the dead. Unless it is shut before All Saints' Day, the dead will rise and overrun the world. Peter travels to Dunwich with the medium, Mary Woodhouse, where the two of them and a local man, Gerry, search for the priest's grave as the town's residents report encounters with the returning dead.
Lucio Fulci directed, produced and co-wrote the film with Dardano Sacchetti. It was the twelfth of the nineteen features Fulci directed, arriving between Zombie Flesh Eaters and The Beyond, and it is often grouped with those two as part of his run of horror films. Christopher George plays Peter Bell, Catriona MacColl plays Mary Woodhouse, and Carlo De Mejo, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Janet Ågren and Antonella Interlenghi appear in supporting roles, among a credited cast of twenty-four.
On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.2 from around 21,000 votes, and on TMDB it holds a 6.5 from roughly 459 votes. A critics' score of 5.2 from seventeen reviews places it slightly below both audience ratings. It runs ninety-three minutes.
What's left behind the scenes
- Danwich is a fictional location invented by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
- The film footage depicting the action in Danwich is rendered in a dark blue tone.
- The film was shot in the city of Savannah, Georgia.
- To film the scene where blood flows from the heroine's eyes, blunted syringe needles were used, glued to the actress's lower eyelid and connected to tubes hidden in her hair. An assistant off-camera pumped blood through these tubes.
- For the scenes depicting a woman vomiting her own entrails, the raw rumen of a freshly slaughtered lamb was used. The actress had to stuff it into her mouth and vomit it out before each take. The rumen dried out every 10 minutes and had to be constantly rehydrated before use. A prosthetic mouth with a pump was used for close-up shots.
- Franco Rufini was the special effects artist.
- The premiere screening of the film shocked most of the audience, with some fainting and others running out of the cinema.
- Danwich is mentioned in the computer game Fallout 3. The so-called Danwich Building, associated with mystical phenomena, and in the "Point Lookout" add-on, there was a "Black Book" that could be destroyed on an altar in the Danwich Building's dungeon as part of a quest.
- The scene where the window is thrown open and hundreds of larvae fly in was filmed using two wind generators and 10 kg of real larvae.
- Initially, Bob, played by Giovanni Lombardo Radice, was supposed to be a hunchback. However, the actor refused to wear a fake hump and instead portrayed the character with a distinctive gait.
- Almost all of the scenes at the Dunwich cemetery were filmed at the Midway Cemetery in Georgia. The cemetery was already overcrowded in the 1860s, and many of the graves were simply marked with wooden crosses. When General William Sherman's troops passed through there in 1864, the walled cemetery was used as a corral for animals. When the animals became hungry, they gnawed on the wooden crosses on most of the graves. So, when a zombie rises from the ground in the film, it is very likely that they are indeed rising from someone's grave.
- The temperature during filming was over 40 degrees Celsius.
- A drill with a blunt end, made of a kind of 'soft' plastic, was used for filming the skull-drilling scene. The drill glittered due to a galvanization coating. The drill was hollow inside, and during the visible moment of the drill entering the scalp, fake blood flowed from it.
- When the film was released in the United States in 1983, it was titled "Twilight of the Dead." Given that the title and posters had a noticeable resemblance to George A. Romero's horror film "Dawn of the Dead" (1978), United Film Distribution Company filed a lawsuit against Motion Picture Marketing. The posters for "Twilight of the Dead" were changed to "The Gates of Hell."
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
