Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
One of gore master Lucio Fulci’s most widely known and regarded films is Zombie. Or Zombie 2: The Dead Are Among Us, Nightmare Island, Zombie Flesh Eaters, or The Island of the Living Dead depending on the market. In native Italy, it was Zombi 2, an unrelated but intended sequel to Zombi (the European cut of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead). The basic plot follows a group of people searching for a young woman’s father, and they arrive at the island where he worked only to find its inhabitants in the throes of an epidemic that causes its dead to revive and attack the living.
Being that we’re smack between Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week and the upcoming mega-shark release The Meg, there’s no better time than now to get acquainted with this Fulci classic. Gory zombie movies don’t typically have anything whatsoever to do with sharks, but Zombie puts itself in the arena with spectacular results. One of the most notorious scenes in the entire sub-genre of zombie films occurs in the first half of this Fulci classic. The underwater scene features an almost completely naked female scuba diver (of course) as she freaks out over a shark encounter. Then a zombie. It would’ve been sufficient to end there, but then the zombie had to get into a fight with the shark. I should mention that the budget for this film didn’t have room for fancy animatronics, so the shark was real.
But, this is a gore column, and as insane as the shark fight scene is, there’s not much gore in it. That’s ok, though, because the rest of the film more than makes up for it. The second most memorable scene in the film is the excruciating, drawn out death of Paola (Olga Karlatos), the wife of Dr. Menard who wants nothing more than to leave the island. Fulci consistently featured cringe-inducing eye trauma in his horror films, and Paola’s ever so slow eye skewering is the worst. The viewer is forced to watch as she struggles with a zombie intent on pulling her toward him, a large splinter between them. The tension is unbearable, as the viewer knows what’s going to happen, and Fulci takes his sweet time building up to the inevitable. When that splinter finally pierces Paola’s eye, it doesn’t stop. No surprise that it’s primarily this scene that earned the movie its status as a Video Nasty.
The entire final act is a gore lover’s dream, as the island is taken over by zombies both ancient and new. Our unwitting cast of characters get slaughtered in gruesome ways, ensuring that the eye gouge sequence doesn’t hog the gore limelight. Much of that can be attributed to special effects artist Giannetto De Rossi, who created a lot of the zombies, bite wounds, exploding heads, and even featured as the zombie hand responsible for Paola’s eye impalement. De Rossi teamed up with Fulci again to handle special effects for The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery, earning international fame in the process. He’s one of the world’s greatest special effects artists, and still kills it today with more recent work in films like High Tension. The brutal, lingering gore of Zombie makes it easy to see why De Rossi would continue one to have a lengthy career.
