The Gates of Hell...Again!

The Skeletal Spotlight shines this time on:
The Gates of Hell video box
(Click images to enlarge.)

Back in the day, the early 80's to be more precise about which day we're talking about, certain video releases came out in oversized boxes. These make good collector's items today. The only example I have of this is of my favorite Fulci film, "The Gates of Hell" as it was known back in the aforementioned day. Sure, we have the DVD now, with the original title "City of the Living Dead," but to us aging gorehounds it's still known as "Gates."

Since yesterday's post was such fun, and so popular, I took out my camera and snapped these images of the front and back of the box, just in case you might like to see it. And I took out the DVD and grabbed some 20 or so frames from it to share some of my favorite images from the movie. In case you haven't yet seen it, I hope these images will pique your interest and cause you to seek it out.. and if you have for the umpteenth time as I have, then I'm sure you'll enjoy seeing them again.

The misty cemetery scene sets the foreboding tone for the film. The music during this scene really enhances the mood as the disturbed priest searches for just the right limb.

The mysterious tombstone that seems to be the center of the brewing trouble. It's never explained, but one gets the impression that the priest is aware of the prophetic nature of the incantation and is fulfilling it. At the very least the headstone engraver made a few extra dollars on all that extra text.

Obviously having missed a lot of sleep, or with the ragweed pollen allergy is kicking in, our poor disillusioned and backslidden priest chooses just the right spot to offer the final unholy sacrifice. His blasphemous act will open the local Gate of Hell and empower him to act as leader of the restless dead.


Amidst the moans and groans of the rising dead, which creepily include a crying baby, the first corpse to rise is the one only covered under leaves in a slight depression. Still, the image is powerful and is the one that most of the international posters were inspired by.


A chilling scene as the prematurely buried and traumatized Mary is first seen through the pickaxe-pried wood. It really give you a horrible feeling as she is revealed and screams!

The Famous Gut-Barfing Scene:

Confronted by the ghost of the undead priest, a necking couple become the first victims.

It starts with blood coming from her eyes, a terrific effect. I don't know how she kept from blinking the whole time! I'm assuming that the "blood" is being pumped in from the sides, the tubes covered by her hair. The same effect happens at the end of the movie again, and it's even more convincing.


After some bloody foam, the first batch of intestines begins to slowly exit her mouth. Actress Daniele Doria's own intestinal fortitude is stronger than mine, having stuffed the sheep guts in there for the scene. The long-suffered actress was "killed" in interesting ways by Fulci in three of his other movies. What a trooper!


The guts continue to slowly unfold and drop out as the gagging and squelching sounds enhance the effect. If you aren't making some of your own gagging sounds by this point, you've either got a stomach of steel or you've seen it too many times.


Once the backup is cleared, the larger intestines and organs slide out rapidly. They are accompanied by your last meal as you watch and listen. Accomplished by using a dummy head, the final exodus of what appears to be the stomach is usually what sends my first-time guest viewers running to the bathroom.


Her aghast and sickened boyfriend gets a brain squeeze applied. Below is a YouTube video of the scene, for your viewing enjoyment! WARNING: if you have never seen it, have a vomit bag nearby! Not for the squeamish, as they say.

This right here is one of the most disturbing zombie images on film. The same girl that lost her innards has come back to haunt her little brother. Talk about cold!

Besides the obvious New York locations, some of the movie exteriors were also filmed in Savannah, GA during July and August of 1980. What really, really irks me is that I was actually living in Savannah at the time! If only I had known. I mentioned this on the last post, but this time I have pictures from the movie scene and closer location pics to match, so it's not a repeat of the same info.

This scene was filmed on the lower level of Factor's Walk in Savannah. It's between the bluff and the River Street buildings. Notice the archways to the right which lead to underground storage areas, now used for parking. Compare to the picture below...

This postcard shows almost the exact angle of the first scene!

The photo above of the same location shows where the boy first ran onto the street under the bridges after coming down the steps, which are on the right around the corner of the building, which is actually the Courthouse. He ran up the street under the bridges. You can see the same archways on the right that were visible in the first photo.

Above is a reverse angle after coming down the stairs, and starting the run up the street. The bottom of the Courthouse building in the last photo can be seen in the background.

The second bridge in the above photo is where the zombie pictured below leaps down from.

After athletically leaping from the bridge (these zombies are in excellent shape), the former boyfriend of Miss Oral Evisceration accosts the innocent boy. Michele Soavi played the character, and he went on later to direct and star in other horror movies.


A maggot storm, completely unforeseen by the Weather Service, blows in through a window, prompting more puking. The noisy larvae stick in clumps to our heroes, as if glued on... which they were. I'm just wondering where they got that many live maggots! I'm betting they were meal worms or something, bought at a local wholesale bait supply company.


There's that girl again. She scares me.


A brain tissue sample is painlessly extracted by Sandra, one of our former heroines. Painless for her, that is. It seems quite excruciating to our reporter, however. And who knew rats dig brain food?


"And when they got home, there, on the passenger-side door handle... there hung... a BLOODY HOOK!!!" The undead priest always illuminated his face from below with his flashlight for spooky effect.


Setting the department store manniquins on fire didn't require massive amounts of very visible protective clothing as the stuntmen did.


The entire world is destroyed. The End. At least, that's what is inferred... reality fractures and breaks down as the membrane between Earth and the Beyond is ruptured by the passage of the priest. Ri-i-i-ight. In reality, Fulci credits the unfathomable ending to editor Vincenzo Tomassi, who came up with the reality-cracking scene after the original footage was accidentally destroyed. I'd just be happy knowing what the last scene was supposed to be! What was so horrifying? As with how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, the world may never know.

Look out, "Dunwich!" Here I come!

Newsflash: I have only recently learned where the opening cemetery scene was filmed in Savannah. As soon as I get there and take some photos, I will post them on this blog and I'll report every goosebump I get. I'll try to also take some video and post it as well. It should be very soon!

Well, that's it. I enjoyed scanning through the movie collecting these images, and it made me want to sit down some dark night soon and watch it again. Hope it did the same for you!

The Gates of Hell

The Skeletal Spotlight shines this time on:

"The Gates of Hell" poster

The VHS release sheet. Click to view a ridiculously large image!

Here lately I've been going through some of the material I have in my three bookcases which contain my sci-fi/horror collection items. Most of the stuff in there are magazines, comics, books, and various things like cards, clippings and promotional material. The reason for it is to find interesting things to post here, but the process is fun and I find stuff I had forgotten I even had.

A hi-rez image of the theatrical poster.

For a period of time during the 80's I had a friend that worked at a video store, and I got a lot of the promotional items that they were either done with or never used. A lot of it was in the form of 8 x 10 glossy color pages advertising the new videotape release, and these fit into my plastic notebook pages perfectly. The first image posted above is the one for the 1983 video release "The Gates of Hell," as "City of the Living Dead" was known in it's initial American release in 198o. I'll be sharing the high-rez scans of the other ones that fit this blog's theme as we go along. These are rare items that you may never see posted anywhere else... until, of course, other fans download them and then use on their own blog (like I did for the majority of the posters and video covers below).

A case for Visine if there ever was one. The eye-bleeding horror she is looking at literally makes her eyes bleed. And you can't watch this scene without your own eyes watering.

The phrase "puking your guts out" is also taken literally in this stomach-wrenching scene that will have you doing the same the first time you see it. The actress gamely stuffed raw sheep intestines in her mouth for this scene! This gal really must have wanted to please the director, I tell you. It might just be the single most disgustingly nauseating image ever put on film... unless you count some episodes of "Fear Factor."

"The City of the Living Dead," is my absolute favorite film by Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci. From the first scene of the priest's suicide in the foggy cemetery, to the fiery underground conclusion as they face the undead ex-Father and his rotted minions, it's one of the most frightening films I have ever seen... and that's saying a lot. Featuring the greatest scenes of gut-barfing, brain-squeezing, worm/filth-smearing, head-drilling and maggot-raining you'll ever see, it drips with atmosphere and dread. The zombie/ghosts, appearing and disappearing to horrific effect, are nightmare-inducing and will make even a grown man like me turn on some more lights when watching alone at night.

"Accck! I... change my mind... *choke* somebody help... *gasp* Aw, hell! *wheeze*"

Poor mentally-challenged Bob gets the point drilled into his head by an irate father.

Never in the history of cinema has oatmeal been so frightening.

The music is another element worth mentioning. The score by Fulci regular Fabio Frizzi adds much of the tension, dread and terror to the brooding photography by cinematographer Sergio Salvati. The near-constant wind during the daytime, the fog-shrouded night scenes, the growls and groans of the ghost zombies, even the echoing hoot of what is supposed to be a racous owl (which is really a howler monkey) all bring an over-arching feeling of unease.

Some of the foggy scenes in the town of Dunwich were filmed in Savannah, GA, in locations I recognised since I visit there often. The bridge that the zombie jumps down from in one scene was filmed down near River Street on Factor's Walk. It's a creepy and atmospheric location at night; with the old cobblestone road, historic buildings, catacomb-like parking coves and spanish moss hanging from the ancient oaks. Although you are more likely to get mugged at night than killed by a zombie, it's still pretty scary. It was neat standing in the spot where they filmed... knowing that Fulci and the crew making the movie I loved had been in that same place at one time.

(Image source)
A location in the movie, filmed on Factor's Walk just behind the River Street buildings and shops. You can imagine it at night!

The scariest thing falling from the bridge on you at night might be from a drunk taking a leak, stumbling up from the bars at River Street.

Thin on logic and cohesive narrative, but thick with style and vision, "City of the Living Dead" is what you take out and show when the company dares you to play "the scariest movie you've got." Which is what my mother-in-law said, much to her regret. Her nerves and stomach took days to recover. Needless to say, she never repeated the mistake.

The main reason the undead are so scary to me in this film is that they are functioning with will and with an agenda (to kill you and add to their numbers) rather than the usual mindless flesheaters we have become accustomed to. They love to mess with your mind, toying with you and scaring the crap out of you before killing you. They like to grab your scalp with unnatural strength, rip off a section of your skull and squeeze out your brains as you scream and die. That's just wicked, not hungry. And the images of the undead faces are unlike any other Fulci film. With eyes full of evil, their bloody, decayed faces lit from below and filmed in close-up, the living dead are truly terrifying as they get in your face and your nightmares.

Wallpaper source: Beyond Horror

To enjoy the film, you have to overlook the usual Fulci lapses in logic. For example, when Mary the psychic dies, why is she buried without an autopsy and embalming? The possibility of premature burial no longer exists with present-day burial practices. Under such strange circumstances an autopsy would have been required, and as the medical examiners like to say. "well, they're dead now." But searching for logic in a Fulci horror film is a waste of effort. The story serves much the same function as the Doombuggies track in the Haunted Mansion; it only exists to get you from one scary scene to another. As long as it does it without too many bumps, you don't think about it much.

The Pakistani poster puts one of their local actors on it and tries to insinuate the film features their own talent. The green-faced, orange-tongued goofball is fortunately absent... unless they filmed something and edited him in. You never know with these crazy foreigners.

The large wooden cross he's holding is about to get shoved into the dead priest's crotch. An unorthodox way of killing the living dead, but effective, as it has the effect of causing him to burst into flame. Although the poster juxtaposes the two images to give that impression, probably only coincidentally, it actually happens in the film!

The mask based on the image of the famous poster art. The same zombie showed up on the poster for the Italian gut-muncher "Hell of the Living Dead," also known as "Zombie Flesh-Eaters." He does not appear in the films, however.