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 night Evelyn came out of the grave"

The Skeletal Spotlight shines this time on:
The poster for "The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave"

"Ooooow, my hair! Also, my neck."

This poster artwork is one of those iconic images that everyone remembers once they have seen it. And, like most great posters for a horror movie, the artwork is better then actual film. You can almost bank on it, that the better the poster, the less likely that the movie will be that good.

Having ogled this image as a kid in 1971 when it appeared in my local newspaper movie ads, I have always had it in the back of my mind as one I really wanted to see, especially as I became more aware of the cultish following it seemed to have. So when it was finally released on DVD recently, I jumped at it. I would have been better off jumping away from it. I didn't know it till later, but the film was a giallo. That's a genre I don't have much patience with, as in most cases all you get is some creepy atmosphere, but at the end you might as well have been watching an episode of Scooby-Doo. It's usually just a guy (or girl) in a fright mask. But if one really looked at the image on the poster, you would have known it. Her body's in good shape. Very good shape, actually.

(Higher resolution poster image.)

'The night Evelyn came out of the grave...
it was too dark to see it happen."

As I watched the film, I just got tired of waiting for Evelyn to come out of the grave; and when she finally sort of did, it was a letdown. Here's a good review of the film by an actual giallo fan, to save me the trouble of recapping the convoluted plot. Here's another review by someone less than enthusiastic about it; "resentful" would be a better word. Although the film has its merits, not the least of which are the negligee-clad beauties running around in it, my afore-mentioned impatience with it stems from that fact that when I have invested 80 minutes or so in a film waiting for the publicised horror to appear, it's a bit disappointing when the long-anticipated "boo," turns out to be a "tricked ya!"

"Boooo! I have risen from the gra-a-ave! You know, this
just isn't working. I can't see a thing in this getup."

If it had been marketed as a gothic mystery, rather than a horror movie, I wouldn't have gone into it expecting so much. The movie is more of a psychological thriller, and viewed with that in mind, the film is really not bad. Not as good as some of the fans of it would have you believe, and not as bad as others claim. Like most things, it turns out to be a matter of personal preference and taste. The score is actually quite good; here's a review of it.

But you can't say anything bad about the American poster. It's a real keeper. Hooray for misleading publicity! If it weren't for that, we might never have some of these awesome pieces of art. And that would be a real shame. Some of the best poster artwork came from the crappiest films. Maybe they realised that the poster had to be extra good to get people into the movie?

If anything, the spiffy German poster is even more misleading.

I know I may be unfair in judging some of the films I look at here, comparing them to their poster ads. Typically it's when I never saw the film as a youth, only the poster. The movie could seldom live up to the ads, and viewing them through the jaded eyes of a guy nearing 50, they are seen pretty realistically, and not through the rose-tinged glasses of memory; or even allowing for the time the film was made in. Everyone fondly recalls movies they saw as a kid, and everyone has their favorites, no matter what the movie actually is like. This one did not have that advantage, so apologies to those that hold this film in higher regard than I do, feel free to leave a review in the comments section.

The only interesting part of the film for me was the actual scene, late in the movie, where the dead Evelyn seems to actually rise from the grave. Competently filmed, and atmospherically creepy, it seems to deliver on the poster and premise, until the end of the scene, which ruins it for the horror fan expecting to see a risen corpse. I liken it to seeing a busty woman erotically and slo-o-o-wly removing a pendulously-swollen bra only to reveal it contains.... "taa-daaa!" ...nothing but padded falsies.

Yes, as the poster's tagline says, "The Worms Are Waiting!" They are waiting... in the bait bucket to go fishing. Sitting there on the bank watching the bobber float around would be much more interesting in my opinion... because then there's at least a chance your patience will be rewarded.

I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin

The Skeletal Spotlight shines this time on:
The "I Drink Your Blood/I Eat your Skin" double-feature artwork
(Click for larger image)

Also playing: "I Rip Off Your Money"

In early 1971 my young and impressionable 12 year-old eyeballs fell upon the newspaper ads for the double-bill "I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin," and my brain almost blew up.

Being a lover of scary movies, but too young to see anything other than what I could catch on TV, the closest I could ever get to the movies playing in the theaters was the newspaper ads. So I would clip out and save the them, keeping them in my monster scrapbook. (Go to my other blog, "Held Over!" to see them,) The next year the artwork for "Orgy of the Living Dead" would rock my (admittedly small and sheltered) world, but "IDYB/IEYS" was the first of the truly gory and lurid ads that I had ever seen, and it electrified me. Of course, the movies I imagined were much better than the actual films, but at the time I didn't know that. I believed the posters and ads. I believed that if I went to see them, I would actually witness blood-drinking and skin-eating. Ah, to be young and naive again.

The color poster was what theater-goers saw. The black-and-white ads were what I saw and clipped out. But they were enough to set my insides quivering with the nervous excitement and desire to see what I knew I never could. As it turns out, I was better not knowing at the time that the artwork and ads were pure ballyhoo and not representative of what they were. I've seen both films since on DVD, and although the first was full of shocking images for the time, neither could live up to the ads. The second film was merely an old recycled film from 1964, retitled and released with the first to sweeten the deal. Needless to say it contained no skin-eating.

(Click for larger image)

But no amount of present-day disillusionment can tarnish the youthful memories of the thrills I got, gazing with fascination at the ads as they were displayed in my scrapbook (really, a school notebook with pictures and ads taped in it). A couple of years later, when I began to get "Famous Monsters" and "The Monster Times," I would foolishly cut out the pictures I liked from them and tape them in as well. (Looking back I could kick myself for not saving them in perfect condition, as I began to do a little later.) But at that early time, what I could find in the newspapers was the extent of my collecting. Whenever I take out that old dog-eared scrapbook now, many years later, it takes me back to the time when adding something to it was the hightlight of my day.

A few weeks after the film's release the ads got smaller, but the way they cut together the two was inspired and still made a great graphic.

A more accurate title would have been "I Eat Dead Rats,"
but it probably wouldn't have had the same impact.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.


"Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?"

Watch the R-rated trailer on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRNPLD3lh4s

Having seen the movie upon it's recent DVD release, I realise that the violence and adult themes in "I Drink Your Blood" would have indeed been too much for my tender mind to take. And although the title was misleading, the film did push at the boundaries of gore and good taste and deserves to be seen by old and new fans. The cast of the hippie band was populated by memorable characters, particularly (the sadly late) Indian actor Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury. whose performance left me wondering if it didn't inspire Holt McCallany's young American-Indian tough from Creepshow 2. And Lynn Lowry, whose pixie-like face almost rivalled Yvette Mimieux for eye-catching cuteness, brought a weird mixture of innocence and evil to her character.

The DVD release is great, with plenty of fun extras and awesome menus. But would it have been too much to ask to have both films on it, to duplicate the double-bill effect of the original release?

Oh, well, at least we have it now and that 37 year old itch I had to see it could be scratched to satisfaction.