Format: Streaming video from AMC on Fire!
I’ve made no secret of how I approach Italian horror films on this blog. While there are some true standouts like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, I remain convinced that the majority of Italian horror films come about because the director envisions a particular scene or a couple of scenes and then plans the movie around getting those scenes on camera. Because of this, there are often bizarre plot holes or things that happens specifically because of the need to get to those key scenes. Suspiria is a great example of this. There’s some of that in The House by the Cemetery (or Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero if you prefer the Italian), but for once, it feels like this might have actually started with at least an elevator pitch of a plot.
We open with the sort of classic slasher movie opening. We have a young woman (Daniela Doria) looking for her boyfriend in a house. She finds him dead and then is quickly dispatched herself. This is the house by the cemetery that is going to be the focus of much of the rest of the film. We switch to New York where we meet the main human characters of the film. These are Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) and their son Bob (Giovanni Frezza), who makes a strong case for the most annoying child in any movie. It’s not so much the kid as the dubbed voice, which can cut glass.
Why are they important? Because they are about to move into the house in question. The previous occupant, a former colleague of Dr. Norman Boyle, killed himself and his mistress. For whatever reason, Norman has a picture of the house in his office. While things are being packed up, Bob sees a girl in the window of the house and tells his mother that the girl is speaking to him, telling him to stay away.
What we’re going to learn eventually is that the house was originally owned by someone with the truly ridiculous name of Jacob Freudstein—going all-in on the potential anti-Semitism with that name. We’re soon going to get a great deal of evidence that Freudstein may have left some sort of curse on the house. This is evident not only because we get to see people pulled into the basement and killed, but because that girl from the photo is someone Bob is now talking to. She claims her name is Mae Freudstein (Silvia Collatina), and it’s soon apparent that only Bob can see her. We’re also eventually going to get a recording from Norman’s late colleague, where he claims to have also seen things he can’t explain in the house.
There is a sense of plot to The House by the Cemetery, far more than I am used to with Italian horror films in general and those of Lucio Fulci in specific. While there is still a sense of key scenes that the movie revolves around in terms of how they appear—the death of the realtor, the attack on the babysitter—it does honestly feel like there was an attempt to make a coherent plot to tie all of these things together.
There is, of course, an issue with this being available (to my ability to find) as a dubbed-only film. The dubbing is really not very good, and that’s especially evident in the case of Bob. Bob’s dubbed voice is high-pitched, shrill, and annoying. Worse, there are frequent parts of the film that require Bob to be crying or whimpering constantly, and it sounds like whimpering being done by someone who was told what it should sound like without ever hearing it first themselves. Bob is the-kid-from-Shane levels of irritating, but 90% of that is the dubbing, and not really the fault of the kid on screen.
The truth of this is that The House by the Cemetery is probably a better film than I am giving it credit for being. This is a style that I genuinely dislike in general and that I tend to find difficult to enjoy, even in the best of circumstances. It is one that managed to get blood that actually looks like blood and not red paint, at least in a few places, and for that, it might be a mild miracle of Italian filmmaking after all.
Why to watch The House by the Cemetery: There’s actually a semblance of plot in this one.
Why not to watch: That kids ranks for “most annoying kid in a film.”