General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The House by the Cemetery

The House by the Cemetery (Italian: Quella villa accanto al cimitero) is a 1981 Italian horror film directed by Lucio Fulci, in which a New York academic moves his family into a New England house whose basement hides a murderous secret.¹ It is the concluding film of Fulci's unofficial "Gates of Hell" trilogy, following City of the Living Dead (1980) and The Beyond (1981).²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Quella villa accanto al cimitero; working title Freudstein³
Director and producer	Lucio Fulci; produced by Fabrizio De Angelis for Fulvia Film¹
Writers	Story by Elisa Livia Briganti; screenplay by Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Lucio Fulci¹
Italian release	14 August 1981; US wide theatrical release March 1, 1984¹^•⁴
Runtime	87 minutes (uncut US version); 84 minutes in Italy; cut versions ran as short as 75 minutes 20 seconds on UK video¹
Principal cast	Catriona MacColl (Lucy), Paolo Malco (Dr. Norman Boyle), Giovanni Frezza (Bob), Silvia Collatina (Mae Freudstein)¹
Reception	40% Tomatometer (10 reviews) and 48% Popcornmeter (5,000+ ratings) on Rotten Tomatoes⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Dr. Norman Boyle, a New York-based academic, is assigned to investigate the death of a colleague, Dr. Peterson, who moved into a rambling New England house formerly owned by Dr. Freudstein, murdered his mistress, and then hanged himself.¹ Norman relocates with his wife Lucy and their young son Bob to the long-abandoned house in New Whitby so that he can continue Peterson's research.¹^•⁵

Soon after the family arrives, Bob begins seeing a mysterious little girl, Mae, who appears in a photograph of the house and warns him that he is in danger, although no adult can see or hear her.² Strange events accumulate: a tomb is discovered in the floor of a room, and noises come from the basement, where people who venture downstairs meet gruesome deaths.⁶^•² When Bob disappears, his parents search the cellar and find that Dr. Freudstein, a mad doctor who died about a century earlier, is still alive there, sustaining his immortality by transplanting the vital parts of his victims' bodies onto himself.⁶

Production

The film went into production in March 1981 under the working title Freudstein.³ The original story was by Elisa Livia Briganti, who had worked on Fulci's Zombi 2; her husband Dardano Sacchetti turned the treatment into a screenplay, which was rewritten by Giorgio Mariuzzo and Fulci himself.³^•⁷ Sacchetti and Fulci parted ways after this film, and each subsequently tended to claim credit for its successes.⁷

Locations and crew. Fulci had shot scenes for Zombi 2 in New York City and followed the same practice of American location work here, filming in New York City, Boston, Concord, and Scituate, Massachusetts, as well as at the De Paolis studios in Rome; the Concord house needed little dressing beyond fake gravestones placed outside it.³^•⁷ Cinematographer Sergio Salvati, a frequent Fulci collaborator, shot the film on 35 mm in 2-perf Techniscope with spherical lenses, and the flat negative was optically blown up to 2.35:1 anamorphic release prints.³^•⁸ Walter Rizzati composed the electronic score, and Vincenzo Tomassi edited.¹ Although Gianetto De Rossi is credited with the makeup effects, they were actually done by his assistant Maurizio Trani.⁷

The repertory cast. British leading lady Catriona MacColl made the last of three films for Fulci here, after starring in City of the Living Dead and The Beyond; child actor Giovanni Frezza, whose English dubbing has been described as among the worst on record, went on to another terrorized-child role in Fulci's Manhattan Baby (1982).³ The cast also includes Dagmar Lassander and Daniela Doria, both of whom had appeared in Fulci's 1981 adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat, and Fulci himself appears in a cameo as Professor Muller.³^•¹

Censorship and release

The film was heavily censored for its initial theatrical release.² The Italian censors wanted an eye-gouging removed from an already protracted killing, and Fulci obliged because he was not pleased with the effect anyway.⁷ In the United Kingdom the film was cut by the BBFC and placed on the list of "video nasties", films prosecuted or withdrawn under Britain's early-1980s video obscenity controversy.⁹ Version lengths recorded across releases range from 75 minutes 20 seconds (UK Vipco video, 1993) to 87 minutes (uncut US version), with the Italian release at 84 minutes.¹ The film was a commercial success in Italy, though it was not well reviewed there.⁷

Reception and legacy

Contemporary critics were unimpressed: London's Time Out dismissed the film as "a hack-work of almost awesome incoherence", though it has grown in stature in the years since.¹⁰ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 40% Tomatometer from 10 reviews and a 48% Popcornmeter score from more than 5,000 audience ratings.⁴ Later critics have been more generous: Alan Jones of Starburst called it "Fulci at his most restrained and therefore most effective", while James Kendrick of the Q Network Film Desk gave it 1.5 out of 4, arguing that the on-screen violence was nothing compared to the violence Fulci inflicted on storytelling and logic.⁴

Place in Fulci's career. The British Film Institute describes the film as the work of Fulci "at the height of his powers", forming the third part of an informal trilogy begun with City of the Living Dead and The Beyond.¹¹ The trilogy, unofficially termed the "Gates of Hell" trilogy, is characterized by a gothic sensibility built on decay and unflinching depictions of violent death; academic work has read it through Jacques Derrida's concept of undecidability.¹² Where the first two films present the fusion of worlds at an apocalyptic scale, The House by the Cemetery reduces the theme to a single domestic location, an alternative take on the gothic haunted-house scenario.⁵ Its premise, a family relocating from the city to an isolated New England house with a troubled past, has clear affinities with The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Shining (1980), though Fulci turns the haunted-house story into a fragmented nightmare of loose ends, disorienting set pieces, and sudden tonal shifts.³^•¹¹

Home video

Blue Underground restored the film in 4K 16-bit from the original 35 mm 2-perf camera negative, first issuing it on 4K in 2020 and later with Dolby Vision HDR and a Dolby Atmos mix.⁸^•¹³ Arrow Video released a limited edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray in the UK on 9 October 2023, using the Blue Underground restoration with a new encode, restored mono English and Italian soundtracks, a 5.1 English option, and commentaries by author Troy Howarth and by stars Catriona MacColl and Silvia Collatina.⁹^•¹⁴ Reviewers of the Arrow disc judged it the best presentation the film had received, correcting a video error and a long-standing audio error present since the DVD era.⁸^•¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026