- Director: Lucio Fulci
- Writers: Dardano Sacchetti
- Stars: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale
- Run Time; 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
Synopsis
Louisiana 1927. A woman sees a book labeled “Eibon.” There are eye closeups as a man paints a landscape. A group of men with torches approach in boats. The men confront the painter, “You ungodly warlock!” And then they beat him half to death. They chain him up and take him to the basement, where they nail him to the stone walls and give him fatal chemical burns that eat off half his face. The basement just happen to contain one of the seven gateways to Hell, and we all know what that means. Credits roll.
Liza Merril is having her old house restored. Martha and Arthur are her weird servants. One of the workmen falls off a scaffold when he sees someone inside with all-white eyes. Dr. McCabe carts the man off to the hospital. The plumber comes to do some work, and he goes down to the basement and finds water leaking from out of the wall. He breaks away the brickwork and finds more than he bargained for. We get the patented Fulci-eye-pop in this scene. Martha finds what’s left of Joe, but doesn’t seem all that surprised.
Liza nearly runs over a woman with white eyes on the road. Her name is Emily. Emily says that Liza needs to give up the hotel, but can’t explain it.
Dr. Harris wants to hook up a corpse to his brain wave machine to see what happens. The corpse has been dead for sixty years, but somehow, we see that it has a rhythm. He has to leave the body unattended, and a woman comes in to put clothes on Joe the dead plumber. For some reason, she screams, falls down, and get doused in acid, which eats her face off. Her daughter Jill is locked in the room and gets a good scare.
Liza goes out with Dr. McCabe. Liza was from New York, but then she inherited the old “Seven Doors Hotel.” McCabe asks if she wants to run the hotel, considering the accidents, but she really doesn’t have any choice.
Next, we’re at the funeral for Joe the plumber and his wife. Jill, their daughter, is there. We see that now, Jill has white eyes.
Emily explains about the seven gateways to hell and that sixty years ago, everyone in the hotel vanished. The painter, Schweick, found a key. Emily also believes the Schweik has returned. His room was number 36, and then the buzzer for room 36 rings. Emily runs off and disappears.
The next morning, Liza breaks into room 36. She finds the book of Eibon. Liza goes into his bathroom and sees Schweick nailed to the wall in there. When McCabe goes to look, there’s nothing but the nails. McCabe doesn’t know who Emily is. Liza notices the book is now gone.
Marty, the architect in charge of the hotel renovations, goes to the library to look up the hotel, but he’s struck by lightning and eaten by spiders. In the clean and modern library. Of course, one of them bites him in the eye.
Meanwhile, creepy Martha finds Joe the plumber’s dead body in the bathtub of room 36. He pushes her into a big nail, and we get our third eye-popping scene! Schweick comes for Emily, and she cries, “I don’t want to go back! I did what I’ve been asked!” Her seeing-eye dog fights off the zombies, but then turns on Emily and kills her.
McCabe checks out the house where Emily is supposed to live, and it’s a ransacked mess. He does, however, find her copy of the Eibon book. McCabe and Liza drive off, leaving many ghosts wandering the house. They drive to the hospital to talk to Dr. Harris. The phone in the hospital doesn’t work. Suddenly, the hospital is full of walking dead. For some reason, they run into Jill in the autopsy room.
They eventually encounter Schweick, but McCabe only shoots it in the body. Jill turns against them, but he does manage to shoot her in the head. They go through a door and find themselves back in the hotel. They walk on through another door and find themselves in a desolate, foggy landscape, which can only be Hell itself. In the final shot, we see that they both have white eyes.
Commentary
Every in horror films should have big jars of acid uncorked on a high shelf. As a gimmick, it moves the plot along quite nicely. There’s an outstanding amount of gore in this one. I got particularly grossed out with the spider scene, and I don’t even have a problem with spiders. Fulci is known for his eye-injury scenes, but in this film even he gets carried away.
Eibon is related to the Cthulhu mythos tangentially, but was not created by H.P. Lovecraft. Basically, everything happens because of the evil from the book, but there’s not much explanation beyond that. There’s lots of good gore, but otherwise, the story is pretty generic. I liked it, but it’s not a standout favorite.