- Director: Lucio Fulci
- Writers: Elisa Briganti, Dardano Sacchetti
- Stars: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni
- Run TimeL 1 Hour, 26 Minutes
Synopsis
There’s a house, and believe it or not, it’s next to the cemetery. The inside of house is covered in cobwebs and dust, but that doesn’t keep a couple from having sex in there. The girl calls for Steve, but he’s disappeared. She soon finds Steve hanging around, but someone plants a knife through her head in mid-scream. The killer drags both bodies into the basement and shuts the door. Credits roll.
We see a black-and-white photo of a little girl in the window of that very same house. A little boy named Bob stares at the tiny, tiny girl in the old photo. The little girl tells Bob that he shouldn’t go where she is. Bob’s mother, Lucy, can’t even see the girl in the photo that it’s so small and blurry— and she’s not there when Lucy looks.
There’s a different little girl (or is it?) named Mae who stands outside the house, and she seems very interested in it as well. She also stares at a sad-looking storefront mannequin until she sees a vision of the mannequin being beheaded with a lot of blood.
Bob’s father, Dr. Normal Boyle, has to travel to New England to that house to finish the work of a colleague, Dr. Petersen, who killed himself and his mistress. They go to the leasing agent, and he refers to the house as the Freudstein place. Norman acts a little sketchy when asked if he has ever been to the house. Mae and Bob have a conversation from an impossible distance apart. The leasing agent backs over a tombstone after dropping the family off. “Damn tombstones!”
Lucy has some nerve problems, and she’s supposed to be taking medication, but she’s heard they give people hallucinations, so she skips her doses. For some reason, the door to the basement is boarded shut. Ann is the new babysitter, and she looks exactly like the beheaded mannequin from an earlier scene. Norman begins his research, and immediately, he finds a big binder labeled “Freudstein.” He hears noises downstairs and finds Ann pulling the boards off the basement door in the middle of the night.
A man asks Norman how he enjoyed his previous trip to the town, and Norman denies ever having visited the town before. He is assigned a research assistant, Douglas. Douglas gathered a bunch of material on missing persons, but that didn’t really have anything to do with Petersen or Norman’s work.
Meanwhile, while playing in the cemetery, Mae tells Bob that Mary Freudstein isn’t really buried in her grave. Lucy finds a trap door under the dining room floor. It’s not a trap door, it’s a tombstone for Jacob Freudstein. She then hears crying and growling coming from the basement door; is it real or is she just crazy? Norman explains that lots of homes in New England have dead people buried in them.
They pry open the basement door finally. Norman goes down the ancient stairs, and he finds a ring on the floor, which he quietly pockets. Lucy is attacked by a bat, and Norman is really slow in dealing with it. They complain to the Realtor again, but when she drops by to tell them about other options, she gets her foot stuck in the hallway tomb, and then something gets stuck in her…
Dr. Freudstein was a surgeon from the turn of the century who had a penchant for illegal surgery experiments. Norman thinks Petersen’s suicide may be connect to his research on Freudstein somehow. Ann hears Bob crying in the basement and goes down after him. The door locks behind her, and then she finds out that it’s not Bob in the basement. Bob soon finds Ann’s head rolling down the stairs. He tells Lucy the story, but she doesn’t find anything and thinks he just made it up. We see something with yellow cat’s eyes in the basement with them, but they don’t see it.
Later than night, Bob goes back into the basement, and he sees the eyes under the stairs. Lucy tries to open the door but has trouble with the keys. Norman grabs an axe and hacks at the door. Norman explains that it was Freudstein who has been killing people. Meanwhile, Bob is running all over the basement running into corpse after corpse, just hanging around.
Norman and Freudstein fight, but Freudstein is really slow, like a zombie should be. When Norman stabs him, he sees the Freudstein is full of maggots, but that doesn’t stop Freudstein from tearing his throat out. He then grabs Lucy and pulls her face down the stairs, one step at a time. Mae lifts Bob out of the brown tomb. Now that Bob’s safe, Mae’s mother Mary Freudstein, tells her it’s time to go to save someone else in the future. Mary leads both children back into the cemetery.
Commentary
It’s a blood-splattery mess, that’s what it is, but in a good way. There are a disturbing numbers of eye-gouging-close-ups in this, and it’s just weird. Where were all those corpses when Lucy was looking for Ann’s head?
If you can get past atrocious dubbing and deal with crying children, this is actually really good. Bob is maybe the most annoying child ever, and it’s not even the actor’s fault. Lucy’s dubbing is nearly as bad. There are many instances of crying children sounds, but it’s not Bob, not mostly.
Clearly, Mary and Mae were ghost, and I guess we’re to assume that so is Bob now, although we don’t actually see him die. We do see Norman and Lucy die, so why didn’t they become ghosts? What was up with people in town thinking Norman had been there before? There was nothing to that plot thread.