I MADE A POSTER FOR THIS SERIES AT THE TRYLON, BUT YOU SHOULD GO ANYWAY BECAUSE IT WILL BE FUN

The excellent folks at Take-Up Productions are great at putting together fun film events and series. This one is my favorite to date, and I got to design the poster for it!

From their website:
“No one deserves the moniker “The Godfather of Gore” more than Lucio Fulci. Nearly all of his films were rated X for their decapitations, eye-gougings, and disembowelings, which may have kept the under-18 crowd away. But Fulci was more than just a director of “cheap” horror. He utilized experimental camera techniques, blazing colors, imaginative gore, and absurd storylines to create incomparable Italian horror that sets the standard. We present four of his best, shown as originally released with English dubbing.”

As a young horror fan coming up in the analogue golden age of video stores, I was often more than a little confused as to which of Lucio Fulci’s films I had actually seen. US distributors took to editing his films and altering their titles to attain an “R” rating, thereby ensuring a broader viewing audience. It was evidently believed that his films would have received the ignominious mark of the “X” without these usually heinous acts of back-alley cosmetic surgery.

So anyway, the first time I saw most of these films, they were called something else. I’m pretty sure Zombie was Zombie Flesh Eaters, or possibly the terribly confusing Zombi 2 (The film was marketed in Italy as the unofficial sequel to George Romero’s Zombi, which is commonly known as Dawn of the Dead in the US). City of the Living Dead was definitely introduced to me as The Gates of Hell, and The Beyond as Seven Doors of Death, which makes it sound more like the product of 1970’s Hong Kong Cinema than Italian gore.

But this October, The Trylon will have me all sorted out. I hope you can make it out to one or all of these deliciously bizarre screenings. We don’t often get the chance to see this type of stuff on the big screen, so if you like weird, gross, industrious, crotch-obsessed, eyeball-puncturing, gut-barfing, auteuristic film making, come see some fine examples from a director who did it more boldly than most have dared.

Mondays and Tuesdays in October at 7 and 9pm at the Trylon Microcinema