Italian film director, political activist, screenwriter, and actor. Although he worked in a wide array of genres through a career spanning what is sacchetti five decades, including comedies and Spaghetti Westerns, he garnered an international cult following for his giallo and horror films.
Lucio Fulci was born in Trastevere, Rome, on 17 June 1927. His mother Lucia was from a poor but reputable Sicilian, politically anti-fascist family from Messina, Sicily. In his young teenage years he became active in the Italian Communist Party and was active during the tense times and turmoil and political struggles in post-war Italy. As an adult he was not active in any political “fight” anymore but remained a firm supporter of radical left wing and socialist politics his whole life, according to people close to him. His mother encouraged him to be a lawyer, but he wound up going to medical school instead.
His interest in the arts led him to apply to the film school in Rome named Centro Sperimentale where he apprenticed, after which he worked first as a director of documentaries, then an assistant director of motion pictures, then a screenwriter working mainly in the Italian comedy field In the early 1950s. Fulci had a Catholic upbringing and always referred to himself as a Catholic. Several of Fulci’s movies released in America were edited by the film distributor to ensure an R rating, such as The Beyond, which was originally released on video in severely edited form as Seven Doors of Death. Fulci travelled to the Philippines and spent six weeks shooting the film Zombi 3. Two opposing views were given for Fulci leaving the film, the first being an illness that left him unable to film and the second being that he was having disputes with producers. By the second half of the 1980s, the Italian film industry was struggling with less theatrical distribution of films and productions being made to sell to foreign markets for television and home video. A series was developed titled I maestri del thriller was developed with the aim of television and home video markets, which was originally going to be a set of ten films but only eight were made.
Fulci would also develop films for television as part of the series Le case maledette set up by producer Luciano Martino. In the last decade of his life, Fulci suffered from emotional and physical health problems, reflected by a marked decline in the quality of his work. Fulci also continued to suffer during the late 1980s from recurring problems with diabetes and his liver. He hid the severity of his illness from his friends and associates, so that he would not be deemed unemployable.
Fulci and Argento met in 1994 at the Rome Fanta Festival and surprisingly agreed to collaborate on a horror film called Wax Mask, a loose remake of the 1953 Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax. Fulci collaborated with writer Daniele Stroppa to create a screenplay for Argento, whose insistence on increasing the violence and gore quotient was, unusually, opposed by Fulci. Lucio Fulci died alone, in his sleep, in his apartment in Rome at around 2 pm on 13 March 1996, from diabetes-related complications at the age of 68. Toward the end of his life, he had lost his house and was forced to move into a cramped apartment.
Since Fulci had been so despondent in his later years, some believed that he may have intentionally allowed himself to die by not taking his diabetes medication, but this is controversial. Fulci’s films had remained generally ignored or dismissed for many years by the mainstream critics, who regarded his work as exploitation. However, genre fans appreciated his films as being stylish exercises in extreme gore. At least one of his films, The Beyond, has “amassed a large and dedicated following”. Fulci made an appearance at the January 1996 Fangoria horror convention in New York City, two months before his death. Walking on crutches with a bandaged foot, he told attendees that he had had no idea his films were so popular outside of his native Italy, as hordes of starstruck gore fans braved blizzard conditions that weekend to meet him.
Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and his Films. Lucio Fulci, le poète du macabre”. The Zombification Family Tree: Legacy of the Living Dead”. No Eyes are Safe: Lucio Fulci”. Grindhouse Releasing Presents ’80s Horror Classics Pieces and The Beyond”.
Lucio Fulci, il poeta della crudeltà. Rome, Italy: Un mondo a parte. Italian Sword and Sandal Films, 1908-1990. Riccardo Freda: The Life and Works of a Born Filmmaker.
Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films. Lucio Fulci – le poète du macabre. Mario Bava – All the Colors of the Dark. Guida al cinema horror made in Italy. This article is about a type of packaging. A plastic bag, poly bag, or pouch is a type of container made of thin, flexible, plastic film, nonwoven fabric, or plastic textile. Most plastic bags are heat sealed at the seams, while some are bonded with adhesives or are stitched.