Zombie movies push the envelope pretty far with their central premise alone. Filmmakers have to get really creative if they want to take the gore beyond the audience’s expectations when the audience already expects hordes of the undead looking for brains and human flesh to feast on.
With his early masterpieces Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero – widely regarded to be “The Godfather of Zombies” – established that the best zombie movies use their simplistic, blood-soaked narrative framework as a vehicle for satire and social commentary.
Instead of focusing on the satire of Romero’s work, Lucio Fulci was inspired by the gruesome imagery and figured out a way to take the blood and guts to even darker, nastier places than Romero. While his bumbling peers were peddling half-baked, ham-fisted commentary in a futile attempt to emulate Romero, Fulci discovered a new way to make an unforgettable zombie movie: by pushing the gore and the violence and the terror much further than all the others.
Zombie Flesh Eaters Has Eyeball Impalings And Swarms Of Maggots
One of Fulci’s most notorious horror movies – 1979’s Zombie Flesh Eaters – has such shockingly violent moments as a zombie impaling a woman’s eyeball on splintered wood (realized in horrific detail), swarms of maggots bursting forth from the rotting flesh of the undead, and, most infamously, a zombie wrestling a shark.
Zombie Flesh Eaters is just one of many titles this movie goes by. It was initially released in Italy under the name Zombi 2, because it was conceived as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, which had been released in Italian theaters a year earlier with the title Zombi. However, since Dawn of the Dead wasn’t known as Zombi in most other countries, Zombi 2 had to be retitled in just about every foreign market. Across the world, this movie is known as Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie: The Dead Walk Among Us, L’Enfer de Zombies, Gli Ultimi Zombi, Woodoo, Sanguella, Nightmare Island, and The Island of the Living Dead.
Dardano Sacchetti wrote the script to serve as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead (or at least the version of Dawn of the Dead that Suspiria director Dario Argento cut together for the European market), but Zombie Flesh Eaters is very much its own beast. It’s as much a sequel to Dawn of the Dead as Dawn of the Dead is to its own official predecessor, Night of the Living Dead. It revolves around new characters in a new location dealing with the same zombie apocalypse. If anything, it’s more of a spiritual successor to Romero’s genre-defining masterpiece.
Set in a world that’s already in the throes of a zombie apocalypse – specifically on a Caribbean island where a voodoo curse is bringing the dead back to life – Zombie Flesh Eaters is arguably a better threequel for Romero’s Dead trilogy than Romero’s own Day of the Dead.
Wildly Controversial Upon Release
When it was first released in 1979, Zombie Flesh Eaters was met with widespread controversy – especially in the UK, where it was labeled a “video nasty” for its graphic content. The film was dismissed by contemporary critics as a schlocky B-movie, but it’s since been reappraised as a cult classic and a misunderstood horror gem.
Fulci is one of the most daring filmmakers to ever grace horror cinema. The director worked in all kinds of genres over the course of his nearly half-a-century-long career, including comedies and spaghetti westerns, but he was always most renowned for his horror movies. Thanks to his zombie-infested gems like The Beyond and giallo classics like The New York Ripper and Murder Rock, Fulci shared the nickname “The Godfather of Gore” with fellow director Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Zombie Flesh Eaters isn’t Fulci’s finest film, but it is one of his zaniest and most inventive efforts (which is a saying a lot, considering one of his other zombie movies has a dozen tarantulas crawling out from the shadows to chew a guy’s face off). The aforementioned eye-gouging scene is particularly gruesome. It’s even more disgusting and drawn-out than John Wick shoving a henchman’s face eye-first into his knife.
The film’s spooky score was provided by frequent Fulci collaborator Fabio Frizzi, one of the greatest horror composers of all time. Along with Goblin, Frizzi is one of the renowned zombie film scorers whose music was pastiched into Shaun of the Dead by Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford. The overwhelming wall-of-sound rhythm he draped over the gory action of Zombie Flesh Eaters was inspired by the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” Frizzi even mixed in some Caribbean musical stylings to juxtapose the on-screen horrors with the sounds of the tropical paradise in which they take place.
The Movie’s Most Infamous Scene
As unnerving as the eye-gouging scene is, the most infamous moment in Zombie Flesh Eaters is, without a doubt, when a zombie wrestles with a shark. Homaged on Jay Baruchel’s t-shirt in This is the End, this scene manages to pack every hallmark of exploitation cinema into one sequence: gore, nudity, and pure B-movie absurdity.
In this set-piece, which can only be described as “Russ Meyer’s Dawn of the Dead meets Jaws,” a topless scuba diver encounters a hungry great white shark in the middle of the ocean, then gets attacked by a zombified human corpse on the seabed. The diver escapes when the zombie tries to take a bite out of the shark and has its arm ripped off. Like the finale of Jurassic Park with the T. rex and the velociraptors, this sequence sees two relentless monsters canceling each other out as they give up their pursuit to fight each other long enough for the protagonist to escape.
This sequence wasn’t actually shot by Fulci himself. It was conceived and staged by Ugo Tucci, then filmed by Giannetto de Rossi without Fulci’s approval. The shoot took place in Isla Mujeres and the zombie was played by a local shark trainer.
It’s Not The Finest Zombie Movie – But Might Be The Wildest
Zombie Flesh Eaters isn’t the finest zombie movie out there by a long shot. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, the Romero double whammy that defined the genre’s tropes, set a very high bar. 28 Days Later has a refreshing dose of gritty realism, while Train to Busan uses the carriages of the train to explore the class divide.
Even Shaun of the Dead, which is primarily a spoof, has more than enough memorable characters, unexpected plot turns, and fiercely effective jump scares to qualify as one of the greatest entries in the genre it lampoons. With all this competition, Zombie Flesh Eaters doesn’t even scrape the genre’s top 10. But, with its popped eyeballs and shark wrestling, it just might be the wildest zombie movie ever made.