Celluloid Sounds - Zombi 2 (1979)

This edition of the ever popular and world famous Celluloid Sounds will investigate the musical contribution of Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Cascio to Lucio Fulci’s gore soaked zombie opus Zombie 2 (aka too many different names to list). For pure entertainment I don’t think Fulci ever eclipsed this film, and it remains a firm favourite of mine. Intellectually I find myself gravitating to more nuanced and layered productions such as Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) or A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), but for sheer enjoyment then look no further than this wonderful film. Crucially it lacks the dream like and hallucinatory feel of his later horror films, and is subsequently able to tell its story with efficiency and economy. I often find that adjectives such as ‘dream like’ or ‘hallucinatory’ are normally used in Fulci’s cinema to explain away the terrible and shoddy lack of continuity, and to ultimately forgive incompetently plotted screenplays.



Zombi 2 is wonderfully free of such barriers, and it is also wonderfully free of the adolescent social commentary that so blighted George A. Romero’s infantile zombie pictures. Like the best horror films the primal terrors are created through music. Frizzi had contributed musical offerings (along with his frequent collaborators Franco Bixio and Vince Tempera) to several earlier Fulci productions, including Four of the Apocalypse (1975), Seven Black Notes (1977) and Silver Saddle (1978). Although Cascio gets a credit on Zombi 2 I’m not certain as to the extent of his contribution. I shall open this out to my tremendously knowledgeable readership, and hopefully someone can leave a comment telling us more about this man. Easily the most successful composition to grace the film is the eerie primal shuffle of the main title theme. The slow and plodding nature of this piece resonates with the laborious progress of resurrected corpses. It was clearly impressive enough to function not only as the title theme, but as a leitmotif whenever the zombie hordes appear.

One of the stylistic elements that binds a great number of the films outlawed in the United Kingdom as ‘Video Nasties’ is their use of electronic music. Undoubtedly this was partly attributable to the low budget nature of the production. But the use of synthetic instrumentation in so many of these films was a serendipitous side effect of a forced economy, and the results were often more impressive than the films themselves. The stark and clinical sounds only added to a sense of dislocation and alienation; a sense of the unnatural invading the natural world. One of the pleasures of Zombi 2 is its unabashed embracement of the voodoo culture upon which the myths of the zombie were born. This had become increasingly unpopular in the post 1968 Night of the Living Dead conception of the zombie. But Fulci and his collaborators were seemingly uninterested in using the zombie motif as an allegorical or metaphorical device. This is represented in musical terms by the deft combination of electronica and tribal drums.