Pupi Avati is one of the most underrated directors of Italian horror, largely due to the fact that he only has a handful of horror movies in his oeuvre, and many of them are difficult to find in the United States. His 1976 film The House With Laughing Windows, which happens to be my favorite giallo after the Fulci / Argento entries, was given a very brief DVD release by Image. Zeder did not fare much better in the U.S., although it at least saw a cut release on VHS under the misleading title Revenge of the Dead during the 1980s. If one were to believe the box, the movie could reasonably be expected to be an Italian zombie bloodbath in the spirit of Zombi 2 or Burial Ground. Avati, however, is not that kind of a director; having worked primarily in the art house realm, his horror movies are unsettling, slow and fraught with paranoid developments, rewarding patient viewers long after those with ADD weaned on MTV-style modern horror will have tuned out.
The story begins in France in 1956, where cops are turning up mangled bodies and attempting to solve the crimes by digging around basements for corpses. Paolo Zeder has discovered a way to defeat death, and to prove his theory, he buries himself in one of his "K Zones," or areas where the natural laws of death don't apply and bodies will resurrect.
We then flash forward to Italy, where a struggling writer everyman Stefano gets a typewriter as a gift from his wife. It doesn't take him long to find information on Zeder's research still imprinted on the ribbon, piquing his curiosity and leading him into a mystery that will open doors which we all know he will regret having opened by the end of the movie. Despite pleas from his wife and warnings from other parties, Stefano's investigations become obsessive; dogged by a shady government society bent on continuing Zeder's research, he discovers a link involving a former priest with a mysteriously empty tomb and an abandoned vacation camp surrounded by electric fences in the Italian countryside.
As in The House With Laughing Windows, Avati uses atmosphere and mystery, telling rather than showing, to build his horror methodically until everything comes to a boil in the final fifteen minutes of film. The ultimate horror is once again concealed in a creepy rural location, and the protagonist exists for little reason other than to move the plot along by uncovering strange secrets. Avati is good at using shadows and desolate locations to convey mystery and unease. Riz Ortolani (Cannibal Holocaust) composed the soundtrack, which sounds like a mix between something Goblin would have done for Romero or Argento and the theme from Psycho.
Unfortunately, Zeder's main drawback is that its events are very similar to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, published the same year that the movie came out. Although the similarities are undoubtedly a coincidence, this movie will attract savvy horror fans who have already seen and / or read King's work, making some of the events in Zeder fairly predictable and drastically reducing the shocks that the movie should be delivering.
Is this movie worth your $2?:
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