I’m not ashamed to admit that as a budding horror fan, my first obsession— my first love— was zombie flicks.
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) ignited a passion within me for the type of social commentary that horror had to offer, that zombie films, when done right, excelled at, and I never looked back. Still, at that time, there were only three offerings from Mr. Romero and once I had exhausted those entries, I was hungry for more flesh.. eating cinema, that is.
I had done some research, read the names of the classic zombie fare that one is supposed to watch if they consider themselves a fan (according to the internet, anyway). I perused titles online such as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974) and Braindead (1992) but one title in particular caught my eye. The poster image was simply a decaying face, encased in moss and dirt, its left eye brimming with maggots and its right a vacuous hole. Its partially slack-jawed maw revealed a slanting row of jagged, misshapen teeth. The whole visage hovered above the glowing, red lettered title:
ZOMBIE (1979).
At that time, I had not seen a single Italian horror outing. I was unfamiliar with the name Lucio Fulci. Hell, I didn’t even know that the movie was an unofficial sequel to the George A. Romero classic Dawn of the Dead (1978) that had played such a key role in inspiring me to seek out more zombie films in the first place.
Staring at that cover, all I could think was: I have to see this thing.
I picked up a copy and, together with a few friends, decided to make a night of it. We were armed with nothing but our knowledge of George A. Romero and the handful of American horror movies we’d managed to watch over the prior several months.
Still, what was sticking with me, driving me to figure out what else this Lucio Fulci guy had made so that I could watch it as soon as was humanly possible, was the effects work. The gruesomeness, the disturbingly surreal and yet all-too-real execution of the mayhem took root in my brain, creating a new pocket of obsession. Gore was ever-present in the zombie sub-genre, but Lucio Fulci’s masterpiece took it to a whole new level.
My research led me to Dardano Sacchetti‘s original script (something more akin to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau than the film we ended up with) and the process of its adaptation into a pseudo-sequel to Dario Argento’s re-edited and re-scored version of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead that was released in Europe as Zombi. Add to that the visionary eye of Lucio Fulci and what appears onscreen is a fever-dream of violence and practical magic, creating a zombie feature that feels vast, visceral and vicious.
The film is the result of a cavalcade of creatives, vying together to create something that began as a rip-off to cash in on the success of Dawn of the Dead and became something else. The script went through many phases and even Lucio Fulci himself didn’t see eye to eye with the producer’s on what should or should not comprise the body of the film.
A great many scenes spring to mind when attempting to summarize the film by way of a handful of frames, but it’s when a member of the undead emerges below the sea to take on a shark that I knew I was watching something truly new. Exciting. Dangerous. A feeling that only comes from raw, unexpected filmmaking, unafraid to challenge the audience, placing them into an emotion as uncomfortable as what they’re witnessing onscreen… and as exciting.
The words on the page depict a similar kinetic energy, however with a detached precision that allows for filmmaker interpretation. The ideas are outlandish and grand, enabling creative discovery, allowing for something bold, terrifying and fresh.
THE SCENE
Susan swims serenely beneath water. A shark approaches undetected, narrowly missing Susan who realizes the danger with seconds to spare. She swims to the surface, calling for help. Brian and the others on the ship spot the shark. Brian retrieves his gun and fires several shots, missing. The shark rams the boat. Susan hides in the shadow of nearby coral when a decaying hand comes down on her shoulder. She struggles with the zombie, only breaking free after tearing off a piece of coral and rubbing it in the creature’s face. The shark and the zombie meet, attacking one another. The zombie takes several bites out of the shark and the shark tears into the zombie’s arm. Both leave the other wounded.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
The sequence opens with Susan swimming underwater, snapping photographs. It’s presented as a glamour shot, a medium wide showcasing the mostly naked woman in clear, calming waters.
The sleek, silvery outline of shark suddenly swims into view behind Susan.
The screenplay doesn’t bury the lead, opening with frightening imagery of the shark’s stealthy approach. The film cuts back and forth between Susan and the shark, portraying a predatory dance between animal and human that is present even in an idyllic environment such as this. Still, even as it circles her, according the screenplay: She doesn’t see it.
When she does notice, it’s with a slight glance, as if she were merely reacting to a change of tide, an innate sensation to look. As the screenplay then points out, she senses the danger. Again, the film cuts back and forth between Susan and the shark in a series of progressively more and more intimate medium shots. Underwater, Sarah has no ability to verbalize her plight and the silent nature of her desperate flight from the shark is made all the more eerie as a result.
The screenplay makes a point to describe her emotional state, allowing the reader insight into her actions:
Terrified, her first instinct is to swim to the surface. But cold logic forces her to remain motionless and wait. Sharks are more likely to attack a swimmer during emersion, going for the legs.
This is information that the film can’t possibly provide the viewer, however incredibly important to understanding Susan’s actions. After several uncomfortable frames depicting the shark at one end of the frame and Susan at the other, it disappears from view.
As soon as it starts to swim away, Susan heads for the surface.
Susan pops up above the water some distance away from the boat. Her arms flail as she shouts for help. The script notes: The three on the boat turn to look. The film shows the three on the boat, employing a snap zoom on Brian amidst Susan’s screams. His expression drops and the film cuts to the shadow of the shark from above, gliding through the water toward the boat. The visuals allow the scene to feel raw and intense, emotional and dangerous.
The quick cuts continue to sustain the dramatic tension of the scene. Brian grabs the gun. Susan decides to submerge herself once more. The shark is coming toward the boat.
Some dialogue is trimmed here from the original script, simplified to one or two word bursts that speak to the immediate, visceral nature of what’s happening. Brian fires at the shark. The film holds on the water as the bullets send violent splash after splash into the air, not one connecting with the beast barreling toward the boat. The last shot we see is from the shark’s POV as it connects with their vessel.
The shark evidently passes beneath the keel because the boat shudders so violently that both men are knocked off their feet.
The film cuts back to the shark, now from a low angle, making the thing seem more threatening, frightening and monstrous than before. The film holds directly to the script, depicting Susan as she looks for a hiding place in the opening of a coral cluster and tries to slip away. Then, the film cuts to a medium close up from behind Susan’s shoulder:
All of a sudden something touches her. She turns and her eyes widen at the nightmarish sight.
A hand comes into frame, touching Susan’s shoulder as though to alert her that she had stumbled into an occupied hiding spot. More terrifying than the shark is the thing attached to the rotting hand: the face of a corpse, bloated and emotionless.
Emerging from the coral is the corpse of a male Negro, the face devastated by the horror of death.
Again, the screenplay puts forth a conceptual description, evoking a devastation by the hands of death and no small leap of the imagination from the reader. However, the word choice works astoundingly, creating a terrifying realization about the nature of the undead and just how formidable a predator they may be. Perhaps, it would seem, able to best any of nature’s most ferocious creatures.
Once more, a soundless, underwater struggle ensues. The zombie wraps itself around Susan as she attempts to free herself. In the screenplay, Susan frees herself with a kick of her feet but in the film she resourcefully breaks off a piece of coral. 
Vigorously, she rubs the coral in the zombies face, causing the creature to recoil and remove the obstruction from its line of vision. Its reaction is animalistic and reflects an instinctive reaction, even more than its attempt to ensnare Susan to begin with. That’s when the shark comes back into frame.
The whole of the shark and zombie’s exchange occurs within a few sentences of action description in the script, versus the near minute and a half the eventual film featured. The screenplay begins to describe this fight with the sentence:
The fish attacks the corpse, biting off an arm.
While the shark does snare the zombies arm at the end of their encounter, the film opens with a high angle medium-wide shot of the shark gliding over the “corpse”, momentarily blocking the thing from view, allowing for visual dominance. The sequence continues its reliance on quick edits as the zombie grabs on to the shark’s body and wrestles with it, as emotionless as it was when it laid its rotting hand on Susan’s shoulder.
The corpse, however, unexpectedly reacts and with his teeth tears open a wide gash in the shark’s soft white belly.
Continued edits feature the shark as it swims, seemingly attempting to free itself from the zombie’s grip. The zombie then tears at the shark, spilling bright, red blood into the crystal clear water. The zombie lets go and begins to feast on the shark’s flesh. The thing is uninterested in escaping or putting distance between it and the creature it transgressed against, it simply wants to eat.
The shark turns back around and heads for the zombie once more.The zombie is poised, arms outstretched, ready for the shark. A close up of the sharks jaws mash open and shut just before the image cuts to the zombie’s hungry, driven, deadened face; not a human, but a fellow carnivore… looking for its next meal.
The screenplay ends in a simple, reactionary manner, depicting the aftermath of the zombie’s attack.
“The shark’s deadly tail swings this way and that in violent spasms.
The churning water turns red.”
The zombie lunges at the shark once the two are again face to face. The zombie bites into the shark in a medium shot, but the shark bites down on the zombie’s arm. It pulls the the limb from its joint and the deadened skin stretches and snaps, leaking dark blood into the water— a drab color in sharp contrast to the red, vibrant blood which had spilled from the shark only moments before.
The final shot finds the shark swimming off into the sea, leaving the zombie behind, a large portion of its arm dangling in the current. The zombie, however, seems generally unperturbed. As for the shark and the repercussions of being bitten by the living dead… well, let’s just say neither beast is too concerned about the fallout from their exchange, just so long as they don’t go unfed.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“Fulci thought it was perfect,” Dardano Sacchietti recounted in an interview entitled “Deadtime Stories” found on the Blue Underground blu-ray release of Zombie . In the conversation, he described the process of attempting to fulfill the producer’s desire to create a “zombie western”, instead landing on transposing “the roots of an adventure film into a horror setting” by “taking elements from one genre and adding them to another.”
Still, the process of creating something so eccentric and surreal within the world of horror is rarely the result of one individual’s vision, but a mashup of ideas. Zombie itself was intended to capitalize on the success of Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the genesis of one of the film’s most famous moments is no exception.
“Ramón Bravo was an amazing guy who had discovered where the shark sleep near Isla Mujeres in Mexico,” recalled Special Make-up Effects Artist Gianetto De Rossi in the feature “Zombi Italiano” found on the Blue Underground disc mentioned previously. “The hardest part was finding the shark. We stayed there for 2 or 3 days waiting for the shark to take the bait that they had scattered around the boat. On the second or third night the shark bit.”
Both Gianetto De Rossi and Troy Howarth described how the shark was “drugged” and “trained”, while an uncredited Ramón Bravo dressed as the zombie in question, trusting only himself to take on the animal. The end result is what Troy Howarth described as a “mashup of Jaws (1975) and Dawn of the Dead, Italian style.”
“We decided to do this scene to enrich the film a bit.” Gianetto De Rossi concluded.
When I first finished watching George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, I knew I had stumbled onto something special. Something I could be passionate about. Something I could love.
What I didn’t know was that, mere months later, I would be sitting before a scene not depicting bickering siblings as they debated the merits of the culture surrounding death in American society amidst the lumbering dead treading ever nearer, but one showcasing a zombie taking on a shark. The two seem incompatible in many ways, contradictory in their seriousness or lack thereof. But, still, they fit.
Horror is an odd amalgam of ideas, a compilation of competing ideologies that evolves as it passes from one creative to the next. The genre encourages personalized stamps, individual flags staking claim to a new idea or alternate variation of what has come before. In this way it is ever evolving, changing, mutating into something new. It’s a versatility that knows no limits, no bounds— much like the cinema of Lucio Fulci— it is visceral, frightening and, above all, exciting.
Or, in the words of Zombie Co-Producer Fabrizio De Angelis, “Here we are shameless.”
After all, sometimes it’s the lack of shame, that allows us to take the greatest leaps of faith. Letting go of our fear (of putting a silly scene into your zombie flick, for instance) and embracing the impossible.
If any zombie flick does that, it’s this one. And, Romero knock-off or not, I’ll always regard it as one of the best— shame or no shame.
Zombi 2 (1979): Written by Elisa Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti & Directed by Lucio Fulci
){kind=link}