
            New Orleans, Louisiana, 1927. An enraged posse of men descend on the isolated Seven Doors Hotel deep in the swamps. They grab an artist called Schweik (Antoine Saint John), who is cloistered there. Accusing him of being a warlock, Schweik is dragged down to the cellar where he is savagely beaten with heavy chains, tortured with quicklime acid, and crucified with his wrists nailed to a cellar wall, despite his dire warnings of evil to be unleashed.New Orleans, 1981. Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) is a young woman who arrives from New York City to claim the hotel as her inheritance. No sooner has architect friend Marin Avery (Michele Mirabella) begins to show her around the property, strange incidents begin to happen. A painter (Anthony Flees) falls off his rig and is horribly injured, coughing up blood and babbling about, "the eyes, the eyes." Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck) arrives to take the injured man to the hospital, and offers Liza some sympathy. Next, a plumber, named Joe, attempts to repair a major leak in the flooded cellar. However, he is murdered by a presence that emerged from behind a slim-caked wall. The atmosphere at the hotel is further chilled by the creepy-looking servants, Arthur (Giampaolo Saccarola) and Martha (Veronica Lazar), who apparently come with the hotel. Martha discovers Joe's dead body in the cellar, and another much older cadaver lying in a pool of dirty water nearby. It is apparently that of Schweik, the artist.Driving down the 14-mile causeway to New Orleans, Liza encounters a strange blind woman, standing in the middle of the desolate highway. The blind woman introduces herself as Emily (Sarah Keller), and tells Liza that she has been waiting for her, although her eyes are occluded with cataracts. Liza drives Emily over to her opulently furnished house in New Orleans. Liza is warned by Emily to leave the hotel while she still can. Meanwhile at the hospital morgue, Dr. John McCabe is performing the autopsy on Joe the plumber while his assistant Harris (Al Cliver) wants to install an EMG machine to the corpse of Schweik. John laughs it off and leaves for lunch, while Harris remains behind to install the EMG machine. After Harris leaves for a call, the EMG machine begins pulsing with activity. A little later, Joe's wife Mary-Anne (Laura De Marchi) arrives with her daughter Jill (Maria Pia Marsale) to dress up her husband's corpse for the funeral, when she is killed in a horrific way by scalded with acid. Jill is then menaced by the re-animated cadaver of Schweik.Liza meets with John McCabe in a downtown bar to discuss her misgivings and anxieties. He expresses puzzlement when Lisa complains about he ineptitude of her weird servants. John claims to have never heard of them before despite knowing everyone in the area. Then a phone call from the bar arrives from Harris who informs John that Mary-Anne's body was found in the morgue, while Jill was found huddled in a corner frightened and unable to speak. After Joe and Mary-Anne's funeral, Emily appears again to Liza that evening at the hotel. Emily tells Liza about the warlock Schweik, who stayed in Room 36 of the hotel and about the supernatural underworld that the hotel conceals. The hotel was built over one of the Seven Gates of Hell, and Schweik has been the Guardian. Emily is about to reveal more when her hands wander over to a canvas depicting a desolate vision of lost souls in a terrible and arid landscape. Suddenly afraid, Emily says that the painting was painted by Schweik before he died, and she runs out of the hotel parlor into the night. But Liza notices a disquieting fact about her sudden departure: Emily made no footfalls on the bare wooden boards as she ran, and neither did her seeing-eye dog.The next day, Liza ventures nervously into Room 36, a dingy phantasmal of sheet-covered furniture and shafts of dusty light. She finds an ancient book, whose weirdly flesh-like cover bears the single word: Eibon. The closet breaths a cold hind of dark stygian realms from behind moth-eaten clothes. Liza tries to shrug off her fears and strides into the bathroom, only to be confronted with Schweiks rotting corpse nailed to the bathroom wall. She runs screaming from the discovery into the arms of the visiting John McCabe. The two of them return to the cursed room, but find nothing. Two nails are all that remain of Liza's nightmare vision. When Liza says she must have been over stimulated by Emily's tale, John queries her story by saying that there is no blind woman living at the house she described.Liza goes for a walk around New Orleans with Martin Avery, and they happen upon a old antiquarian bookshop. Just for a second, Lisa spies a copy of the book Eibon in the window. But when she runs into the shop, the book is gone. The weird old bookseller tells her that he never heard of a book by that name. Back at the hotel, Arthur is continuing his efforts to re-seal the hole in the cellar wall that Joe unwisely breached when he gets killed off-screen by unseen ghouls.Martin goes on alone to visit a local library in search of the original blueprints to the hotel. The strange librarian (director Lucio Fulci) leaves him alone as he goes out to lunch. Just when Martin discovers a clue in the Seven Doors Hotel blueprints, a bolt of lighting from the unseen forces of darkness knocks him off a high ladder to the floor, breaking his neck. Then, a horde of supernatural tarantulas appear and finish off the paralyzed Martin in a very gory way by eating his face off. Meanwhile, John investigates the house where Liza said she met Emily. But he discovers only a blasted, decaying shell of a house, empty of clues, except for one rotting item on the floor: the book of Eibon.At the hotel, Martha is continuing her lackluster efforts to clean up the hotel, and drain a scum-filled bathtub in Room 36. As the dirty water receds, the living coprse of Joe the plummer rises from the foul fluid. He impals the appalled housemaid through the back of her head on one of the nails jutting from the wall.Meanwhile, the semi-sinister Emily returns to her house which magically appears with all the posh furniture that was seen during Liza's visit. But then she is visited by the motionless, but menacing, figures of the recently dead; Arthur, Joe, Mary-Anne, and Schweik. Despite her pathetic pleas to be allowed to stay in the land of the living she is called back to Hell for she apparently served her purpose. Emily orders her guide-dog, Dickie, into action who attacks the rotting cadaver of Schweik. For a while, it seems that Emily's dog valiant efforts might save her. But with a mesmerizing stare from Schweik to the dog, and in a moment of devilish duplicity, Dickie turns on Emily herself, ripping out her throat in a welter of blood and gore.Back at the Seven Doors Hotel, Liza is suffering a supernatural assault during a visit to the cellar. John arrives from the hospital just in time to save her, but then accuses Liza of being in league with the forces of darkness. Just as John reveals from his research of the book of Eibon which he brought with him, that the hotel is one of the seven gateways to hell, a sudden storm erupts in the confides of the flooded cellar. As they flee to John's car and drive away, the hotel is seen lurking with the undead. The gates of hell have finally been opened.Driving around New Orleans, they notice that there is nobody in the streets. They arrive at the hospital where John gets a gun from his desk drawer, but discover that to their dismay that the nightmare has broken out there too. They run into a group of zombies that stagger through the corridors, and the phone lines are all cut. There are no bodies anywhere, yet no one seems to have survived the marauding undead. When John and Liza are separated, John finds his colleague Harris hiding in a storage room. John and Harris brief exchange of words ends when Harris is killed by flying glass by a magically shattered window, which impales him to a wall.Reunited, John and Liza find the exits blocked by groups of zombies. Corralled into the morgue, they find Jill there, and a fresh horde of reviving corpses. John begins shooting the zombies in the head to prevent them from reviving. Amidst the turmoil, Jill suddenly attacks Liza, her eyes cataracted with the stigma of the living dead. Jill is now an agent for the forces of darkness, as Emily had been. John whirls around and, without hesitating, blasts the young girl's face off with one bullet. A final appearance from the spectacularly rotting corpse of Schweik, drives the terrified couple down a spiral staircase into what should be the hospital basement. But to their utter bewilderment, they find themselves back in the cellar of the Seven Doors Hotel. Following a bright light emanating from a cloud of smoke, they walk through the large hole in the wall, and into a landscape of death depicted the warlock's painting; each horizon offering the same view of dead bodies scattered everywhere among the arid landscape. The porthole behind them closes, and there is no escape! John and Liza are trapped in the Beyond.... apparently for all eternity.Quote from the book of Eibon: "And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein may be explored."
    

The Beyond


            In New York City, during a séance held in the apartment of medium Theresa, Mary Woodhouse (Catronia MacColl) experiences a traumatic vision of a priest, Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine), hanging himself from a tree branch in the cemetery of a remote village called Dunwich. When the images overwhelm her, Mary breaks the circle, goes into convolutions, and falls to the floor as if dead. The police, led by Sergeant Clay, interrogate Theresa, but fail to heed her warnings of an imminent evil. Outside the apartment building, Peter Bell (Chirstopher George), a local journalist, tries to gain entry to the premises but is turned away. The following day, Mary is buried in a local cemetery on Long Island overlooking Manhattan and Peter visits her grave site. The gravediggers (Perry Pirkanen and Michael Gaunt) leave Mary's half-covered coffin at the end of their work shift and leave. Soon, Peter hears muffled screams as he reluctantly leaves the graveyard. Using a pickaxe, he frees the screaming woman from her premature burial, but with the pickaxe coming dangerously close to her head as it smashes through the casket lid.Peter and Mary visit Theresa where she warns them that according to the ancient book of Enoch, the events Mary has witnessed in her visions presage the euroption of the living dead into our world. The death of Father Thomas, a marked priest, has somehow opened a door through which the living dead can enter and the invasion will commence on All Saints Day, just a few days away.In Dunwich, Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), a lonely youth with a bad reputation, wonders into a desolate, empty house. He finds a rubber doll which inflates itself. But before he can use it, the sight of a rotting babys corpse scares him away. At Junie's Lounge, the barman discusses recent events with two local men, Mr. Ross (Venantino Venanini) and Mike. Strange events have been occurring the last few days, and Mr. Ross is inclined to blame Bob. When a mirror shatters and the wall cracks inexplicably, the men leave, despite the bartender's offer of free drinks. Across town, Gerry (Carlo De Mejo), a psychiatrist, is in consultation with Sandra (Janet Agren), a neurotic patient, when Emily Robbins (Antonella Interlenghi), his 19-year-old girlfriend and personal assistant, arrives. She tells Gerry that she's on her way to meet Bob, whom she has been trying to help. After Emily leaves, Sandras pet cat, whom she has been holding through her session, suddenly scratches her badly on her hand, and huddles in a corner. That evening, Emily visits Bob at a disused garage, but unearthly groans scare him away. Emily is left alone when she faces the supernatural apparition of Father Thomas who smothers her with a maggott-covered hand.A short distance away, Rose Kelvin (Daniela Doria) and Tommy Fisher (Michele Soavi), a teenage couple, are making out in Tommys jeep near the vicinity when they too face the ghostly image of Father Thomas outside the jeep. With a powerful, mesmerizing stare, Father Thomas makes Rose's eyeballs bleed and she meets a ghastly fate by vomiting her entire guts out while Tommy watches, and he is immediately killed by getting his head ripped open by an unseen ghoul. The next morning, there is no sign of Rose or Tommy, while Emily's body is found at the garage. The local pathologist Dr. Joe Thompson (director Lucio Fulci), cannot make a clear assumption to how Emily died except from a heart attack caused by shear fright. After Dr. Thompson leaves the scene, Sheriff Russell finds a small puddle of black, worm-infested fluid nearby. Mr. Robbins tells the sheriff and Gerry of his suspicious about Bob. Meanwhile, Peter and Mary leave New York and embark upon their search for the town of Dunwich, as seen in Mary's vision.As All Saints Day approaches, the people of Dunwich suffer further ghostly visitation in advance of the Hellish outpouring. That evening, Bob sees Father Thomas hanging in the deserted house he frequents. At the local morgue, a mortician is bitten on his hand by the cadaver of a old women, called Jane Holden, whilst trying to steal her jewelry. The apparition of the dead Emily pays a nocturnal visit to her little brother John-John (Luca Paisner). At Sandra's house, the corpse of Mrs. Holden appears without explination on her kitchen floor. Sandra calls Gerry for help, and he tries to cling onto the possibility of a rational explination. But as soon as Gerry arrives, the body has disappeared as mysterious as it appeared. Investing noises upstairs in Sandra's house, the doctor and patient witness broken glass fly from a shattered window into the wall opposite. The wall bleeds before their eyes, forcing them to flee the house. Meanwhile, Bob has taken refuge at the Ross household in the garage. When Mr. Ross's teenage daughter finds him and tries to comfort him after he tries to explain whats going on outside, the rabid patriarch enters, and mistakenly assuming that Bob is trying to seduce his daughter. The vicious Mr. Ross kills Bob in a horrific way by impaling his head on a drilling lathe.The following morning, Peter and Mary follow a bland village priest's directions to the shunned village of Dunwich. Arriving at the graveyard, they begin searching for Father Thomas' tomb. Gerry and Sandra also arrive after following a trail there, and the two couples exchange stories about their recent events. They begin to become acquainted at Gerry's office when a sudden violent storm blasts through the window, showering the four with maggots. When it's over, Gerry receives a distressing phone call from John-John Robbins. The little boy says that his dead sister has returned from the grave during the night and killed his parents. The four rush over the Robbins' house and find that John-John's story is true. Sandra offers to take the boy to her apartment while, Peter, Mary, and Gerry try to find the sheriff. Upon arriving at the entrance to Sandra's apartment building, she is killed by the malevolent zombie/ghost of Emily, who rips Sandra's scalp off. John-John runs through the fog-shrounded streets of the town, evading more zombies of the townspeople, when he is saved by Gerry who hands the boy over to the police.At Junie's Lounge, Mr. Ross, Mike, and the barman are attacked and finally killed by the marauding ghouls as a state-of-emergency is declared over the radio. Mary, Peter, and Gerry arrive back at the graveyard as All Saints Day begins. They decent into Father Thomas' family tomb, discovering an underground grotto of skeletal remains and cobwebbed putrescenes. Sandra appears as a zombie, and kills Peter by ripping his brains out. The zombie Sandra is then immobilized by Gerry who impails her to a cave wall with a pitchfork to her chest. Mary and Gerry are forced to go on until they reach a weired, stained-glass chamber coated in musk and dust. There, they face Father Thomas who has re-entered corporeal existence with his supernatural powers intact. Mary and Gerry look on as all of the dead begin to emerge from their tombs and surround them. Father Thomas once again begins to use his powerful and mesmerizing stare making Mary's eyeballs bleed. Before his stare can turn Mary inside out, Gerry grabs a large, rotting, wooden cross and disembowels Father Thomas. The evil priest's decayed guts are punctured, and he and the massing zombies burst into flames and return to dust. The Gate of Hell have apparently been closed. Mary and Gerry struggle from the subterranean catacombs of the night and emerge back out of Father Thomas' tomb into the graveyard at morning, to see John-John running excitedly towards them. As he approaches, Mary and Gerry's joy turns to disquietude, and then to fear, until the movie suddenly ends as ambiguously as it began... with Mary's scream.
    

City of the Living Dead


            A young woman (Daniela Doria) in an old abandoned house is looking for her boyfriend Steven who has taken her there for sex. The young woman discovers her boyfriend's horribly mutilated dead body when she gets stabbed through the back of her head with a sharp kitchen knife by an unseen person. The killer drags the woman's body through a door leading to the cellar.New York City, several months later. A young boy named Bob (Giovanni Frezzi), and his parents Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) are preparing to move to a new house in New England just outside Boston previous occupied by Normans ex-colleague, Dr. Peterson, who recently murdered his mistress before committing suicide. The Boyles are to spend six months at the house, whilst Norman finishes his research project of old houses at the request of his employer Professor Muller (director Lucio Fulci). As his mother packs, Bob looks at the photograph of a sinister-looking old house, hanging on the Boyles wall. In it, he sees a young girl warning him to stay away.In New Whitby, Boston, Bob waits in his parents car while they pick up their house keys at the estate office. He makes further contact with the girl in the photo, who this time appears across the street. Despite the distance between them, Bob and the girl (Silvia Collatina), who introduces herself as Mae, can hear each other without opening the car windows. Mae again warns Bob to stay away. In the real estate office, the friendly Mrs. Gittelson (Dagmar Lassander) is annoyed with her laconic colleague Harold, who hands the couple "the Freudstein keyes." "It's Oak Mansion, Harold," she insists. She seems to recognize Dr. Boyle and asks him if hes been to New Whitby before. Norman says that he hasn't. Accompanying the family to Oak Mansion, Mrs. Gittelson promises to arrange for a babysitter to drop by. Lucy is struck the by the resemblance between the house in the photograph and their new home. But Norman seems strangely disinterested.Inside, the old house is spacious, but in a poor state of repair. They notice in the kitchen that the cellar door is locked and nailed shut. As they start unpacking, a strange young woman arrives and introduces herself as Anne the babysitter (Ania Pieroni). That night, Norman hears noises and on rising to investigate, finds Anne unblocking the cellar door. The next day, Norman goes to the local library to look over Dr. Petersons materials. Mr. Wheatley the librarian (Carlo De Mejo) also seems to recognize him and asks if he's been to the town before. Norman again replies that he has not. The assistant librarian Daniel Douglas (Giampaolo Saccarola) informs Norman that Dr. Peterson has conducted private research at the old house. Hed been studying records of disappearances in the area over the last several years as well as medical reports and death certificates, none of which has any relevance to his official studies.In the wild undergrowth around the house, Mae shows Bob a tombstone bearing the name of Mary Freudstein and says that the woman is not really dead. Indoors, Lucy finds a tombstone set into the floor. It bears the name Jacob Tess Freudstein. Scared and confused by her discovery, she hears noises emanating from all over the house and breaks down screaming. When Norman returns home, he reassures his distraught wife that its quite normal for some old houses in the region to have indoor tombs, because of the hard wintery ground. Producing a set of keys and a flashlight, Norman opens the cellar door and proceeds to walk down the stairs only be attacked by a large bat, which sinks its teeth into his hand and proves incredibly hard to get off. Norman stabs at its loasome pulpy body over and over in which the things oozes globs of blood before dropping dead to the kitchen floor. Now completely spooked, the family drives down to the estate officce where they demand to be rehoused. Their demands are met with exaggerated yawns from Harold. They are told they will have to wait just a few more days before they can move somewhere else. "That Freudstein place" he intones as they leave.The next day while the Boyles are at the hospital to look over Norman's injury caused by the bat, Mrs. Gittelson arrives at the house to tell the family that a property has been found for them. When no one answers her knock, she lets herself in. When she casually stands on the Freudstein tombstone, it cracks apart, grinding her ankle. As she struggles to free herself, an apparently cadaverous figure (unseen except for a normal left arm and a rotting right forearm) emerges from the cellar and attacks her with a fireplace poker, stabbing her repeatedly in the neck. Mrs. Gittelson bleeds to death when blood jets from her multiple wounds and she's dragged to the cellar.The next morning, Lucy finds Anne scrubbing up a huge bloodstain on the kitchen floor leading to the closed cellar door. When asked what she is doing, Anne is noncommittal and eludes Lucy's attempts to talk. At a local coffee shop in town, Norman tells Lucy that he's discovered that the mysterious Dr. Freudstein was a turn-of-the-century surgeon with a penchant for illegal experiments. Norman tells Lucy that he will be traveling back to New York for more research on Dr. Freudstein, telling Lucy that he will be away until well after nightfall. On the way, Norman drops by the library and finds a cassette recording of Dr. Peterson, whos deranged ramblings explain the horrific circumstantial which drove him to suicide. He was not the killer of his mistress and children, but the ghoulish Dr. Fredustein was.Back at the house, Anne goes down into the cellar looking for Bob, when she is attacked and decapitated by the still-unseen Dr. Freudstein. Bob goes down to investigate, when he sees Anne's severed head come rolling down the metal stairs and runs back screaming, just in time to avoid being shut in with the monstrous denizen. Lucy at first refuses to believe the frantic Bob's wild tale about Anne being killed. However, Lucy cannot find any trace of Anne anywhere in the house. That evening, after his mother has gone to bed, Bob returns to the cellar with a flashlight to look for Anne. The door behind him slams shut, and glowing eyes peer at him from the darkness.Lucy is woken up by Bob's frenzied shrieks for help, and she tries to open the cellar door. The key snaps. Lucy tries using a knife as jimmy, but it too snaps. As Lucy panics, Norman arrives back and attacks the cellar door with an axe. On the other side, the rotting hands of Dr. Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava) appear and hold Bob's head to the wooden panels. Normans axe blows come dangerously close to Bob's head, missing his son by a fraction of an inch. One blow chops off the monster's left hand, and he staggers away in pain from the door, dragging the unconscious Bob with him. At last, the cellar reveals its secrets opening up in full view to reveal a charnel house of mutilated bodies, its shadowy recesses dotted with surgical equipment and a gore-streaked pathology slab. The horribly deformed Dr. Freudstein is shown as a rotting living corpse with shrunken in eyes, and rotting flesh. As the couple ventures into the cellar to rescue their son, Norman breathlessly fills Lucy in on the details of his find. The 150-year-old Freudstein has apparently discovered a way of keeping himself alive by using the hacked up body parts of his victims to regenerate his blood cells. Norman attempts to attack Freudstein, but the revolting-looking ghoul twists the axe from Norman's grip. Norman then grabs a knife off the surgical tray and rams it into Freudstein's gut releasing a sickening stew of maggots and corrupted blood. Although wounded, the monstrous Freudstein continues to attack. Lucy and Bob watch in horror as Freudstein picks up Norman and literally ripps his throat out with his one rotting hand. Lucy and Bob spot a metal ladder in the corner of the basement which leads up to the cracked tombstone in the living room floor. With the ghastly monster standing between them and the cellar door, their only hope is to climb up the metal ladder and try to push apart the two stone segments to escape. Lucy strains desperately to shift the stone, but her ankle is grabbed by the perusing Dr. Freudstein. As Bob clings to the topmost rung, he sees his mother pulled down, her head battered by each metal step down. Freudstein finishes off Lucy by ramming her head into the concrete cellar floor, splattering it like a melon. As Freudstein advances up the metal latter to the helpless Bob, the little boy strains to escape by forcing his head through the jagged aperture. At the last minute, as Freudstein clutches the boy's ankle, Bob is yanked up and out of reach by unseen hands to find Mae standing before him. But with Mae is the 19th Century figure of her mother, Mary Freudstein (Teresa Rossi Passante), who gently urges them to leave for other people will no doubt drop in for her husband's continuing research for eternal life. Mrs. Freudstein leads Mae and Bob away from the house and down the wintery grove into a netherworld of ghosts and sadness.Quote from Henry James: "No one will ever know whether children are monsters, or monsters are children."
    

The House by the Cemetery


            
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Catriona MacColl

Catriona MacColl Movies or Tv Shows (upto Dec 2024) - Watch Online

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