All events start at 19:00, for 19:15, please do not be late.

Presented by Matthew Rogerson

Italian director Lucio Fulci garnered an international cult following for his horror and giallo films. He is most well-known for his zombie horror cycle of the late 1970s-early 1980s, films that were censored and censured by moral guardians around the world and prosecuted in the UK during the ‘Video Nasties’ controversy. There is, however, much more to Fulci. Beyond the gore and cruelty lies an ongoing and complex commentary on the Roman Catholic faith, including a number of battles fought against the Italian Church and State.

This lecture focuses on the journey of Fulci the Apostate; the conscious uncoupling of a man from his Church and his Faith, as manifested across his filmography. The director weaved a faith-based narrative throughout his four decade career, from his earliest credits as screenwriter and assistant director in the 1950s to his very final films as director in the 1990s. Analysis of the tenets and iconography of Fulci’s Roman Catholic faith across key films in his filmography will plot an apostatic journey through his art in the vein of many celebrated Italian artists that went before him, from Dante Alighieri to Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Exploration of Fulci’s upbringing and development will reveal a man of complex contradictions: a tortured Catholic and heretical Marxist who, despite going on to work in what are considered the ‘low’ genres, was trained by some of the nation’s most celebrated directors (including Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini and Stefano ‘Steno’ Vanzina) and developed a mastery of both the mechanics of filmmaking and the importance of sub-textual messaging that few of his genre peers could match.

From there, the lecture explores the socio-political and the anti-Catholic themes across his key works, including: student documentaries and early screenwriting assignments for the likes of Steno and Camillo Mastrocinque; his comedies, which gently poked fun at the Italian establishment and patriarchal institutions; his period as a self-styled ‘genre terrorist’, marked by historical dramas, satires, spaghetti westerns and gialli that often attacked the Church and State directly and with fury (and repeatedly got him into trouble with both, including several court appearances, and secret screenings of his films in the bowels of the Vatican that led to attempts to censor, censure, and outright ban them); his move into horror, that saw his narratives develop from attacks on the Church to meditations on faith and the afterlife in the vein of the great Dante.

This will not give you access to any online events. You will require a different ticket for that. These events are in-person only, and are not live streamed - sorry.