Written by Matt Rogerson
The following article features exclusive excerpts from the book ‘The Vatican Versus Horror Movies’, written by Matt Rogerson and published by McFarland & Company. The book can be pre-ordered now from Amazon, Blackwells, Barnes & Noble and all good online booksellers, or direct from the publisher. It will be published in January 2025.
The Vatican’s subsequent activities in its self-designated role as shepherd to the cinematic medium have included: the publication of a number of prohibitive decrees about film in general; establishing the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (CCC), its own censorship organisation designed to monitor the domestic industry from pre-production to exhibition; funding a film production company, Orbis Films, and planning a series of cine-catechisms (of which only one would actually be made, Mario Soldati’s 1945 short film Chi è Dio?)3 intended to rival the country’s neorealism movement; lending its backing to the conservative US Christian pressure group The League of Decency (which battled vociferously and effectively in the US to establish the infamous Hays Code); perhaps most importantly, the publication of the Segnalazioni Cinematografiche.
A fortnightly pamphlet which passed Catholic moral judgement on every film released, the Segnalazioni Cinematografiche was first published in 1934, and has continued ever since, with two collected editions also produced each year. Each film review is made up of three sections: basic information about the film, including cast and crew; an aesthetic review of the film, not much more than a summary of the plot; the Church’s pastoral verdict. It was the verdicts, usually long and effusive in the case of a film the Vatican had no moral objection to, or a few damning words for films which the Holy See considered obscenities, which became the Vatican’s greatest weapon against transgressive cinema for a number of decades.
If your film was unlucky enough to be certified as ‘E – forbidden for everyone’ then that would likely spell its doom. Given that anywhere between 80-96% of Italians identify as Catholic4 (depending upon the time period and the specific polling) it was highly likely your local cinema owner, operator or projectionist was God-fearing. These pamphlets, disseminated by clergy throughout the nation, would of course be seen and, more often than not, obeyed. An ecclesiastical ban proved just as effective as a State ban, and was the death knell for many subversive films and their directors.
My book, The Vatican Versus Horror Movies, looks at the effects the Vatican’s efforts had upon horror and exploitation filmmakers and their films in Italy, and at contextual cues which may provide answers as to why the Holy See went so hard on certain films and directors, but less so on others from the same genre.
There is no creature in all of horror, at least in terms of smart, complex storytelling, socio-political commentary and rich, varied history, than the zombie. The shuffling undead, often considered a perversion of the resurrection myth and the Second Coming, have brought a transgressive version of the biblical apocalypse to pass across countless films, television shows, video games, books and comic books for close to a century, and began life as a racially coded archetype based on Haitian folklore of the 17th century (where West African slaves were taught that the penalty for committing suicide would be to exist in perpetuity as walking corpses, rather than return to their African homeland).5
In terms of the modern zombie, the variation largely established of George A. Romero in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead that has dominated the subgenre ever since, the walking dead represent the ultimate profanity. A perversion of death and rebirth, of the Christian resurrection myth, and harbinger of the biblical rapture. In examining its subversion of the resurrection, consider the zombie’s return as the exact opposite of Jesus Christ: the Christian son of God excreted his earthly body, a temporary corporeal form, his soul living on in a new body in Heaven through Transfiguration. The zombie instead excretes its soul, leaving behind the opportunity of transfiguration and passage to Heaven and resurrecting its corpse. The corporeal form cannot function without a soul so the zombie becomes a creature of strange movement and insatiable hunger instead.
Its movement is a perverse dance of sorts; slow, deliberate, rhythmic movements that both terrify and entice us at once (a notion taken to its logical conclusion by the choreographed dancing zombies of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the Grammy Award-winning 1983 video directed by John Landis). Its hunger cannot be sated, at least not in the conventional sense. It eats only because it remembers that it once ate; in fact its bite is that of a plague-carrying parasite, a mechanism offering the same fate that befell it to any live human it encounters.
This plague, slowly but surely repopulating the earth with zombies, offers us the transgressive Second Coming; Judgment Day is visited upon the earth, but without the promise of passage into Heaven. The mere existence of the zombie speaks its message loudly, and that message is one of spiritual abandonment; the end times are here, and God is dead.
All of this, of course, makes zombie horror films an obscenity in the eyes of the church. Religion and the zombie are irreconcilable, something which is evidenced in the Vatican’s verdicts on every entry into the subgenre that sought release in Italian cinemas, verdicts given via the Segnalazioni Cinematografiche.
By the time George A. Romero’s genre-defining Night of the Living Dead obtained a cinematic release in Italy in 1971, it had already come in for a great deal of criticism for its gruesome violence, shocks and nihilism. Variety had labelled the film “pornography of violence”6 and an “unrelieved orgy of sadism,”7 maintaining that the zombie horror film “casts serious aspersions on the responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distributor…(and) the film industry as a whole).”8 Vincent Canby of the New York Times dismissed it out of hand, calling it “a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farm house by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.”9
It would be no surprise, then, that the Vatican held a similar view of this shockingly gory film, released the same year that the Hays Code was finally repealed. The Segnalazioni Cinematografiche’s writer considered that “the most grim and grand-guignol aspects of the horrific story”10 would have a negative influence on the viewer, and determined that the film’s “scenes of cannibalism, made with macabre, disgusting realism”11 were unacceptable for Italian Catholics to watch.
What is of particular interest, though, is that unlike most critics, the Vatican’s writer delved into subtextual analysis of the film, considering it “a horror film whose content seems to overshadow a certain socio-political theme: from the consequences of technological progress that gets out of hand to the power that promotes it, to the inability of the white man to react in any other way than with repression or fear. The same conclusion of the story, which sees the only man (a Black man) has found the courage to face reality, carelessly killed by whites, seems to have an anti-racist meaning.”12 the Vatican, that most patriarchal and pious of institutions, had afforded Romero’s film more consideration than any other critic who had reviewed it, in a bizarre turn of events for a horror film (as the rest of this essay will evidence).
Even Roger Ebert, the storied critic of the Chicago-Sun Times, had initially reacted to the film with disdain, using it as nothing more than a talking point for censorship and rating classifications, and spent most of his piece about the film referring to Duane Jones’ lead Ben as “the negro”13 in a manner that can only be considered racist. After decades of instantly dismissing and rendering ecclesiastical bans upon any horror film that sought a release in Italy, the Vatican could be considered somewhat progressive in its thoughts on Night of the Living Dead.
Much like Romero’s seminal film, Amando De Ossorio’s 1972 production Tombs of the Blind Dead sought to create a new, original zombie myth. In this Spain/Portugal co-production, the zombies are neither Haitian slaves nor are they the recent dead brought back to life by radiation from outer space. Instead, the film draws upon material familiar to the Spanish people to create a zombie that is truly Catholic; the works of 19th Century Spanish author Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.
Ossorio adapted from Bécquer’s tales of the Knights Templar, a fictionalised version of the real life Order of licensed-to-kill Catholic warrior monks. In the film, the Templar Knights are said to have returned from The Crusades having swapped Christianity for the occult, and due to their practices of witchcraft and heresy (including blood sacrifices, drawing upon the Eucharist and the symbolic drinking of Christ’s blood), they were excommunicated and hanged. A local legend warns of a town on the Spain/Portugal border where the corpses of the Knights (blind because their eyes were pecked out by crows at the gallows) rise from their graves at night thanks to one of their earlier occult rituals.
Ossorio’s zombies were also physically different from both the classic model and Romero’s: essentially reanimated sacks of bones and dust (as one would expect of 600 year old corpses) yet they still ride on (zombiefied) horseback and carry the array of weaponry they had fought with in the crusades. Ossorio’s zombies were, truly (and for the first time) the Catholic undead. They were once the church’s colonial warriors, taking and occupying the Holy Land during the crusades. Here, the Spanish director raises them from the dead to continue their (un)holy conquest.
The Segnalazioni Cinematografiche called the film a “silly story…conducted on a line of narrative inconsistency, approximate interpretation and slow pace, adding boredom to annoyance.”14 The Vatican’s critic dismisses the film quite quickly, pronouncing it “Unacceptable / negative.”15 due to its “immoral situations”16 and essentially accused Ossorio of being no more than a hack, trying in vain to thrill and horrify audiences (something that said audiences would disagree with, given the film’s reasonable success and slew of sequels).
The “line of narrative inconsistency”17 in question is that of Bécquer’s Knights Templar, which the Vatican’s writers clearly saw as a distasteful and morally corrupt portrayal, a caricature that is both a mockery of the church and potentially harmful to its reputation. That these noble Catholic soldiers might have returned from The Crusades having swapped the sacred for the profane is clearly a source of anger here, and what leads to the simultaneous accusations of boredom, silliness and immorality. Ossorio’s movie could not be met with anything short of full condemnation, and that is exactly what it received.
While the newly reinvigorated zombie filone would flourish around the world, eventually leading to George A. Romero’s return with 1978’s equally groundbreaking Dawn of the Dead / Zombi, it was the zombie filone of Europe’s Catholic nations that continued to draw the ire of the Vatican. Amando de Ossorio had done plenty to provoke the ecclesiastical ban his film received in Italy, but a director from the home of the Vatican, one who had already crossed the church on several occasions with his historical dramas, comedies, westerns and gialli that featured Roman Catholic antagonists, would go even further.
Lucio Fulci’s 1979 film Zombie Flesh Eaters is known for a number of things: cheekily cashing in on the success of Romero’s Zombi when released in Italy as Zombi 2; an aquatic action sequence where a zombie wrestles a shark; being a stalwart of the ‘video nasties’ list, having been prosecuted under the Video Recordings Act 1983. What is not commonly discussed about Fulci’s film is its anti-Catholic messaging. The film, which eschews many of the tropes of Romero’s zombies by returning to the Caribbean, to Voodoo, and to a certain colonial army backed by the church.
As the film’s heroes (Tisa Farrow’s Ann Bowles and Ian McCulloch’s Peter West) journey from Manhattan to Matul, a (fictional) Caribbean island, in search of the source of a zombie outbreak, they stumble upon a Conquistador graveyard, where yet more corpses reanimate and overcome their human opposition. Fulci’s conquistador zombies offer a nod to Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead and its long-dead Templar Knights in more ways than one. By the mid-1530s, Francisco Pizarro and other Spanish adventurers had completed a series of expeditions to the Americas and seized control of the civil-war ravaged Inca Empire in South America.18
Pontiff Julius II and the Spanish monarchy embraced the evangelization of the newfound continent, and dispatched priests to convert the conquered Incas. Spanish Catholic conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men landed their ships at Veracruz, Mexico on Good Friday 1519 "with multiple objectives, chief among them the conversion of the indigenous peoples to the Catholic faith."19 A man of deep, pious faith who told his men "Brothers and companions, let us follow the sign of the Cross with true faith and in it we shall conquer,"20 he laid siege to what Roman Catholics deemed the "grotesque and barbaric"21 Aztecs and erected an altar, a cross in their temple. Later, non-Catholics were forbidden from settling in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The Incans and other Native peoples were forcibly converted to Christianity and indigenous religions were outlawed. The conquistadors had spread Roman Catholicism to the Americas and Fulci, with his history of filmic antagonism towards the church, was commenting on this.
His own zombified conquistadors rise from their graves to continue their mission, to visit more of what they had really brought upon the region: assimilation, or death. Not only are they the Christian colonizing soldiers bringing death, like a plague (and it was disease that was the number one killer of Native Americans, disease they had previously been insulated and isolated from and that their European conquerors introduced), but as they inevitably wipe out humanity, they also represent Judgment Day, the biblical rapture, the End of Times.
Fulci’s zombies are the ultimate profanity: they are an attack upon both church and faith, on the Vatican and on Revelation. They are the profane resurrection and a sacrilege of the Second Coming. Fulci’s zombies, even more than those of any other director, were completely irreconcilable with Roman Catholicism.
“In a piece of dialog, the film attempts to validate the theory of "woo-doo" (the living dead) and does so with the extravagant appeal of a mixture of Christianity - brought to the Caribbean Sea by the conquistadors - and the pagan beliefs of its indigenous peoples. But the solution to the mystery, entirely imaginative (even if the film has tried to stay faithful to ‘White Zombie’, directed by Victor Halperin in 1932), was not the objective of Lucio Fulci, who aimed exclusively for horrible, grand-guignolesque special effects. Only an intensely masochistic spectator can enjoy the sight of monsters who, having torn off shreds of live meat from the unfortunate [humans], face each other in the foreground with disgusting faces full of worms. Unacceptable / Horrible.”22
Clearly, the Vatican’s writer picked up on Fulci’s use of what had once been Christian forces as his zombies. The review would not outright entertain any ideas of the zombie’s profanity beyond this, but the disapproval and consternation with regard to Christian soldiers used in such a transgressive and subversive way is palpable. The Vatican review is interesting in that it notes the film’s influence as being White Zombie, and shows that the Holy See’s critics have been engaging with the zombie film on more than just an aesthetic level. It is becoming more and more apparent that the Segnalazioni Cinematografiche engaged with the zombie subgenre on an intellectual level, tracking not just the films’ tropes but the subtexts and even the history of this subgenre that was such obvious perversion of Christian canon.
