The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

While it predates the entire Italian zombie phenomenon, the Spanish/Italian co-production The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue feels like an exemplar of Italian horror films of the 1970s—the Catholic graveyard, bizarre made-up science, the digression to a drug-addled side character, fascist policemen, brutal and hideous gore, somewhat unlikable civilian leads who have been thrust into the role of detective to defend themselves, the culmination in a hospital-bloodbath set piece and fire. Most of Lucio Fulci’s entries into the genre use this film as a template, not the American titles (such as I Walked with a Zombie) he often cited.

The cops in The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (which takes place almost entirely in England’s Lake Windermere) are incompetents who despise the two young lead characters at the outset. Jorge Grau’s film is unpleasant in a lot of ways—George (Ray Lovelock) is an arrogant prick, Edna (Christine Galbo) is hapless, and the unnamed Inspector (Arthur Kennedy) is a fascist monster. Everyone, barring one police officer, is cruel and inhumane; no one listens to anything anyone has to say; the Inspector accuses George of being a satanist (“You’re all the same, the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes, drugs, sex, every sort of filth”); he claims that Edna’s sister (a 90-pound woman with a heroin addiction) caved in her husband’s chest… they’re all helpless idiots.

There is obviously a George Romero influence here—particularly in the appearance of the first zombie—but it also has Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi early gialli vibes. Meaning: they feel like horny European trash mongers attempting a Swinging Sixties take on Hitchcock and Blow Out.

Grau was tasked by his producers to replicate the success of Night of the Living Dead—but in color. The Spanish director chose to make the cause of the dead rising an experimental sonic dynamo meant to kill insects on farmlands. It affects not only the dead but babies too (arguing that their nervous systems are so simple they might as well be insects). Grau focuses on small bits of technology—the whirring dynamo of the “ultrasonic radiation” machine, the mechanical airtight coffins at the titular morgue—and uses that as a stand-in for modernity. The rules of Grau’s zombies blur the line between science and mysticism—they arise from radiation and can raise more zombies with their own blood, but don’t appear in photographs, like vampires. The zombies don’t want anything but to destroy, highlighted by a particularly nasty genital mutilation of a yappy nurse.

Once the machine is turned on, the film shifts from ’60s curio to tension-escalating masterpiece. Grau uses sound design in such a distinct way that it often doesn’t seem to correspond to what’s appearing on-screen, creating a particular hypnotic vibe unique to this movie. This isn’t foley; this is musique concrète.

The ambient nightmare feeling of casual inevitability in that first zombie encounter recalls nothing less than the diner alley scene in Mulholland Drive. After so many wide, naturalistic shots of George and Edna wandering around an empty riverside landscape, we trip and fall into a dream. The camera follows Edna slowly walking back to her car, as she appears to hear something… something we know is not there. We linger on her as she pauses, looks around. The world slows to a crawl. A crash cut from her POV of a soaked man wandering out of the tombstones to his asymmetrically jagged red eyes. Edna runs before he does anything, and we are in a cycle of surreal terror and banal dismissals until the film boils over into a hospital filled with blood and flames. The twin surprise reveals at the end make much more emotional, dream-logic sense than A-to-B plotting. We have been entranced by this sound the characters can’t hear but can feel—and there’s no way out. 🩸