Cthulhu is a low-budget Lovecraft adaptation that understands its financial limits and mostly plans around them. Rather than attempting to visualize cosmic horror directly (a strategy that would have been optimistic at best),  the film keeps its focus on atmosphere, implication, and narrative density. Heffernan treats the Lovecraft mythos less as spectacle than as a framework: ancient knowledge, inherited corruption and the slow erosion of agency. This is a practical choice, but also a coherent one.

What distinguishes Cthulhu from many low-budget horror films of the period is its seriousness of intent. Heffernan is not interested in irony, parody or self-aware genre play. The film takes Lovecraft at face value- which is both admirable and faintly risky. The result is uneven but focused. When the film falters, it does so quietly. When it succeeds, it does so by restraint. There are no grand revelations, only an accumulation of unease and the sense that something has already gone wrong long before the story begins...

City of the Living Dead, also known as The Gates of Hell, directed by horror maestro Lucio Fulci, is a film that treats narrative coherence as an optional extra and physical suffering as a primary organising principle. The premise is nominally theological: a priest’s suicide opens the gates of hell, allowing the dead to rise in a small New England town. This setup is introduced efficiently and then largely ignored. Fulci shows little interest in causality, motivation or resolution. Events occur not because they must, but because the film requires another occasion for decay. 

What replaces narrative logic is atmosphere: thick, wet and hostile. Fulci constructs horror through accumulation rather than escalation. Scenes do not build so much as linger, often past the point of comfort or sense. Time feels elastic, geography is unreliable. Characters appear where the film needs bodies. The violence is explicit, tactile and famously excessive. Fulci’s camera treats the human body as a fragile container, prone to rupture under minimal pressure. These moments are not shocking because they are sudden but because they are prolonged. The film insists that you stay with them, often baffling and occasionally hypnotic. It does not reward interpretation so much as endurance. If it works, it does so by replacing sense with sensation and trusting that dread does not require explanation. Order has collapsed, authority is absent and the body is no longer secure. Fulci offers no cure, only symptoms- and he documents them with considerable enthusiasm.

There is a curious seriousness to all this. Despite the absurdity of its internal logic, City of the Living Dead never winks. Fulci presents his nightmare without irony as if coherence itself were a bourgeois expectation best abandoned...