First up, it's City of the Living Dead (not to be confused with City of the Walking Dead, another Italian zombie movie, which I probably will cover another time). Now if you're the sort of person that likes their horror films to have a story you can follow naturally, and figure out logically, boy have I got some bad news for you with this one. If I tell you the basic plot, that a doorway to Hell is opened, which makes the dead begin to populate the city of Dunwich, that probably will give you a mental image of a very different film to this one. For the whole thing unfolds more as a series of fascinating vignettes than a conventional narrative, with the undead less being your traditional shamblers and more weird and ethereal; they can teleport in at certain moments! This is the ultimate in the attitude a lot of Italian genre cinema of the time had; fuck narrative logic, does it look cool? But that's not really a problem in this case, at we have a good fit of form and function. Lucio Fulci was one hell of a director, so the various strange tangents we get are filmed superbly, including an incredibly creepy touch of one elderly woman who's joined the living dead, and causes a lot of havoc, but we never actually see her move on screen. This recently got a new 4K restoration from Arrow Video, and I strongly advise giving this a go; don't expect exactly a coherent ride (especially a truly "WTF?" final scene), but it's an experience like no other. Fun fact; for some reason this is the only one of Fulci's zombie films that didn't end up caught in the whole Video Nasties debacle, despite it featuring perhaps the grossest moment of all of them, the infamous scene of a woman coughing up her entire digestive system. Yeah, that's a thing that happens.
Next up it's The Beyond. Now this is kind of a refinement of City of the Living Dead's concept, same basic idea but a bit more polished, like Fulci saw the potential, and realised that there was further he could go down this path. Again, plotwise there's not much to say; in fact I can sum up the whole thing with a quote from Marvin the Paranoid Android. "Oh dear, reality seems to have sprung a leak." Again though, that's not an issue; the film is all about forces from the Other Side flooding into the real world (well, a real world where a house in Louisiana has a basement, despite being below sea level), so the fragmentary nature of the story and weird random events fit that idea. Both this and City have nods to the works of HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and they fit in a cosmic horror niche quite well, giving a sense of a whole universe going insane by the revelations. If you watch this and City back to back, you'll sense quite a bit of overlap (including both nicking scare scenes from Suspiria), but you'll also see how well Fulci takes the concept from the earlier film, and damn near perfects it in this one (a far better, and utterly haunting final scene for one). This is Fulci's masterpiece, and I'm not just saying that because he manages to work in three acts of eyeball trauma to this one!
Finally, we have House by the Cemetery, which is quite different to the previous two films. It has some similarities, including nods to Lovecraft, Catriona McColl as the lead, another lift from Suspiria, and the presence of the undead, but here it's not an apocalyptic invasion of the diabolical forces. Rather we have one lone zombie, Dr. Freudstein, the most on-the-nose mad scientist name ever. Now I didn't think much of it on first viewing, but this has grown on me quite a bit; it has a solid use of a narrative device Fulci uses a lot, of hinting at there being a lot more to the story of screen. In Zombi 2 for instance, he kept hinting that the character of Dr. Menard did... something that has caused the zombie crisis, without directly saying so. In this one, the main male lead, the head of a family, is hinted to know a lot more than he first admits, and seems to be doing a bit of gaslighting of his family, but the end goal of all this and where precisely Freudstein and his undead existence fit into all of this is never directly spelled out. It also has an ending that seems very random at first, but if you look at all of the clues earlier in the film, it points to there being even more going on than a single ghoul killing people. Of all three of these films, this is the one you have to "meet halfway" the most, the one that takes the most effort to enjoy, but it's a rewarding view.
So that's the Gates of Hell trilogy. All three of these are definite unconventional horror watches, and won't be to everyone's tastes, not least for the gore levels. However, as someone whose bugbear with a lot of modern horror films is their tendency to overexplain every damn little thing, taking a lot of the scares out of the experience, I admire these for going quite the other way, daring you to mull over them, and getting to Lovecraft's "Fear of the Unknown" in a way I don't think even he really succeeded at achieving that often. If you have nerves of steel, a strong stomach, and a tolerance for continental weirdness, give this a go! To end, let's have the cheesy as all Hell American trailer for The House by the Cemetery...
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