Lucio Fulci

Although a number of films over the years were said to have been "co-produced" by Fulci, he was just allowing them to use his name to promote the films (with the exception of City of the Living Dead, which he did actively attempt to obtain some funding for). Owing to his brand of expressive visuals and unconventional storytelling, Lucio Fulci has been called "The Poet of the Macabre" by genre critics and scholars, originally a reference to Edgar Allan Poe, whose work he freely adapted in The Black Cat (1981). The high level of graphic violence in many of his films, especially Zombi 2, The Beyond, Contraband and The New York Ripper, has also earned him the nickname "The Godfather of Gore", which he shares with Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Lucio Fulci was born in Trastevere, Rome, on 17 June 1927. His mother Lucia was from a poor but reputable Sicilian, politically anti-fascist family from Messina, Sicily. She had earlier eloped to Rome with a cousin of hers, who she later left to raise their child (Lucio) alone. Lucio was raised Roman Catholic by his mother and a female housekeeper. He attended the Naval College in Venice, and near the end of World War II, completed his studies back in Rome at the Giulio Cesare State Classical School. He was interested in art, music, film, football, and had a love for sailing. His mother encouraged him to be a lawyer, but he wound up going to medical school instead. After studying medicine for a time, he dropped out before completing his training, deciding there was more money to be made in the filmmaking industry He worked initially as an art critic, writing for Gazzetta delle Arti and Il Messaggero, and also joined the critical art group il Gruppo Arte Sociale. In the Fulci Talks interview filmed in Rome, Fulci mentions having in his youth met Truman Capote in Italy, who he said was reading books and spoke good Italian. His interest in the arts led him to apply to the film school in Rome named Centro Sperimentale where he apprenticed, after which he worked first as a director of documentaries, then an assistant director of motion pictures, then a screenwriter working mainly in the Italian comedy field in the early 1950s. The famed Italian director Steno took Fulci under his wing and allowed him to assist in the making of a number of comedies starring Totò. He also directed a number of comedies starring the actors Franco and Ciccio.

Fulci travelled to the Philippines and spent six weeks shooting the film Zombi 3. Two opposing views were given for Fulci leaving the film, the first being an illness that left him unable to film and the second being that he was having disputes with producers. After completing filming, he would later state "(I) didn't finish making Zombie 3, but the reason wasn't anything to do with illness [...] there were arguments and so, I finished off an hour and a quarter of the film". Fulci stated that he could not get the script changed, which he deemed to be "dreadful", and modified it with his daughter. Claudio Fragasso stated that Fulci simplified his screenplay and shot a seventy-minute film which shocked producer Franco Gaudenzi. By the second half of the 1980s, the Italian film industry was struggling with less theatrical distribution of films and productions being made to sell to foreign markets for television and home video. In some films, such as Gianni Martucci's The Red Monks, Fulci is credited as a "special effects supervisor" despite not showing up to set or preparing any special effects for the film. According to Martucci, Fulci "agreed to "present" the movie" as distributors required "a "heavy" name for foreign sales. By then Fulci had become a name, let's say exportable. He was already very ill, and I met him to talk to him about the project" While Fulci's health did get better, Martucci stated that "at that time he couldn't even speak, devoured as he was by cirrhosis." A series was developed titled I maestri del thriller was developed with the aim of television and home video markets, which was originally going to be a set of ten films but only eight were made. Fulci was invited by cinematographer Silvano Tessicini to the series as the director had just moved from Rome to Castelnuovo di Porto and was experiencing health problems after returning from the production of Zombi 3. Tessicini lived in the nearby Morlupo and on visiting him stated that Fulci "was not well, and had a huge belly", a consequence of the liver disease that affected Fulci during the filming of Zombi 3. Fulci was initially hired on the film as a supervisor but submitted the idea to direct his own film, Touch of Death. When one of the directors walked away from the series, Fulci was invited to begin filming Sodoma's Ghost. It was filmed under the title Ghost Light and began shooting on 30 May 1988 with filming taking four weeks. Mario Bianchi was recruited by production supervisor Silvano Zignani to film some second unit scenes. According to Bianchi, "Fulci didn't leave the set until he finished the film" while also stating "I wouldn't say I shot half the film, but almost" while Michele De Angelis stated that Bianchi was only on set for a couple of days. Three days after filming Sodoma's Ghost, Fulci began work on Touch of Death which began filming on 22 June 1988. Another film in the series was Hansel e Gretel, which was originally set for Giovanni Simonelli to direct but after three weeks of filming only about 50 minutes of the film had been completed and large parts of the story were not filmed. Several weeks later Fulci was asked to supervise an additional week's shooting. According to the assistant director of the film Michele de Angelis,"Lucio shot everything. Simonelli stayed by his side, just watching...." Along with Fulci, Andrea Bianchi was reportedly recruited to work on the film as well. Fulci was credited in another film in the series: as a supervisor in the film Bloody Psycho by Leandro Lucchetti. Fulci did not discuss the film with the director and did not show up at the set of the film. Fulci would later use the gory footage of the titles in the series used in his film A Cat in the Brain. Fulci added new scenes where he played himself, a horror director who visits a psychiatrist who he does not realize is a serial killer. The films in the I maestri del thriller series were later released on VHS and DVD as Lucio Fulci presenta by the Formula Home Video label. Fulci would also develop films for television as part of the series Le case maledette set up by producer Luciano Martino. The films were shot outside Rome with a schedule of four weeks each, with The House of Clocks filmed between 31 January and 25 February 1989. Immediately after finishing work on the film, Fulci started work on The Sweet House of Horrors which finished filming in March. The series was not shown in Italy and was released on VHS in 2000 and later shown on Italian satellite TV in 2006.

In the last decade of his life, Fulci suffered from emotional and physical health problems, reflected by a marked decline in the quality of his work. Fulci also continued to suffer during the late 1980s from recurring problems with diabetes and his liver. He hid the severity of his illness from his friends and associates so that he would not be deemed unemployable. His wife's suicide in 1969 had always weighed heavily on him (she had killed herself with a gas oven after learning she had inoperable cancer). Fulci biographer Stephen Thrower wrote "The suicide of his wife in 1969 was followed not long after by the death of a daughter in a road accident", but neither of Fulci's daughters are deceased. Dario Argento is quoted as saying of Fulci "His life was terrible. His wife committed suicide, and his daughter was paralyzed because of an accident." In a 2023 interview with actors Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Silvia Collatina at the Romford Horror event, the two confirm that one of Fulci's daughters had an accident when she fell off a horse and was injured very badly and became temporarily paralyzed. This is also confirmed in the documentary Fulci for Fake. Fulci and Argento met in 1994 at the Rome Fanta Festival and surprisingly agreed to collaborate on a horror film called Wax Mask, a loose remake of the 1953 Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax. Argento claimed he had heard about Fulci's miserable circumstances at the time and wanted to offer him a chance at a comeback. It is said that Argento was shocked at how thin and sickly Fulci appeared at their 1994 meeting, and said he felt very sorry for him. Fulci collaborated with writer Daniele Stroppa to create a screenplay for Argento, whose insistence on increasing the violence and gore quotient was, unusually, opposed by Fulci. (Stroppa had co-written two of Fulci's earlier films, The House of Clocks and Voices from Beyond). Fulci was slated to also direct the film, but he died before filming could begin, due to a series of delays caused by Argento's involvement with his own project, The Stendhal Syndrome, at the time. Wax Mask was eventually directed by former special effects artist Sergio Stivaletti. The screenplay was entirely reworked by Stivaletti after Fulci's death, so the finished film contains significant changes to Fulci's original screenplay. Argento also hired Fulci's daughter Antonella to serve as an assistant art director on the film.

Fulci was Catholic. Discussing his faith related to his films, he said in an interview published in 1982 that his later films that were fantastique were his more true to himself works and that said that "all Catholic literature is terribly anguished" and he had found God in this misfortune of others and that he "studied the horrible as Bergson studied laughter."