Leave it to Lucio Fulci to make a haunted house flick with lots of gore. Whereas countless filmmakers have used spooky ghosts as an unseen menace, to varying effect, Fulci decided to stick with what he knew, and he knew gore. He also knew convoluted storytelling.
From 1981, Fulci directed The House by the Cemetery from a screenplay by Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Fulci, himself. The movie follows the Boyle family: college professor Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco); his wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl); and their young son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza). Fair warning to all potential viewers — Bob is a chore. Missile Test has made it clear how we feel about the talents of child actors, but in this instance, Frezza gets a pass. It’s the awful dubbing that does the most to make Bob one of the more annoying movie children one will see. Anyway…
One of Boyle’s colleagues, Dr. Peterson, had been living in an old house in New England while doing psychological research on the causes of suicide. As it happens, Peterson went nuts, killed his mistress, and then himself. Boyle is then assigned to continue the research, and possibly find reasons for Peterson’s actions. He packs the family up in New York City, and it’s off to New England, where they will take up residence 
in the same creepy old house in which Peterson had lived. That house had been occupied decades earlier by one Dr. Jacob Freudstein, a surgeon who had been conducting dubious experiments.
But wait, that’s not all. The ghosts of Freudstein’s wife and daughter, Mary and Mae (Teresa Rossi Passante and Silvia Collatina), still roam the property and the nearby town.
And yet there’s still more. Someone or something, which is not revealed until denouement, is going around committing bloody murder of anyone involved with the house.
Of course, there’s even more. More than once it’s implied that Dr. Boyle has been to the town and the house before, with a young daughter that he does not have. This story thread goes exactly nowhere, as Fulci abandons it without resolution. There is also a budding subplot involving Boyle and a nanny named Ann (Ania Pieroni) that the Boyles hire to look after Bob, but that is cast aside as well.
There is much to keep track of in this movie, and it’s all wasted effort. In the end, little of what has been built up in the viewer’s mind matters. Fulci cared about none of it, insofar as it made the movie feature length. Everything exists to get the movie from one kill scene to the next, whether that be an outrageous bat attack, or a splattery amputation. There is no reward in following the story, and no burden on the viewer to do so. If Fulci didn’t care enough to have the story make sense, that gives the audience permission to just sit back and watch the spectacle.
And a spectacle it is. The gore is extensive enough that the movie was released unrated here in the States. Fulci seemed uninterested in satisfying the censors. Good for him. The result is a movie that will satisfy the gorehounds out there, and it does so without the dire sense of cringe and disgust that 2000s torture porn flicks evoke.
This movie does beg the question: what could Fulci have done freed from the shackles of storytelling? Zombi 2 probably answers that question best of all, and it did so with a zombie fighting a shark underwater. There’s nothing that outrageous in The House by the Cemetery, but that bat attack comes pretty damned close. This movie is essential viewing for the dedicated horror fan, since it’s an important movie in Fulci’s career. For everyone else, it’s a coin toss.