Fulci the Psychic

I’m not sure you know this or not, dear reader, but I almost died. A couple of weeks ago I nearly slid of a cliff on the coast of Oregon to my untimely demise. It was A LOT!

In fact, I already provided something of a play-by-play in the “Thank God I’m Saved” post written soon after the event. On top of that, while doing a radio show this weekend to honor the recently departed Duke, I retold the tale. I do think that the oral telling provides even more nuance. I’ve clipped that section of the radio show and have included it below for anyone interested in knowing exactly, precisely what happened.

“I almost died, or how someone saved my life tonight” audio recounting my near-death experience

The Italian title for the film is Sette Note in Nero

Anyway, if you read the post or listened to the audio above you might get a sense of the emotional exhaustion and existential shock such a near-death experience creates. As Sunday came around and the weekend was quickly coming to a close we drove back from the coast and folks started to return to their lives far away. I stayed on ’til Tuesday because lingering in Portland is always a joy. What’s more, Zach and Aimee’s hospitality make it all that much better.

By Sunday evening everyone was gone, and despite general exhaustion, Zach and I went to see Lucio Fulci’s 1977 Giallo The Psychic. Fulci is best know for his gore films like Zombi 2 (1980), City of the Living Dead (1980), and The Beyond (1981), but The Psychic, like Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), is an earlier, more restrained psychological thriller that goes lighter on the gore. Although he more than makes up for it in later films 🙂

I’d never seen The Psychic before, and the opportunity to watch it on the big screen at the Hollywood theater was a definite treat. The film starts off with a woman driving to what appears to be the Dover cliffs in England and throwing herself off. If that’s not bad enough for a guy who just almost fell off a cliff, Fulci captures the carnage on the way down. I was like “What the fuck!” It was hard to watch given I’d already been imagining the worst for the last two days. Fulci turned my darkest fears into a filmic reality.

As a warning, this scene is definitely graphic.

Not but a day or two before we were joking about the physical aftermath that would result from a 100 foot plunge off a cliff. We never considered the possibility of my face scraping off against the rocks on the way down.

After this scene I pretty much checked out. I was trying to staying awake the whole movie, but my mind and body simply shut down. My only thought for the rest of the showing was I hope I don’t snore.

What a crazy way to punctuate an already insane weekend. It’s as if Fulci knew all along.