Manhattan Baby

Following a string of genre-defining nihilistic horrors, director Lucio Fulci and screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti pivot to a more traditional—and underwhelming—ghost story.

The film opens in the Egyptian desert, at a tomb excavation following Professor George. He ventures into the crypt with a willing assistant. This is all actual location photography, hinting that Fulci was working with a bigger budget.

In the crypt, George and his assistant encounter some Indiana Jones-style booby traps that provide our first head-scratching moment: after revealing a secret passage, a snake shoots out of the wall, spear style, narrowly missing the explorers. This begs the question: how long was that snake waiting in the wall?

Another booby-trap dispatches the assistant in a gruesome but surprisingly non-graphic manner. In what will be a recurring theme, the graphic, drawn-out deaths of Fulci’s prior horrors prove absent, replaced by screams and cuts to the dead victims.

Professor George avoids a similar fate with some ninja-like acrobatics, sees a symbol on the wall, then gets blue lasers shot into his eyes, blinding him. If that seems disjointed, then I have conveyed the viewing experience.

Meanwhile, Professor George’s wife Emily is snapping photos of the crypt exterior with their daughter, Susie. When Emily leaves Susie alone, a mysterious woman with cataracts reminiscent of Fulci’s The Beyond, approaches Susie and gives her an amulet bearing a symbol similar to what Professor George saw in the tomb.

Cut back to New York. Despite the title, Manhattan doesn’t feature aside from some nondescript establishing shots and generic park settings. There’s also no baby.

In what should be another red flag, we meet Susie’s brother Tommy, played by Giovanni Frezza, who also played the dreaded Bob in Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery. Fortunately, he’s far less annoying this time around, though one still wonders what possessed Fulci to cast him, let alone twice.

From here, the script meanders. Through some exposition, we learn of an evil spirit who might have possessed Susie via the amulet. It’s never clear what the spirit wants, as neither the parents nor Susie appear in much danger.

The worst of the spirit’s machinations sees it fatally teleport Emily’s co-worker to the Egyptian desert. The au pair meets a similar fate. But mostly, the spirit does things like arrange Tommy’s toys up and down the stairs, or play ventriloquist games with the children’s voices.

It also becomes clear the Egyptian prologue was tacked-on, likely to sell comparisons to The Exorcist, as the location isn’t revisited.

It’s a shocking misstep for Sacchetti, whose prior scripts involving nightmare logic worked so well. City of the Living Dead saw an undead priest amass an army and terrorize an entire town with seemingly limitless powers. The Beyond saw hell spill into our reality, claiming everyone in its path.

Those films worked because of their apocalyptic premises and nihilistic conclusions. In Manhattan Baby, he fails to escalate the narrative or emotional stakes, resulting in a film that’s almost shockingly boring. Indeed, an inadvertent highlight comes when Professor George once again gets the blue lasers to the eyes. This time I laughed aloud. Not the reaction the film wanted.

For his part, Fulci tries to manufacture thrills via some stylish camera work and incessant close ups of people’s eyes. Much like his film The Psychic, I’m tempted to suggest a drinking game where you drink every time Fulci cuts to an eye close-up, but I fear for your liver. Color gels and Fabio Frizzi’s signature incantation-synth sound bring a Fulci feel to the proceedings, but it’s not enough.

Consider a scene where George has given a photograph to a colleague for analysis. As the colleague researches the symbol and discovers its origins, a snake appears. From the colleague’s point-of-view we see the snake lunge, then cut to Susie screaming in bed. Cut back to the colleague who now lies in a pool of blood, his face bearing gruesome fang punctures. We watch from the snake’s point-of-view as it slithers away, then see the photograph disappear.

Contrast this with a similar scene from The Beyond. In the town library, an architect researches the hotel at the story’s center. He’s on a shelf ladder, searching the high stacks where he discovers the hotel’s blueprints. Excited, he opens the blueprints while still on the ladder and discovers a large hidden space in the basement. Suddenly, an unseen force knocks him from the ladder. He takes a brutal fall to the floor, rendering him paralyzed but conscious. Spiders appear from nowhere and crawl to his face and arms. Fulci cuts to close-ups of the spiders, as they tear chunks of flesh and eat them, devouring the architect alive. Then the blueprints change, removing the hidden space.

The Beyond’s scene works because Sacchetti had already established the narrative stakes. The hotel sits atop a gate to hell, which has been opened. Hell and our world are bleeding together and the scene is part of the bleed, remaking reality. It also ups the emotional stakes by punctuating the sequence with Fulci’s signature, on-the-body style of gore. Seeing the spiders tear eraser-sized chunks out of the architect proves more visceral than something more extravagant like having him fall and land impaled. The Manhattan Baby sequence lacks both of these elements and thus it fails to register.

Watching the film left me with a nagging feeling that I was watching a neutered version of a better movie. One awash in Fulci’s signature nihilism and gore that had been edited down and saddled with an alternate ending. In a 2001 featurette entitled “Beyond the Living Dead,” Sacchetti says the film originated as “an attempt to do a technological piece. I was attempting to approach themes that were no longer classic or traditionally Gothic. I was trying to bring horror in a different direction.”

While it may have originated as a “technological piece,” no trace of that approach appears in the final product, save the ill-conceived eye lasers. Perhaps because, as Sacchetti also says, the film’s budget was cut in half. Maybe more elaborate effects were planned and ditched. Regardless, the result underwhelms.

Compare Manhattan Baby to Poltergeist, released the same year. Both hinge on a malevolent spirit force that possesses and eventually claims a family’s young blonde-haired daughter. In between, both sprinkle various horror set-pieces. But Poltergeist’s set-pieces prove more horrific, highlighted by a scene showing a man peeling off his own face. That scene proves more memorable and disturbing than anything in Manhattan Baby. Who would have guessed, between the Spielberg-produced Hollywood version, and a version from Fulci and Sacchetti, that Fulci’s would be tamer?

Thus, this film is best left to Fulci completists. Placed in the context of his earlier works, it’s something of a curio, and fans might appreciate (or bemoan) the film’s potential. Others would do better to seek out the director’s earlier, better horrors.