The Comforts of Home: Manhattan Baby (1982)
For some time, dear readers, I have have found that certain modes of transportation leave my nerves in a most jangled state. In these unfortunate moments, my body is swept with a sudden case of tremors, my vision blurs and the perspiration flows most readily. I have found it best to avoid these triggering transports altogether and I no longer submit myself to the tortures of air travel, sailing vessels, motorized vehicles, peddle-driven vehicles or pedestrian walkways. As such, I have become something of a “home body” and my trips abroad have become infrequent. But when they do occur, let me assure you, they leave me in a bit of a state. This is all to say that I am no stranger to the sentiments the masterful Lucio Fulci expresses in his treatise on the terrors of traveling.
Just the sort of beautiful, exotic destination that everyone should avoid
The Hacker family’s Egyptian holiday must have seemed like such a merry sort of sojourn to begin with, just the sort of harmless thing that a family with an archeologist as its patriarch might do. Taking in the sights, the sounds, the history, collecting scorpions for the children to examine. But beware! The world outside one’s own abode contains all manner of lurking horrors. Mr. Hacker (Christopher Connelly) is temporarily blinded after taking a pair of mystical blue lights right smack in the eyeballs and a blind woman hands little Susie Hacker (Brigitta Boccoli) an amulet coursing with evil energy that causes her all manner of distress.
But the terror doesn’t end simply because they decide to hop on a plane back home. The taint of travel follows them right back to their posh Manhattan apartment. Poor Susie becomes the host for some sinister force. She and her brother begin to disappear from their rooms on what they refer to as “voyages.” Soon a dimensional doorway appears in their home, providing instantaneous transportation to very foreign and rather distant lands. Passage through this doorway is treacherous and it spells the end for at least one peripheral character.
Travel can have lasting and unexpected consequences
All of this is quite clearly Fulci’s attempt to convey his own fear of travel, a deeply personal confession of anxiety that he had been hinting at in previous cinematic endeavors. Along with this film, The Beyond, The New York Ripper and City of the Living Dead are all set in New York. Despite taking place in Gotham, all of these films feature barely perceptible traces of New York iconography while sporting plenty of heavily dubbed actors, classic Giallo scores and sinister blind women. This flawless transport of his aesthetic from the Continent to the United States bespeaks a man who is, at the very least, reluctant to relinquish the comforts of home.
Despite the aforementioned hallmarks of Fulci’s art, it is worth noting the ways in which Manhattan Baby departs from his other work. While not entirely clean cut by any means, it simply does not ooze quite as much as his other films. Aside from a brain-burrowing bird attack, the gore is almost absent. The film is awash with extreme close-ups of eyes and given Fulci’s history, one anxiously anticipates seeing one of these eyes punctured. And yet not a single ocular orb is subjected to the business end of an impaling implement. Furthermore, the rotting visages that haunt so many of Fulci’s film are absent here and jump scares are achieved with sudden visions of amulets and statuary.
Eyes, not a single one of which is punctured
It all seems remarkably restrained for a man who once pitted a shark against a zombie. And yet the absence of gruesome violence only makes Manhattan Baby an all the more fascinating addition to the Fulci oeuvre. While fans of agonizingly gradual eye punctures may have to look elsewhere for their gory treats, anyone intimately familiar with Fulci will delight in this stylistic departure that speaks so clearly to his own fear of departures.
Manhattan Baby runs 89 minutes and does not possess a certified rating in the United States.
