The Antonioni of splatter: welcome to the gruesomely elegant world of Lucio Fulci

Be it face-eating spiders, punctured eyeballs or a deadly snail attack, Fulci staked his claim as Godfather of Gore with dreamy languor and plenty of blood

There is more than one candidate for the title Godfather of Gore, but Italian film-maker Lucio Fulci can lay greater claim to it than most. This is a director who seems pathologically incapable of filming someone falling off a cliff without inserting closeups of their face scraping against the rocks on their way down. This is a director who seemingly can't film an eye without getting the urge to squish, skewer or enucleate it. Welcome to Fulci World.

It was a film called Zombie Flesh Eaters that brought Fulci to international attention. At least, that was its UK title; its Italian studio called it Zombi 2 to cash in on the success of George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which had been released in Italy as Zombi. In early 1980s Britain, Zombie Flesh Eaters ended up on the director of public prosecutions' list of video nasties, mostly due to closeups of an eye punctured by a giant splinter. Other slightly more family-friendly highlights include an underwater tussle between a zombie and a shark, and an astonishing vision of zombies shambling across New York's Brooklyn Bridge. (Don't look too closely or you'll see cars going in both directions in the background; the budget wasn't big enough to stop the traffic.)