Zombie Flesh Eaters - Director: Lucio Fulci, Soundtrack: Fabio Frizzi
This is one of the very earliest memories I have of watching a horror film and being completely grossed out by it. I watched it with my first ever girlfriend who I’m still friends with and she reminded me of this recently. It was the school holidays and I made us beans on toast while we watched it. At the time I thought, “This is brilliant. It’s got everything I ever wanted in a film. Gratuitous violence. Nudity. It’s mental. It makes no sense whatsoever. And the soundtrack…” I just remember being obsessed with this and Cannibal Holocaust, which I saw at a similar time. I think Fabio is really underrated and he’s one of the best composers who has carried on working in Italy. It’s not that I wanted this to be Death Waltz’s first release because that was always going to be House Of The Devil but weirdly we’ve only just signed the contract for that and it took so long. But I knew I wanted to do Zombie Flesh Eaters. And as soon as I started talking to the guys in Italy and they put me in touch with Fabio and he was like, “Yeah, we’ve got to do this.” It sounds really twattish but it was one of the most simple deals I’ve ever done. I asked them. They said yes. I asked if Fabio would be involved. They said yes. They asked how many I wanted to press. When I told them they said you’ll have to pay us in advance because everyone rips us off. It’s par for the course in the Italian film and music industry. I said yeah and we pressed up 500 copies to begin with and Fabio graciously gave us sleeve notes. Mine and Fabio’s relationships grew from there and we’ve become really firm friends. When you get to do something like that and you work on it, it’s a joy.