Frame by Frame – Zeder (1983)

Year – 1983
Decade – 1980s
Director – Pupi Avati
Cinematographer – Franco Delli Colli
Genre – Horror
Keywords – 1980s Horror; Italian cinema; Italian horror; Zombies
Studio – Gaumont
Shooting Locations – Italy (largely in the Emilia-Romagna region, including Bologna)
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Format – 35mm with spherical lenses

The Movie
A struggling novelist (Gabriele Lavia, from Argento’s Deep Red and Inferno) follows the ribbon on his second-hand typewriter into a mystery involving the previous owner and plots of land called K-Zones capable of bringing the dead back to life. I first saw Zeder on VHS in the 1990s when I picked it up at a video store under its American title Revenge of the Dead. The box cover art (see the poster below) led me to believe I was venturing into the realm of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie or Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead. In actuality, Zeder is almost the antithesis of the Italian horror of that era — light on gore, free of nudity and restrained in style. What the movie does have is an unsettling atmosphere of dread, boosted immeasurably by a final act set in an abandoned Fascist-era children’s camp (the Colonia Marina Varese in Milano Marittima, Italy) and a conclusion eerily reminiscent of 1989’s Pet Sematary.

Director Pupi Avati only dabbled occasionally in the genre, and Zeder came from a financial rather than artistic impulse. Here’s Avati’s brother and producer Antonio:

“The film was born out of the necessities of our film production company. We had to come up with some projects to develop. Zeder was a project born out of two non-horror films that had not done well. Seeing how well (the brothers’ previous 1976 horror film) The House with Laughing Windows had fared, we thought making another horror movie was the only way to find a willing producer.”

And here’s Pupi Avati on the inspiration for Zeder’s story:

“The whole idea came to me when I (bought a typewriter) from Amedeo Tommasi, a great jazz musician who scored several of my films. It happened at the end of a dinner and he asked me if I wanted to buy this electric typewriter of his. It was a massive thing, one of the first electric typewriters I had ever seen. We agreed on a price of 100,000 lire. I used to write with a regular Olivetti typewriter, a model 44 or a 22. It had a magnetic tape. I had never used an electric one. The peculiar thing of this new type of ribbon was that it left a sign of what Amedeo had previously written on it. When I changed the ribbon I could read everything he had written. I could see the words imprinted on the ribbon as I unraveled it…I thought this could be a wonderful idea for a film. A wife buys a used typewriter and gives it to her husband as a present. This typewriter has been owned by an old priest and, well…there’s always priests, churches, religion and mysteries in my films.”

*quotes from featurettes on the 88 Films Blu-ray release of Zeder.