The narrative halts for nearly four minutes as Fulci treats us to gruesome extreme close-up's of the tarantula's biting into the man's eye, nose, lip and mouth. One of the most impressive of any Italian horror film is the early cellar set piece from Inferno, in which a woman delves into an inexplicable puddle below the cellar floor in search of her keys. An even more bizarre and narratively disconnected seven minute set piece occurs later in the film. A crippled, cat-hating antique dealer stuffs a canvas bag full of stray cats and takes them down to a sewer drain spillage area to drown. Once there he slips and falls into the rat-strewn waters.
Rats begin to attack.
In the great Italian horror film, narrative is merely a pretext for spectacle. To catch the best examples of Italian set piece artistry at Fant-Asia I urge you to go see The Beyond, Stagefright, Dark Waters, The Stendhal Syndrome and Zombie.