Fulci’s world is all rough cuts and seams, the red of blood, the yellow of digestion. Meat-crazed: crows ascend, beaks wet, from the bodies left to rot in the street, dogs squabble and tear at each other, laughing children dismember a cat and gnaw rapturously at its legs. He shudders and turns away, whose hand is on the tiller.

He is sick, lately, with planning murder, with arranging death. People are butcher’s charts, easily and necessarily segmented. A profitable trade, at least: the hunger for meat is insatiable, an open throat a mile wide and twenty deep. He could labor another lifetime and still you wouldn’t see his handiwork piled at the bottom.

Riots in the street on the way to and from work. Fulci, dazed, does not notice, not the fire, not the smoke, not the intermittent sound of gunfire, too stuffed with his own deaths to notice others. He wakes, sleeps, works, drinks; plans for a boat trip that never comes, an respite never quite earned.