Forty-four minutes into Zombie [which is how I will be referring to Zombi 2 from now on] something… interesting happens.

No, it is not when a zombie fights a shark. That happens thirty-six minutes in. Nor is it when a gigantic wooden splinter pierces the right eyeball of poor Mrs. Menard (Olga Karlatos). That iconic moment happens two excruciating minutes after what it is that I am about to focus on.

No, this is something that occurs during Mrs. Menard’s struggle to close a door against a zombie trying to enter the room.

I took notice of it because, on the fuzzy, washed out, pan and scan print released by Wizard Home Video, the scene was interrupted by a bar of white light that grew brighter and brighter on what looked like a grey-black smudge. What the hell was that all about?

Well, when I got a letterboxed release of the film, I would learn that white smudge was a shaft of light creeping across the bathroom wall as the zombie forced the door open. A nice stylistic flourish by director Lucio Fulci that I noted and then forgot about.

Until I started doing research on Liminal Space. What it is. What it means. How it is used in Horror Cinema. This research led to my becoming fascinated by the concept of Liminality. The ambiguity or disorientation that can occur during a transition, be it figurative (i.e. in an observable rite of passage, where the term originated) or literal.

Ever hear of the Doorway Effect? If you have ever gone from one room to another, in order to complete a task or get something, and forget whatever it was you were going into that room for? Well, that’s it. That amnesia, that confusion, that ambiguity or disorientation, is liminality resulting from a transition. You exiting one room and entering another.

But just what, exactly, does all that have to do with poor Mrs. Menard struggling to close that bathroom door?

I don’t know. Not yet. There is a lot more research I have to do before I feel comfortable enough to write something truly in depth about it.

My research begins where the concept of Liminality itself was first introduced and explored, in Arnold Van Gennep’s seminal 1908 work The Rites of Passage.

On page 20 of The Rites of Passage, Van Gennep made this observation, “The door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic world in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and scared in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.”

Which brings me back to both the Doorway Effect and to Mrs. Menard. She is framed by liminal spaces (windows and doorways) throughout this famous sequence and she is torturously dragged through a liminal space (the doorframe), violently exiting one state (alive) and entering another (death and zombie chow).

There is something there. I just need to figure out what the hell it is.

Any thoughts on this blather and pontification?

[Images “borrowed” from Chilling Scenes of Dreadful Villainy]