Quentin Tarantino's Favorite Zombie Movies Are Officially Streaming for Free

3 weeks ago 13

Published Aug 3, 2026, 7:08 PM EDT

Erik Hawkins is an award-winning writer and editor who's been obsessed with cinema since he was old enough to hold Roger Ebert's Video Home Companion in his hands. He lives in NYC, where he rabidly watches everything from the newest releases to the more odd and obscure, and regularly shares his thoughts on Letterboxd. From ghost-writing fiction and webisodes in South America to local news, trial coverage, and politics in NYC, he's rarely put down his laptop over the past 15 years.

One of the most prolific and ferocious horror directors of all time, Italian auteur Lucio Fulci remains largely unsung in the U.S. — but he has appeared on the radar of many American genre enthusiasts thanks to none other than Quentin Tarantino. Fulci directed more than 44 features over a nearly 40-year career, making Westerns, sex comedies, and even family films before lensing two classic giallos, Don't Torture a Duckling and The Psychic (which Tarantino once planned to remake). From there, Fulci went on to eventually make his legendary mark on the horror genre.

But the Pulp Fiction director's enthusiasm for Fulci's films has been crucial in making them more available stateside— in fact, Tarantino resurrected the director's 1981 Lovecraftian splatter epic The Beyond for U.S. audiences under his Rolling Thunder distribution company. The director even whipped out a 35mm print of Fulci's Zombie and insisted that his star, Brad Pitt, watch it during filming Inglourious Basterds, according to a Daily Beast interview with co-star Eli Roth.

If all this has piqued your curiosity, you can stream three of Tarantino's favorite Lucio Fulci zombie movies for free right now on Tubi and Pluto.

Quentin Tarantino Was Unabashed In His Love for the 'Godfather of Gore'

No one made horror movies like Lucio Fulci, before or after him — and that's where Tarantino's admiration of the so-called "godfather of gore" comes from. While fellow Italian horror auteurs Dario Argento and Mario Bava often pushed the envelope in terms of violence, their films were frequently self-consciously classy and dedicated to a vivid, comic book-style surrealism and color palette that made their gore go down easier. Fulci preferred to rub the audience's noses in gore you could practically smell through the screen.

That dedication, however, led to Fulci lensing some of the "greatest moments in cinema history," according to an interview Tarantino gave to Bret Easton Ellis. One of those unforgettable moments came in Zombie (originally titled Zombi 2, as it was intended to be an unofficial sequel to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead in Italy), when one of Fulci's putrid, rotting zombies falls into the water and battles a shark. The practically — and dangerously — rendered sequence is still startling to watch today.

Fulci also excelled at agonizingly slow, inevitable build-ups to what Tarantino called the "great money shots of all time," which ranged from (to name just a few): A woman's eye being slowly pierced by a splinter of wood, a man's head being slowly pierced by a drill lathe, a woman vomiting up her own intestines (achieved entirely via practical effects), and a man's face being eaten by spiders.

And Tarantino's love of Fulci extends to outright stealing from the maestro. The buried-alive sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 2 bears striking similarity to an early scene in City of the Living Dead, and the shot of assassin Gogo Yubari's bleeding eyes during her death in Vol. 1 also came straight out of that film. Tarantino also lifted music from the unforgettable score of Fulci's The Psychic, and even for a time expressed a desire to remake the film he called "one of my favorite thrillers."

Fulci's Horror Films Are Not for the Faint of Heart

Fulci's films move at an idiosyncratically slow pace that can feel like a dream — an effect that's helped by the eerie music of Fabio Frizzi, which sounds like the beat of an undead heart. The dubbing of even American actors (a common practice in Italian cinema of the time) can add to the films' bizarre atmosphere — perhaps most memorably in Fulci's House by the Cemetery, in which a young boy named Bob has the voice of a middle-aged woman.

Even fans of Romero's Dead series and modern gorefests like Terrifier may find their tolerance challenged by scenes in City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, as Fulci retains an admirable dedication to showing every second and every gory inch of every mutilation. It's an acquired taste and can come off as a bit odd at first in its matter-of-fact horror; there's little razzle-dazzle to most of his gore scenes, just pure disgust played out at an agonizing snail's pace.

The infamous intestine sequence in City of the Living Dead seems to go on for an eternity, as actor Daniela Doria, under the influence of a spectral undead priest, vomits up seemingly her entire digestive tract. Adding to the horror is the fact that Doria is clearly holding real bits of animal offal in her mouth and spitting them out, between shots of a dummy head when Fulci needed a higher volume of guts. And Zombie's legendary sequence of a woman's head being pulled toward a long shaft of wood is almost Hitchcockian in how long it's drawn out — until we see the splinter pierce her eye in queasily graphic detail.

Viewers looking to share in Tarantino's love of Fulci's splatter epics are in luck, as his three undisputed masterpieces — City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and Zombie — are all streaming free on Tubi and Pluto TV.