The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) Review

There’s something about Italian zombie films from a certain era – in The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue’s case, the mid-70s – that have an indefinable vibe to them.

Maybe it’s the litany of lengthy alternative titles (this one was also released as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie in English, No profanar el sueño de los muertos, which translates as Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead, in Spanish, and Don't Open the Window). Maybe it’s the surreal, disjointed narratives. Maybe it’s the eerie, hallucinatory, almost vibratory quality of the soundtrack. Or maybe it’s simply a mix of the lot – the off-kilter performances, the isolated locales, or the way the pacing of a film like this one, veering wildly from spells of complete inactivity to sudden, explosive violence, vies to unsettle and disturb.

Well, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue takes these aforementioned influences, pairs them with a Spanish filmmaker, and takes the action to the wide green rolling hills of northwest England. (Yes, the film’s title isn’t just an attempt to latch onto the name of a prominent English city to sell more stubs: it actually takes place near Manchester!)

What we get is a total tonal mashup.

Narratively, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue spins elements of the procedural into a tapestry of messages encompassing the environment, the counterculture, and the perils of unchecked scientific experimentation.

Stylistically, Grau walks a line between the desire to frame his film as punch-packing social commentary alongside the – apparently equally strong – urge to indulge in as many gruesome set pieces as he can.

And, visually, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue has a gritty, realistic feel of a police drama – while also channeling the gothic, decaying ambience typical of Italian cult genre films. It’s a bit like Midsomer Murders crossed with a film George A. Romero might have made as a student – a little wonky at times, but with an invasive, unsettling vibe only the bleak, rain-soaked English countryside can serve up.

What's more, Grau’s use of the English setting isn’t just for show – it’s integral to the film’s dissonant mood. There’s something about the contrast between the quaint, bucolic village life and the grotesque, stumbling undead that makes everything feel even more unnerving. It’s the kind of setting where the living and the dead can coexist – where the seemingly picturesque countryside conceals a festering rot just beneath the surface, and where reality – and the ecology that supports and sustains us – is stretched perilously thin. Oh, and, as the film’s title suggests, it’s not just the environment that’s rotting.

Grau’s eponymous living dead zombies are practically seeping with decay – their crimson, bloodshot eyes and ashen skin making them spectral, almost ghostlike, more haunting than ravenous, yet with the same slow, shuffling gait that marks this out as one of the post Night of the Living Dead cash ins. (Albeit, for my money, one of the best – and certainly one of the most interesting.)

This movie – which turned half a century last year – is taking some big swings. But does it hit home? I think it does. Let's find out why.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue Review

The setup is tight, crisp, and classic 70s horror – a restless drifter and a stranded woman, an eerie rural backdrop, and a small-town populace that’s either oblivious or outright hostile.

George (Ray Lovelock), a long-haired ‘hippie’ type (he cares for the environment, which in the language of 1974 made him just that), heads north for the weekend. At a petrol station, he meets Edna (Cristina Galbó), a woman who accidentally reverses over his motorbike. After some hemming and hawing, the two agree to get Edna to where she needs to be first – a town called Southgate, where her sister Katie awaits – before dropping George off.

On the way, they struggle to find the cottage, and George goes off wandering – lecturing some local farmers on the ecological ill effects of chemical usage in the process. It’s perhaps the only example of this film being ‘ahead of its time’ in any measurable way, but it’s moot – there are no chemicals involved, the farmers explain, but rather an experimental machine being deployed to kill insects through ultrasonic radiation.

The explanation The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) gives for its undead is surprisingly cohesive, coherent, and even – dare I say – plausible? (Well, for a zombie movie.)

But before George can fully grasp what’s going on, Edna is attacked in the car by a tall, shuffling man. Grau’s camera lingers on a closeup of the zombie’s crimson irises, and it’s a chilling scene – albeit one ripped shamelessly from Romero’s 1968 masterpiece. Edna gets away and finds George, but when she alerts him to the figure, it’s gone. They were in a big, open field without many places to hide, and the zombie was slow moving – so it’s hard to see how it could’ve gotten away. But it adds to the spectral, ghostlike qualities of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue’s zombies, which – unlike Romero’s lot – don’t seem to be motivated primarily by the urge to eat flesh. Instead, they’re more interested in simply engaging in brutal murder – not dissimilar to the unhinged undead of The Video Dead (1987), although far, far less silly – and expanding their ranks. (That said, there is an excellent scene in a cemetery that chilled me to the bone, and proves these zombies most certainly aren’t against chowing down on their victims when the mood takes them!)

The red eyes of one of the eponymous living dead of Manchester.

A quick word on The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue’s zombies. Interestingly, they’re more than the mindless mob of Romero’s earlier zombies, and perhaps more akin to the more organised undead rabble The Return of the Living Dead (1985) popularised, and that Romero explored with later iterations of his zombies in Land of the Dead (2005). The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue’s undead are physically strong, able to use tools – re-deploying a large crucifix-shaped tombstone as a battering ram, or wielding axes – and smart.

They’re capable of playing dead (ha, ha) when it suits them, and teaming up to disarm and gain an advantage over their living prey. They act with premeditation and presence of mind, and seem even to have mysterious paranormal qualities, such as not showing up in photos and that aforementioned ability to vanish into thin air. There’s also something profoundly cult-like in the way these zombies add to their numbers – in one scene, a zombie takes a dab of blood from a living victim and gently, almost lovingly, daubs it onto the face of a cadaver.

It’s a far cry from the way such an infection spreads in a typical zombie movie – through bites, where it propagates more as a mindless byproduct of the zombies’ rampaging, rather than as a purposeful, preconceived act – and only serves to underline the clever, cunning nature of Grau’s undead.

While all this is taking place, Grau begins splicing some scenes from the life of Edna’s sister, Katie (Jeannine Mestre) – who is addicted to heroin – at a cottage where she lives with her husband Martin (José Lifante), a tortured artist type who’s trying to wean her off the drug. This flipping back and forth feels a little clumsy and jarring at first, but things get interesting when Katie is attacked by the zombie that came for Edna earlier. The zombie kills Martin and, like the breaking of the idiomatic dam, it catalyses all the bloodshed and mayhem the film – which, up until this point, is remarkably sedate – promised. From there, we’re introduced to the Inspector (Arthur Kennedy) as he pursues the murderer: suspecting a cult of Manson-like acolytes; not suspecting the living dead. And with that, Grau sets out his stall – all that’s left for us to do is sit back and enjoy the mayhem as it unfolds.

Edna (Cristina Galbó) and George (Ray Lovelock) in The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)

The film doesn’t stick the landing with every tonal shift – some of the procedural scenes feel too straight-laced, too protracted, compared to the more feverish horror sequences. But there’s a hypnotic quality to its rhythms, a haunting sense of inevitability as Grau steadily ratchets up the tension. And for every awkward line delivery or overly on-the-nose cop character, there’s a beautifully framed shot of a corpse lumbering through the misty countryside – or a squirm-inducing sequence of rubbery, flesh-ripping gore – that makes the occasional tonal clash feel oddly forgivable. Plus, the film really nails the ending. It’s strong and schlocky in a revenge-fuelled, Tales from the Crypt kind of way and, though it’s a little implausible (you’ll see what I mean when you watch it) it’s still a lot of fun.

Despite my copy being Italian dubbed – although the actors were delivering their lines in English – there was something about the film’s British setting that helped this film hit home in a particularly satisfying way for me. It’s not even just the lush green countryside, or the shots of the Inspector’s police running around in those instantly recognisable uniforms – it’s the uniquely British sensibility. It’s the way a local doctor – having seen recently born babies emerge with violent, homicidal tendencies, who is alerted by George to the ultrasonic radiation machine – dismisses valid concerns over the machine with lines like “It’s never wise to exaggerate”. Setting a zombie flick in this kind of environment, then, is in many ways a masterstroke – because the inherent politeness, deference to authority, and unwillingness to ‘rock the boat’ of the English populace provides such a fertile backdrop for a living dead plague to take hold. And, as it happens, that’s exactly what plays out – the authorities, stuck in a fixed mindset and unable (or unwilling) to believe what’s going on, continue to dispute and disbelieve…until it’s too late.

50 years on, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue may not pack the raw, revolutionary punch of Romero’s work, but it’s a vivid, deeply strange, and above all entertaining film – one that lingers in the mind long after the final frame. (Which, incidentally, is a closeup of the infectious machine’s red motor whirring – calling to mind the image of a police siren or klaxon and, no doubt, foreshadowing the apocalyptic dangers it’s sure to continue causing going forward.) For my money , The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue – or, if you prefer, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie – is a very strong addition to the historical zombie canon. (And one which grows only more so with the oeuvre of subpar zombie films that only seems to bloat and burgeon with every passing year.) Because, while Grau’s film may stumble in its attempts to be both a cautionary tale and a zombie splatterfest, there’s something undeniably compelling about the way it shuffles through both worlds, never quite at peace with itself – or with the dead. It's a strange, contradictory piece of work; but somehow, in some way, that’s exactly what makes it so hard to shake.

Watch it now, thank me later, and, if you enjoyed this The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue review, please drop me a comment – or, better yet, share this piece of writing with your similarly horror-inclined friends and associates.

Oh, and if zombie horror is as much your thing as it is mine, there’s plenty more zombie movie reviews – new and classic – to rip your proverbial gnashers into. How about Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990)? Perhaps the splattery goodness of Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992) is more your thing, or the intellectual leanings of Pontypool (2008).

No? Well, you’ve got a choice: the over-the-top, balls to the wall madness of Demons (1985), or the more restrained, Scandinavian vibes of Handling the Undead (2024). Laters!