Quentin Tarantino on the red carpet Image via Shutterstock By Erik Hawkins Published Oct 15, 2026, 12:08 AM 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. Sign in to your Collider account Add Us Add on Google Preferred Source Google Discover Summary Generate a summary of this story Like Like follow Follow followed Followed Listen Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap Explicitly or not, modern genre filmmakers have taken more than a few cues from Italian gore maestro Lucio Fulci . From frank (and dragged-out) eyeball trauma to zombies that look as moldering and vile as possible, much of recent horror history has the master's hand quietly lingering over it. But no director has so explicitly sung Fulci's praises as Quentin Tarantino . His filmography is shot through with so many blink-and-you'll-miss-it Fulci tributes that it's staggering, though with Kill Bill Vol. 1 , he more explicitly cribbed from him. And for decades, Tarantino has even openly explored remaking one of Fulci's lesser-known works, a 1977 giallo-meets-supernatural film called The Psychic .
Originally given the more evocative title of Sette note in nero , The Psychic is one of Fulci's more restrained films, especially considering the Lovecraftian gore epics he'd soon deliver in the 1980s, like The Beyond and City of the Living Dead . It's a classy, claustrophobic, genuinely eerie piece of suspense film-making that follows an upscale housewife who discovers a literal skeleton in her husband's basement, and then uses her long-gestating psychic gift to discover the truth — even if she may not like what she finds. The Psychic features an unforgettable score by longtime Fulci composer Fabio Frizzi (one piece of which Kill Bill fans will instantly recognize), lush cinematography, a ton of surprises, and plentiful '70s fashions — so it's little wonder Tarantino wanted to put his own spin on it.
Jennifer O'Neill as the protagonist in Lucio Fulci's giallo classic 'The Psychic' Image via Cinecompany Opening with a characteristically Italian cinema scene of a woman throwing herself off a cliff (close-ups of a dummy and all), The Psychic then reveals that to be a flashback for Virginia (played by the charismatic former model Jennifer O'Neill ), who's married in the present day to powerful businessman Francesco (spaghetti Western veteran Gianni Garko ). Virginia soon experiences further visions — this time, of a Cask of Amontillado -style murder of another woman, all lensed in classic, fragmented giallo fashion . . . and when she unearths a literal skeleton in the walls of her husband's vacation home, she decides to dive in further.
Fulci films Virginia's investigation and psychological unraveling with a remarkable sense of calm and dread, obviously echoing Hitchcock with its protagonist no one believes, but also putting his own surreal spin on things. From sudden apparitions to crash-zooms on key pieces of evidence, The Psychi…