Quella villa accanto al cimitero

Guest

Just one theory about one of the unexplained points of the movie: it seems that Dr. Boyle has been in the town already, or at least two characters think so (the woman who rents the house and the man who talks with him about Dr. Peterson in the library).

Also, it seems that Dr. Boyle and the babysitter know each other (remember the scene with the doctor, his wife and the babysitter: he looks at the girl, the girl looks at him, the wife notices it and both look at the floor). I believe that Dr. Boyle had some affair in the past with Anne, the babysitter, so this is not the first time he has been in the town.

His mentor, Dr. Peterson, was also his friend, so he could visit him and meet Anne then. Probably this relation was finished when Boyle moves to the house with his family and because of this reason Boyle and Anne keep the distance.

The fact that Dr. Peterson had a lover too (note that the woman who finishes in pieces before he comities suicide is not is wife but his lover) gives a sense of story repeating: the pupil moving to the same house, discovering the same secret and facing the same fate.

Of course my humble (maybe stupid) theory doesn't explain everything: Anne seems to know the secret in the cellar, but if she really knows... how could she get that information? And how can she dare to go downstairs? Maybe it has some relation with the words of Dr. Peterson in the tape ("the evil in this house makes me afraid but also fascinated...

I want to know, I want to know!"... or similar). Anyway this is a very obscure point of the script. But the scene that makes more nonsense is that with the wife going to the kitchen and seeing Anne cleaning the blood on the floor. She is not surprised, not scared. Nothing happens, Anne is just cleaning lots of blood, this happens every day in every normal home!

I think Anne and Dr. Boyle both knew each other and were working together against their colleague Dr. Petersen. Since they were researching nightmares and insanity, I suspect that they were trying to drive Petersen mad by setting things up in the basement that would make him go bonkers and lead him to commit suicide.

What neither one of them expected was the arrival (or participation) of the REAL Dr. Fruedstein. So Anne was moping up the blood and seemed to have knowledge of the house's dark history, but she believed it was the work of Boyle and was caught off guard when Fruedstein murdered her.

That's also why Boyle both seeks Fruedstein's grave and subsequently burns the tape - it had evidence for things he was doing, but it also revealed a slaughter Petersen describes that he knew he had nothing to do with... hence, he realizes too late that Dr. Fruedstein is real and puts all the blame on the zombie when he shows up at the end and explains things to his family. What was meant to be a horrible scientific experiment with Petersen as the guinea pig transformed into an all-out slaughter from Dr. Fruedstein.