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Director: Lucio Fulci
Screenplay: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Lucio
Fulci
Cast: Catriona MacColl (as Liza Merril); David
Warbeck (as Dr. John McCabe); Cinzia Monreale (as Emily); Antoine Saint-John
(as Schweick); Veronica Lazar (as Martha)
A Night of a Thousand
Horror (Movies) #48
To enter the world of The Beyond is to go into one of Lucio Fulci's least conventional horror
films. Ironically this is his most well known film yet it is very
unconventional, a story of a gateway to Hell under an abandoned hotel but one
which slowly jettisons the entirety of logic bit-by-bit as the narrative goes
along. Especially when able to view it in a pristine form, it's a deceptively
alluring and haunting horror movie, its sepia prologue in 1920s Louisiana, when
a sorcerer keeping the gate closed is horribly murdered by a mob, starting the
events decade later, evoking a classical horror movie with its pace and music
only for the prolonged nailing of hands to a wall and melting with lime to
force you to remember this is an ultraviolent Italian film from the eighties. Paradoxically,
like many of Fulci's horror films,
this manages to be amongst the most lurid of Italian genre cinema at this time,
prolonged scenes of sloppy practical effects gore for its own sake, like a Herschell Gordon Lewis shocker, yet
amongst the most artistically beautiful from that era too. It confuses one's
perception especially as its semblance of plot - an English woman Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) gaining the cursed
hotel by inheritance - becomes infected by the more nightmarish content
immediately after a construction worker renovating the hotel falls off a
scaffold from fright.
Many aspects of The Beyond are utterly silly if scrutinised
by their own. The "realistic" spiders which crawl out from under a
library archive shelf and eat a man's face very slowly. The 'Do Not Entry' sign
in the hospital which belies the Louisiana on-location shoot with its palpable
sense of dread for the rest of the time. Many things in another content, where
there's no clear sense of irrationality as in The Beyond, would be ridiculous but, whether its fully planned out
or includes accidents, inside this film they make sense still, Fulci in his films possessing a tone of
real nightmares where nothing is entirely in control. Events inexplicably
happen, an unconscious body perfectly placed under where a glass of acid will
fall slowly on them, the dead in a hospital morgue rising up, and the small
snapshots of people in the town the film is set in all eventually disappearing
when Liza and doctor John McCabe (David
Warbeck), the later dragged into the events around the hotel, find
themselves eventually isolated in desolate corridors with only the dead as company.
It's clearly deliberate as much
as its the result of Fulci's
unconventional directorial style - very volatile and angry on set, a tendency
to go off-script completely - an empty road in the middle of real life
Louisiana haunting with only a blind woman with her dog, the ghostly Emily (Cinzia Monreale), in sight for Liza to
have to stop her car. An occasional distortion of the visual medium which
disrupts time clearly shows this, a moment of slow motion of a glass of acid
falling out of reality, or when Liza repeats the image of Emily running out of
a house over and over again, the film gladly able to break physical logic as it
goes along with clear intentions. When the heroes find they've gone through a
hospital door and end up back in the water drowned basement of the hotel, it's
clear The Beyond is going further
than even City of the Living Dead (1980),
Fulci's previous film, did in being irrational.
Even as a gory film with
prolonged shots of eye trauma and injury, the sense of immense decay and death
is far more unsettling, the obvious practical effects in Fulci's films always evoking sickness in a slow burn mood. Fabio Frizzi's score adds a sense of the
grandiose to this material but its severely, painfully even, melancholic and
depressed; even by the standards of Fulci's
nasty films this is nihilistic as the results don't bode well at all for those
who try to escape the curse of Hell opening up.
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Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist; Grotesque; Mindbender; Psychotronic; Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High
Likely the extreme of all of Lucio Fulci's career - A Cat In The Brain (1990) is another
contender but one of the other spectrum of the bizarre content in Fulci's filmography next to The Beyond
as his most dread inducing. Only the second of his unofficial Dead trilogy, the slow grower The House By The Cemetery (1981)
capping an incredible triptych of Italian horror films for any director, The Beyond is somehow, when you stop to
think about it, a film which manages to get away with countless things that
shouldn't work in films (one note characters, silly prosthetic effects, a lack
of explanation for what exactly the curse that devours the world is or any
sense of its scope) but is entirely disturbing and powerful nonetheless.
The reality of The Beyond, to match City of the Living Dead's teleporting
zombies, allows the dead to spring from any place, to rise from bodies of water
to slaughter the living, for a ghost to even die again through a horrible
moment of man's best friend turning on its owner. In many ways, a feint scent
of Lovecraftian horror in its view of irrational horror is here, the hotel only
one of seven gates to Hell, but entirely in the realm of religious dogma where
anyone can be silenced whether they are by the layers of death under the earth
in its own realm.
Personal Opinion:
Even by the standards of Italian
genre cinema, and how gonzo it could be, The
Beyond manages to be even more unpredictable on multiple viewers, still
strange and compelling as a result. What was once a film of acquired taste is
now something a lot more special to me.
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