The Beyond

Lucio Fulci's The Beyond is an Italian gore and supernatural horror film of incomparably bizarre, surrealistic, and disgusting qualities. Released in 1981 under an unwieldy title (E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà, in English, rendered, "...And you will live in terror! The afterlife"), and was later released stateside as The Beyond, albeit in an edited version. It was banned in Britain and labeled a "Video Nasty."

And it's no wonder. Minute for minute, this film has a lot of gross-out special effects and bloody, splatterific good times: nails hammered into skulls, acid eating away the faces of corpses, and canines eating out the throats of their former masters. There's a lot of sickness here. The whole film seems to be just a thin veneer cast over many good special effects set pieces. The bizarre, disconnected, dream-like quality, the weird cinematographic compositions of flat plains shown in four-point perspective, and other atrocious touches, lend it a certain avant-garde gravitas. Or so it would appear the way Fulci was stabbing (no pun) with his directorial pikestaff. But, no, we realize in the end it's just exploitation, after all.

A woman inherits a hotel in New Orleans wherein an atrocious murder was committed by a vengeful, superstitious mob, fifty years or more before. The victim was a painter ("Shweick", played by Anton Saint-John) residing in Room 36, who painted dead bodies or something to act as a bulwark against the encroachments of the forces of evil, who threaten at the "Seven Gates to Hell" to come forth and end the world. The painter is dispatched to Neverneverland by an angry mob, who fuck him up royally before nailing him to the wall and walling him up in a heavy Edgar Allan Poe trip. Flash forward to 1980 or thereabouts.

So Liza (Catriona MacColl) inherits this hotel, which is the gateway to hell. A worker falls off a ladder after catching a glimpse of a ghostly woman with white eyes. He bleeds all over the place and is taken to a morgue. Someone comes to visit him with their daughter, a girl with two long braids. The mother dies mysteriously, and a bottle of acid drips on her face.

Okay. Got that? I'm just going to lay out what I can remember and find entertaining. Okay?

Someone gets a nail hammered in through the back of their skull. An eye pops out on the edge of the nail (or rather spike), and it's kind of cool. There's more of this madness where that came from, albeit, it's done to characters we care little about because we can't tell why they're there, what their function is, who they are, etc.

An architect ("Martin," played by Michele Mirabella) goes to the County Records to try and find the "Book of Eibon" (which was something invented by Clark Ashton Smith I thought, or somebody else that was penpals with H.P. Lovecraft) and a lightning bolt or the power of PURE D EVIL knocks him off of his ladder. He falls to the floor and is devoured by tarantulas who EAT HIS FACE AND EYES. No bullstuff.

It's a delicious little gratuitous scene. But then, you could describe ALL of The Beyond that way. Just a string of such scenes strung together. Is there any meat on the bones? Well, yes, in the sense that the movie manages to be both eminently forgettable and very entertaining simultaneously. Just don't expect to be able to remember much of it the next day.

At one point, Liz and a fellow named Dr. John (David Warbeck) go to a hospital and are pursued by shuffling, bloody zombies, and the girl with the braids gets a shotgun blast to the face (Fangoria used to run an ad depicting this in the back of their magazine, and I was hoping for a closeup of the shot in the film, but, no, no dice). They go down to the basement but find utter desolation, and realize they're in Hell.

Okay, enough. The Beyond is passable, gory entertainment for the Grand Guignol set. Otherwise, it's a lost, hapless mess of a movie, but one with an undeniable undercurrent of surrealistic menace. And that's perhaps going above and, well, beyond what I should.

Addendum: Lucio Fulci directed part of the David Keith-helmed movie massacre (as in, slaughtering the art of cinema) H.P. Lovecraft "adaptation" The Curse, starring "Star Trek" and "Big Bang Theory" actor Wil Wheaton and his little sister. Wheaton has penned a blog post accusing the makers of the film of child endangerment, exploitation, and outright abuse, including cutting them, throwing Wheaton in cow manure, working both children far beyond what decency and the law would allow, and keeping them in deplorable conditions in Italy during the shoot. Wheaton claims he was sucked into doing the execrable film by his abusive parents and a "Middle Eastern" sleazoid movie producer with a holographic spider floating over his desk.

If you like, you can go and find that blog post. Should be easy enough. I don't have anything to add except that Fulci's part in the whole affair seems to have been directing a single scene wherein Amy Wheaton, Wil's sister, is attacked by chickens.

Fulci, who when not directing scads of low-tier Italian horror shockers was obviously a rocket scientist and a member of Mensa, decided it would be a good idea to throw LIVE chickens at the little girl. You know, because realism, man.

Live chickens.

Note: We elected not to post the movie, even though it's available on YouTube. It's full of lots of gory stuff that is NSFW and NOT for the little ones. If you want, go to YouTube and watch it. Instead, we post the trailer.

The Beyond (1981) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]

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