THE BEYOND is undoubtedly one of Lucio Fulci's greatest films, a seminal piece whose popularity has not only crossed borders but also decades with great ease. It is a nightmarish piece, a film full of transgressive images and grotesquerie that might be blunted after decades of special effects advances but still manages to tug at the more delicate of tummies.
A simple plot synopsis would seem to reveal it's weakness: In 1927, a painter named Schweik is tortured and crucified in the cellar of a Louisiana hotel. In 1981, Liza Merril (played by the wonderful Catriona MacColl) arrives to claim the hotel as part of her inheritance. Once renovation begin, however, terrible things begin to happen, including the death of a painter and a plumber who was called in to fix a rather bad leak in the basement. When the plumbers body is found by a servant, another corpse turns up, that of the painter, Schweik.
Liza has a chance meeting with a blind woman named Emily while driving. Back at Emily's home, she warns Liza about the hotel. Later, when they meet each other again, this time at the increasingly creepy hotel, Emily tells her about the reality of the situation: that the hotel is actually built over one of the seven gates of hell and that Schweik was a warlock entrusted to guarding the doorway when he was killed. He even lived in the hotel, in room 36.
Liza enters the room the next day and finds an old book, a single word written on it's cover: Eibon. In typical horror movie fashion, something evil awaits her in the bathroom and she has a freak out, running out of the room and into the arms of John McCabe (David Warbeck), a local Doctor she met when her painter took a fatal spill. She tells John all about Emily and her stories but John points out a strange flaw in her story: no woman named lives in the house Liza describes.
Simple enough. But the threadbare construction of the narrative here works to Fulci's advantage.
Having already tossed off the somewhat avant-garde CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, Fulci takes that films nonsensical structure a step forward. Once the door to hell has been opened, evil begins to seep it's way into the lives of the characters and, what's more, into the narrative of the film itself. This breaking down of the barriers between reality and nightmare allow Fulci to concentrate almost completely on the shocks while leaving the more logical progression of the film in their wake. Slowly the narrative begins to unravel until the only thing that's left, the only solution at all, is the eventual succumbing. By the films end, all hope is lost and our heroes are stranded in what will eventually become of the rest of the world. This is an extremely fatalist film and a work of sheer nihilism. Fulci has never been one for happy endings, but here his work fully embraces misanthropy.
As an experiment in atmosphere, this movie succeeds. The cinematography by Sergio Salvati captures the mood and ambiance of a nightmare with graceful ease and is superbly heightened by Fabio Frizzi's haunting score (though I could have done without the SUSPIRIA-esque whispering beneath the already corny tarantula scene). Fulci's post-SEVEN NOTES direction is usually a mixed bag but here he never stumbles through a scene or goes zoom crazy. The film feels composed and well-executed. If this was not a true labor of love for the filmmaker, he certainly gives the impression that it was.
Now for the bad news, the one bit that has always caused people to give me grief. The special effects by Giannetto De Rossi are quite awful at times. A rather messy dog attack, the aforementioned tarantula scene, a faceful of glass and a rather large hole in a little girl's head are all shocking ideas, but the execution is sorely lacking. A minor hiccup but one that threatens to derail every scene they're the focus of. And while many like to bring up the films production date (which was 1981) as an excuse for the shoddy effects, I'd like to point out that Savini was busy in the States making THE PROWLER the same year and, in comparison, out did everything on display in THE BEYOND. The effects aren't a movie killer. They're just weak.
But that's all for my complaints. THE BEYOND deserves all the praise it gets. I'll probably return to this film a little later on, maybe as part of a Fulci filmography feature but for now I'll leave it rest.
Highly recommended.
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