The Beyond (1981) Grindhouse Releasing/Horror RT: 87 minutes No MPAA rating (extreme graphic violence and gore) Director: Lucio Fulci Screenplay: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Lucio Fulci Music: Fabio Frizzi Cinematography: Sergio Salvati Release date: December 1, 1983 (US)/June 12, 1998 (US re-release) Cast: Katherine MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale (as Sarah Keller), Antoine Saint-John, Veronica Lazar, Larry Ray (as Anthony Flees), Tonino Pulci, Al Cliver, Michele Mirabella, Giampaolo Saccarola, Maria Pia Marsala, Laura De Marchi, Lucio Fulci (uncredited). Box Office: $123,843 (US) Body Count: 22 (12 people + 10 zombies) AKA: 7 Doors of Death
Rating: ****
I first saw Lucio Fulci’s horror masterpiece The Beyond in December ’83 under the title 7 Doors of Death. It was a truncated version with most of the gore edited out, a different music score and a shorter running time (82 minutes). I liked it just fine at the time even though I instinctively knew something was missing. About 15 years later, the original uncut version found its way to US audiences thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s now-defunct distribution company Rolling Thunder and Grindhouse Releasing. It played the midnight movie circuit for a short while before hitting video which is how I saw it. It absolutely floored me. I never realized what a tour de force (or should I say “gore de force”) it was until I saw it in its intended form. It’s my favorite installment of Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy.
The Beyond opens with a sepia-toned prologue set at an old hotel in Louisiana circa 1927. Torch-bearing vigilantes show up in rowboats and cars to deal with a mysterious guest, artist Schweick (John of Duck, You Sucker), they deem an “ungodly warlock”. They drag him from his room as he puts the finishing touches on his latest painting, a depiction of hell or “the Beyond”. He tries to warn the lynch mob of impending evil coming from the hotel being built over one of the “Seven Doors of Evil”, but they don’t listen. Instead, they beat him with heavy chains that rip the flesh from his body, crucify him to the basement wall with rusty spikes and dissolve his flesh with quicklime. We see it all close-up in graphic detail. It’s easily one of the coolest horror movie openings EVER!
Fulci then takes us to present-day 1981 where Liza (MacColl, City of the Living Dead) plans to reopen the cursed hotel after inheriting it from an uncle. Altogether now, let’s say it. BAD IDEA! She should know this by the series of accidents and horrible deaths that occur during renovation. A painter is badly injured falling off a scaffold after seeing a pair of glowing eyes staring at him from one of the rooms. Next, Joe the Plumber (Pulci) dies while trying to deal with the flooding situation in the basement. A grotesque hand reaches out from behind a wall and gouges out his eye (again, in graphic close-up). This is followed by a series of confusing events that culminates in a zombie invasion at the local hospital.
Perhaps this would be a good time to discuss the roles of hero and heroine in a horror movie. The “hero” in The Beyond is local doctor John McCabe (Warbeck, The Black Cat) who’s just as baffled as the “heroine” Liza. Their character types generally have two jobs. The first is to figure out exactly what the hell is going on. In this particular case, it’s an exercise in futility. Try as they might, they cannot attach a rational explanation to the strange events going on around them. This would include the mysterious blind woman, Emily (Keller/Monreale, Beyond the Darkness), who keeps showing up to warn Liza of the grave mistake she’s making in reopening the hotel. Their second job is to put a stop to what’s going on. I refer you back to their first job. How can they stop what’s going on if they don’t know what’s going on until it’s too late? The doctor comes up with this brilliant solution: “I’m gonna call the FBI.” I didn’t know they had a department dealing with supernatural phenomena. It’s true, you do learn something new every day.
The plot of The Beyond doesn’t make a lick of sense, yet it’s brilliant at the same time. Fulci typically doesn’t rely on narrative coherence to tell his tales of terror. His movies tend to play out like bizarre nightmares. That’s how he finds his way under the collective skin of the audience. The Beyond is easy enough to follow, but hard to explain. Things happen without rhyme or reason. For instance, what’s up with hotel employees Martha (Lazar, Inferno) and Arthur (Saccarola, The House by the Cemetery)? Who are they? Where did they come from? All we get in the way of an explanation is when Liza says that they came with the hotel. Fulci never offers more than a very basic explanation of what’s behind the supernatural goings-on. In this case, one of the Seven Doors of Evil has been opened. It says in the ancient evil book of Eibon, “Woe be unto him who opens one of the seven gateways to Hell, because through that gateway, evil will invade the world.” Basically, it means all hell will break loose with grisly deaths, people suddenly going blind and the dead rising to attack the living.
Fulci isn’t one to skimp on gore, a fact evident in The Beyond. There’s plenty of it on hand here. In one scene, Joe’s widow (De Marchi) shows up at the morgue with her young daughter Jill (Marsala) in tow. Something happens while she’s dressing her husband and she ends up on the floor where she gets a face full of corrosive acid from a self-spilling jar while Jill looks on in silent terror. This is one of several gory highlights. Another shows tarantulas eating the eyes, lips and tongue of architect Martin (Mirabella) after he falls from a ladder in the local library. We get to see somebody’s head slammed onto a spike which exits through the victim’s eye poking it out from behind. Somebody has their throat ripped open and face torn off by the blind girl’s seeing-eye dog. A girl gets her head blown off (in graphic close-up, of course). A guy gets it via shards of broken glass to the face. Many zombies are shot. Most, if not all, of this is absent from the R-rated 1983 cut.
Like most Italian-made horror movies, the acting and dialogue in The Beyond are bad. I’ll grant that MacColl is easy on the eyes, but it doesn’t even begin to cover up her tendency to overact to a ridiculous degree. In a movie filled with howlers, she gets the second best worst line (the first is the FBI line) when she tells Martin, “You have carte blanche, but not a black check.” Here’s another. Emily actually says to Liza “We blind see things more clearly.” Okay, just one more. In the opening scene, Schweick says, “Be careful what you do… because this hotel was built over one of the Seven Doors of Evil- and only I can save you.” Oh, PLEASE! More than once, The Beyond spills over into unintentional comedy due to dopey dialogue. The funniest scene, however, doesn’t involve spoken dialogue. Look at the scene where Joe’s widow and Jill arrive at the hospital morgue. A sign on the wall reads “DO NOT ENTRY”. LOL! Goofy stuff like this adds to its appeal.
The Beyond is, in the vernacular of 15YO Movie Guy 24/7, AWESOME! It’s so screwy and surreal; I can’t help but love it. I love Fulci’s style. He relies heavily on giallo motifs while borrowing heavily from Sergio Leone with his frequent close-ups of characters’ eyes. There are some incredible shots courtesy of Sergio Salvati’s beautiful cinematography. The score by Fabio Frizzi, along with the piano piece played by Emily, gives The Beyond a haunting quality. The ending is freaking FREAKY! It still blows my mind. One look at The Beyond is all you need to understand what’s wrong with today’s horror movies. They employ too much restraint whereas Fulci employs none at all. I think he’s brilliant and so is this movie. I’d even say it’s the late filmmaker’s finest work.
