The Beyond (1981)

Media Reviewed: US DVD (Grindhouse)

Director: Lucio Fulci

Starring: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale, Al Cliver

Back when I was around 17 and I really started to embrace the horror genre, looking into the more obscure titles that most people wouldn't have heard of, I thought to myself that I must see The Beyond, a title hailed by many horror aficionados as a classic. So I bought myself the UK DVD from Vipco, which was in the incorrect aspect ratio and didn't have particularly good video or sound quality, but at least it was uncut. On my initial viewing I was rather disappointed - I loved the gore and various scenes in the film, but I felt confused as to the plot. I thought that maybe I'd missed something, and that I had to go back to the film a second time to try and work out was going on.

I was missing the point. Being seven or eight years older now, having seen a great many more horror films (and Italian horror films in particular) I've realised how a film like The Beyond should be approached. If you're watching this film trying to work out what is going on in the plot you're missing out on what the film really has to offer. The new US DVD release (which is an excellent DVD, I must say) arrived through my letterbox yesterday and I felt that this film deserved another re-assessment from me.

What amounts to a plot in the film basically revolves around a woman who has inherited a hotel that turns out to be one of the seven doors to hell. That's pretty much it. What ensues, however, is very atmospheric, visually striking and outrageously violent. A man is nailed to a wall and dissolved with quicklime, a woman's head is forced onto a nail in the wall resulting in her eyeball popping out from its socket and a man is slowly devoured by tarantulas. However, for me the standout visual moment in the film occurs when a woman, visiting her husbands corpse in a morgue, has her face dissolved by acid and then a mixture of blood and acid ominously creeps along the floor towards her onlooking daughter, all set to a weirdly fitting score by Fabio Frizzi. The film essentially consists of various plot contrivances in order to set up these gruesome scenarios.

Whilst the film is visually excellent, these plot contrivances do distract, especially to the less forgiving viewer. A scene where a couple of doctors strap a corpse up to an oscilloscope will leave the viewer scratching their head (quite what the doctors were expecting to happen I don't quite know). Essentially this is just set up so that when the doctors leave the room, we can see that the corpse is still living, as a heart beat starts. These kind of bizarre occurences happen throughout the film.

The acting isn't particularly good, especially with Catriona MacColl's dubious American accent, and a lot of the dialogue is outright absurd. There are also a couple of derivative plot points in the film taken from films such as Suspiria and Dawn of the Dead. Whilst to fully enjoy The Beyond, narrative and plot need to be ignored as much as possible, but in my opinion these flaws do prevent it from being a classic. I would absolutely recommend this film to any horror fan, but for those looking for an interesting story with a good narrative structure, like me aged 17, will have a number of issues with this film.