For the life of me, I can't decide whether The Beyond is a milestone of cinematic horror or a waste of celluloid.
Just look at this. I mean, look at it.
Just look at this. I mean, look at it.
Isn't that one of the most utterly compelling movie posters you've ever seen? It's exactly the sort of garish, macabre sleeve art that stared down at you from the top shelf of back-street video shops when you were a child; the kind that offered something illicit with the added promise of endless nightmares.
I first saw The Beyond on a retrograde VHS copy when I was 14-years-old and, frankly, it scared the living shit out of me. I've always found the idea of what I call recursive horror (ie. stories where characters are unable to escape their predicament) extremely disturbing, and The Beyond certainly delivers on that score. Just to give you an idea how effective it is (and I'm spoilering this bitch until it bleeds), as the film reaches its grisly climax, two of the principal characters step through a portal leading to a mist-strewn netherworld outside time and space, the landscape littered by rotting corpses. No matter which direction they run, it always leads back to the same place. After one last desperate attempt to escape, they're rendered blind and gradually fade from existence.
Young pups such as The Blair Witch Project, Donnie Darko and The Witch have attempted to steal The Beyond's thunder in the Most Enigmatic Horror Movie Resolution Ever stakes, but this is genuinely iconic stuff. In fact, genre fans have spent the last thirty years trying to decipher exactly what the ending means. I read a surprisingly well-written review of The Beyond on IMDB recently (that sounds arch, but some of the contributors on there have the literacy skills of a block of Edam) which offered the rather pithy observation that the protagonists have gazed into the depths of fear itself and, through their symbolic blindness, have nothing left to fear.
I like that argument. Perhaps director Lucio Fulci was commenting on the relationship between viewer and genre. After all, there are only so many eyes we can see gouged out, throats excavated and intestines trailing across the floor before we reach apathy and acceptance. Perhaps the more we see, the more desensitised we become.
Perhaps.
Except, because of its thought-provoking, imaginative finale, it's easy to read more into The Beyond than there actually is.
On the whole, this is a fairly standard horror tale. For the uninitiated, it's about a hotel in New Orleans that was once home to a painter/warlock who opened a portal to Hell in the basement. Sixty years later, the building is bequeathed to a bright, spunky blonde from New York who intends to go into the hospitality trade... I would say you can guess what happens next, and you can to a certain extent, but any semblance of logic is thrown out the window until you have no choice but resign yourself to the demented carnage that follows. (Notable scenes include a zombified eleven-year-old literally having her face shot off, in graphic detail; a man falling off a ladder and having his face ravaged by flesh-eating tarantulas, in graphic detail; and a woman having her throat torn out by an Alsatian, in gra- oh, you get the picture.)
The Beyond is the second part of Lucio Fulci's unofficial "Gates of Hell" trilogy, which kicks off in typically gonzo fashion with City of the Living Dead (1980) and concludes with the camp hysteria of The House by the Cemetery (1981): all three films held together by Scottish actress Catriona MacColl in the lead role (albeit playing different characters) and the worlds of the living and the dead bleeding into each other. Outside Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and George Romero's Living Dead trilogies, Fulci's exploitative triad of flesh frenzy and vomit-inducing viscera remains one of the key staples of horror cinema; quite an achievement given Fulci came relatively late to the genre.
Having honed his talents on a number of commercially successful Giallo movies such as Beatrice Cenci (1969) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), Fulci ran into trouble for his perceived criticisms of the Catholic church and found himself blacklisted by the Italian film industry. A chance opportunity to direct the brilliantly loopy Zombie Flesh Eaters in 1979, originally conceived as a cash-in on Dawn of the Dead, led to a career renaissance and Fulci inheriting 1950s schlock-meister Herschel Gordon Lewis' title "The Godfather of Gore."
It's tempting to see The Beyond as the point Fulci boxed himself into a corner, when his reputation as a purveyor of ultra-violent horror cinema started to overtake artistic integrity. It's been well-documented that Fulci drew heavily on the influence of Surrealist art while writing The Beyond (in particular the Absurdist drama of Antonin Artaud, and the Dalí-Buñuel short film Un Chien Andalou), and the recent success of Stanley Kubrick's wonderfully eerie adaptation of The Shining certainly cast a long shadow over the production - but there's a part of me that wonders if Fulci's film is consciously anchoring itself to wilfully esoteric sources to excuse its narrative incoherence and over-reliance on gore effects (which, it must be said, are excellent).
The Beyond positions itself as a haunted house movie but halfway through transforms into a zombie film, nullifying several plot strands that are subsequently left unresolved. I quite like the contrast between the ravenous hordes of the undead set against the sterility of the hospital morgue in the final sequence, but the film just uses this as a visual set-piece with little or no thought given to why they should be there in the first place. We're also expected to swallow the old "Get 'em in the Head" method of zombie dispatch, which wouldn't be so much of a problem if we didn't know they have the ability to appear and disappear at will. Despite this little grumble, no review of The Beyond would be complete without mentioning the unintentionally hilarious moments where David Warbeck, having discovered that headshots prove fatal to the reanimated menaces, shoots them anywhere but their heads. As a result, we're left wondering if he's a sadistic bastard or just incredibly stupid. But then, characterisation's all over the place here: motivation and purpose scattered to the winds to meet the body-count quota.
A perfect example of the film's haphazard approach to character is Martha the maid. Is she complicit in the ghastly death of Joe the plumber? She clearly knows there's something horrible in the hotel basement, and doesn't bat an eyelid when she stumbles upon Joe's mangled corpse. She does, however, seem genuinely surprised later on when the erstwhile plumber returns from the dead and impales her head on a large, rusty nail. (Mind you, that would be a bit of a shock for anyone.) The point is, if she's not involved in the horrors taking place, why does she act so suspiciously? Still, at least the film tries to bring her into the story. Spare a thought for poor Martin the architect, whose sole function is to discover something unusual in the hotel blueprints and, as mentioned earlier, have a scuttle of pissed off spiders chow down on his facial features (who, coincidentally, squeak charmingly as they do so). I'd have torn up my Equity card.
There's always a gap between intention and execution, and while The Beyond does have a bizarre, dream-like quality that sometimes veers towards Surrealism, it's largely a dumb, often incomprehensible jumble of grotesque images and half-baked ideas. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's completely without merit.
The New Orleans setting bursts with sumptuous colours, the screen awash with vibrant reds, luscious greens and radiant yellows to create a visual counterpoint between the worlds of the living and the dead. When we get the vision of Hell at the climax of the film, we see a world stripped of love and warmth, colour completely drained to suggest the extinguished hope of our protagonists. As a little aside on this use of colour motifs, I'm not sure whether it's entirely deliberate or just a coincidence that the tarantulas' fur matches the Alsatian guide dog's coat, but it subtly identifies them both as hellish predators and adds a further air of menace to the latter's subsequent attack on the blind Emily. Say what you like about Lucio Fulci's storytelling abilities, his visual sense never ceases to impress.
The Beyond's most powerful asset, though, is its genuinely contagious dread-fuelled atmosphere. We know from the very beginning these characters are doomed, and like the best ghost stories, The Beyond refuses to offer moments of false comfort. Fabio Frizzi's majestic soundtrack, which falls somewhere between the textured pomp-rock of late '70s Pink Floyd and the unsettling discordancy of Krzysztof Penderecki, compliments the tone of the film superbly, harmonising to such a degree you could almost swear Fulci built the images around the score rather than vice versa. I don't know if Frizzi's work has been released on vinyl or CD, but if it hasn't the campaign starts here.
The Beyond was aimed primarily at English-speaking markets, so apart from Catriona MacColl and David Warbeck, the rest of the Italian cast have been dubbed with slightly dubious American accents. This sometimes makes it difficult to assess the overall performances, but on the whole they're reasonably solid. MacColl deserves credit for making her banal, often clumsy dialogue sound interesting and plausible, and even made me care about her when the odds were against it (her treatment of the hotel's understaff uncomfortably reminded me of my ex-girlfriend's spiteful passive-aggressive streak.) Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Warbeck, who spends most of his scenes posturing like a model in a Freeman's catalogue. For my money, though, the film's best performance is Cinzia Monreale (credited as Sarah Keller) as Emily the blind psychic. The character may have been lifted wholesale from Nicolas Roeg's 1972 classic Don't Look Now, but Monreale inhabits the role with such intensity it's hard not to choke back a tear when her faithful guide dog turns on her. You'll probably be choking back a bit of sick, too.
So, is The Beyond a cinematic milestone or a waste of celluloid? Well, it definitely transcended the splatter genre to anticipate what we now refer to as torture porn. It's impossible to imagine films such as Hostel or The Human Centipede without The Beyond's trailblazing influence, and it's your call whether or not that's a good thing. While I much prefer psychological horror over movies with their finger on the gross-out button, I defend pictures like The Beyond because they at least try to have a point, even when it's hard to find. Despite plot inconsistencies, ridiculous dialogue and negligible characterisation they boast imaginative cinematography, masterly soundtracks, remarkable special effects and terrific atmosphere. I think it's more the style of these films that's important rather than their actual content. Despite the best efforts of The Beyond's many supporters to read deeper themes into the carnage and mayhem, I'm not sure it's a movie you're supposed to intellectualise over; you feel it rather than think about it. And if that doesn't make for a true cinematic experience then I don't know what does.
