Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981)

Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981)

Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981)

Italian horror film director Lucio Fulci, who was aptly nicknamed the Godfather of Gore, made his supremely stylish (and jaw-droppingly gruesome) supernatural zombie film The Beyond in 1980 and split the filming between scenic New Orleans and a studio in Italy. Not released in the US until 1983 in a heavily truncated format and retitled "The Seven Doors of Death," it had already achieved some success overseas and acquired a few fans who loved its vivid cinematography, eerie atmosphere and cutting edge gore effects, which are in no short supply and are stomach-churning to this day. The film didn't see an uncut American release until 1998, nearly 20 years after it was made, when horror fanatic Quentin Tarantino had a master print of it restored and played it at festivals around the country, and the uncut version was released on US DVD shortly thereafter. The Beyond is the second installment in Fulci's notorious Death Trilogy that includes Gates of Hell (aka City of the Living Dead) and House by the Cemetery and will more than satisfy viewers who enjoyed either of those films or Italian gore films in general. It's one of Fulci's most fast-paced and conventionally entertaining films, but at the same time is full of the director's trademark lingering, poetic imagery.

The opening 1927 prologue is an example of Fulci's affinity for displaying mob torture and murder and has a young artist in a Louisiana hotel named Schweike (Antoine Saint-John) being accused by an angry vigilante mob of dappling in witchcraft and getting brutally beaten with chains, crucified with nails and melted down to a skeleton with buckets of quicklime acid. 54 years later, New York model and dancer Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl, who also starred in Gates of Hell and House by the Cemetery) inherits the now abandoned property and moves in with plans to restore the property and put it to use once again as an inn. But as luck would have it, the hotel is haunted and doesn't want to be reopened, and soon the spirit of Schweike trapped within the house is freed and ready to create havoc upon the world. In the end, he does so by turning the corpses at a nearby mortuary into reaminated zombies under his control, and it's up to Liza and local doctor John McCabe (David Warbeck) to put an end to his reign of bloody terror.

The heavy gore inThe Beyondbecomes almost mystical in its gruesomeness. Joe the plumber (Giovanni De Nava) has a rotten but powerful hand bursting through a wall in the hotel basement and digging itself into Joe's face; sinister hotel maid and custodian Martha (Inferno's Veronica Lazar) is impaled through the back of her head on a rusty wall nail, which pops her right eye from its socket; there's a scene where a man is eaten alive by flesh-hungry tarantulas, with the nasty critters pulling his eye from its socket and chowing down. A sinister young blind woman with psychic abilities named Emily (Cinzia Monreale of Joe D'Amato's Buried Alive), who warns Liza that the hotel is possessed by an evil force and that she should leave the place, has her ear bitten off and throat ripped open by her own seeing eye dog when the animal becomes possessed by Schweike's spirit.

There's more use of quicklime acid in a bizarre scene that has a widow dressing the corpse of her husband in a mortuary when a glass jar of the caustic stuff mysteriously spills from an overhead shelf all over her face and head, melting away her flesh. Talented special effects artist Giannetto De Rossi, who worked frequently on Fulci's films, displays more great work here, as does veteran cinematographer Sergio Salvati. The Beyond is packed with little eccentricities that positively identify it as a Fulci film, such as the heavy use of zoom lens and close-ups of characters' eyes as they experience fear and/or pain. As a side note, I highly recommend the Aquarius Releasing DVD for its bonus commentary track with stars Catriona MacColl and David Warbeck (who sadly died of throat cancer shortly after recording it).

The Beyond is one of Lucio Fulci's most beloved films. It has a great smoky New Orleans atmosphere (despite being mostly filmed on an Italian studio lot) that reminds me a lot of Lamberto Bava's 1980 necrophilia classic Macabre (Frozen Terror). Like the other films in the Death Trilogy,The Beyondis cryptic, gory, and decidedly not for all tastes, but those horror fans who can handle its bloody, enigmatic nature will probably love it. I consider it the best film in the gore-laden supernatural Death Trilogy and rate it a 7.5 of 10.

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