The Beyond
Dir Lucio Fulci, Italy 1981
Shameless Films, £19.99 (Blu-ray)
If your New Year’s resolution is to see a bunch of fake spiders eat a plumber’s face off, then you’re in luck, because Lucio Fulci’s influential 1981 horror flick The Beyond features one of the most drawn-out meateating arachnid scenes in cinema. But if that wasn’t enough, it also happens to be a beautifully bonkers plunge into deep Gothic dread.
The story, such as it is, follows Liza, a New Yorker who inherits an old hotel in Louisiana – but like any old building, this one has a few problems. The plumbing’s a bit iffy, for a start, and it also sits over the recently opened gateway to Hell.
The Beyond is a classic Fulci cocktail: one part art, one part gross-out schlock and one part funky-ass soundtrack. Sure, the plot may be threadbare (“Hell gate is open... Hell gate must be shut”) but the sheer joy is the atmosphere and striking horror set-pieces: you’ll see the wandering damned impale, stab, tear and dissolve their hapless human victims. The lack of a logical story, in fact, echoes some of the best work of fellow Italian
It’s a beautifully bonkers plunge into deep Gothic dread
horror god Dario Argento. Both directors had the balls to say that when it comes to depicting existential dread, plot should play second fiddle to image and feeling. This Euro-centric embrace of mystery is a pleasing mental gear-shift compared to the ultra-logical, everythingmust-be-explained horrors of Hollywood. The Beyond says that when Hell fuses with Earth, all bets are off and nothing makes sense anymore – not even geography. Which is, ironically, a perfectly logical way to play it.
The Beyond is often called Fulci’s finest, though for me, City of the Living Dead takes that crown (someone barfs up their entire set of internal organs in that one, after all). Yet this really is among his best works, with at least two images from the film now cemented into horror iconography: the Kubrickian shot of a blind woman and her dog, standing in the middle of a deserted highway, and the picture of Hell as a desolate wasteland, strewn with the silent corpses of the damned. Fun fact: those cadavers were played by homeless people who Fulci pulled in from the street. I hope they got paid – or were given a sandwich at the very least.
Shameless Films have released The Beyond ina new 2K scan with a nice set of interviews and extras – including four different versions of the prologue presented in different colours (black and white, sepia, colour and combo). But it’s the film itself that still shines. With The Beyond, Fulci mixed a kind of Southern, almost Lovecraftian, Gothic setting with the visual style and illogical priorities of the Italian sensibility. The result? An unpredictable bounce into Hell that leaves you with a strange spring in your step – especially as the Fabio Frizzi soundtrack kicks in just as those spiders start tearing through the plumber’s lips...