‘The Beyond’ (1981)

This time of year people regularly bug me by asking, “what’s your favorite horror movie?”, or “what movies should I watch for Halloween?” Well for starters, my favorite horror flick is probably “The Shining”… or “Jaws”… or “The Thing”… depending on what mood I’m in on any particular day.

That second question is trickier. You really have to know a person before you can give them an honest horror recommendation; you have to know their overall tastes in movies. Do they like the classics? Do they like mainstream fair? Are they an indie buff? Or do they like trash? You also need to know how much blood and guts and nudity and gore they are comfortable with, that way you know how far up the old gore meter your recommendation can go. But lastly, and probably most importantly, how open are they to trying something new. And for the adventurous types, there’s one movie I always recommend: the 1981 Italian classic, Lucio Fulci’s “The Beyond.”

The first thing you need to know about “The Beyond” (or as it’s known in Italy “… E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldila,” which translates to “… And you will live in terror! The Afterlife”) is that the plot is irrelevant. It’s nonsensical, it’s hard to follow, and it’s probably the least important aspect of the movie.

I know what you’re thinking: if the plot’s bad, why would I recommend it? Well, the answer is partly contrived, partly hypocritical, and partly pretentious. Cinema began way back in the late 1800s as an art form consisting purely of moving images. Audiences experienced individual frames in motion that were able to evoke grand emotions. “The Beyond” is one of those films that comes along from time to time that can move you — both intellectually and emotionally — with its images.

Fulci himself put it best by saying, “People who blame ‘The Beyond’ or its lack of story have not understood that it’s a film of images, which must be received without any reflection. They say it is very difficult to interpret such a film, but it is very easy to interpret a film with threads: Any idiot can understand Molinaro’s ‘La Cage aux Folles,’ or even Carpenter’s ‘Escape From New York,’ while ‘The Beyond’ or Argento’s ‘Inferno’ are absolute films.”

The plot, for those that are interested, revolves around an old decrepit hotel in Louisiana built upon one of the Earthly entrances to Hell. The opening scene takes place in the 1920s as a painter becomes victim to a mob that decries him as a warlock, but he claims to be the only one standing between them and ultimate evil. The mob kills the man and buries him in the walls of the basement.

Flash forward 50 years, and a young woman, Liza, has inherited the hotel and is on a mission to revive it. Painters and plumbers and lawyers show up to help with the fixer-upper, but one by one each person that comes in contact with the hotel suffers some form of accident. One painter gets spooked by a pair of disembodied eyes staring at him through a window and tumbles off a scaffold to his death. Another person falls from a ladder in a library, paralyzing him, and tarantulas inch toward his helpless body and devour him alive.

Those deaths may sound a bit graphic, but that’s kinda the point. If a gateway to Hell were to open, there needs to be some pretty gruesome consequences. All the death scenes are done with practical effects, and honestly some of the effects haven’t aged too well. Yet, all of them are still very effective as they make you squirm in your seat in uncomfortable terror. The deaths in the movie were considered so brutal that “The Beyond” made the British “video nasties” list, which was the United Kingdom’s attempt to censor and ban certain horror and exploitation films from video stores in the ’80s and ’90s.

Another highlight of “The Beyond” is its wonderfully creepy score from Fabio Frizzi, one that Rolling Stone has ranked as one of the best horror movie scores of all time. The music comes off as incredibly surreal as it mixes orchestral wind and string instruments with modern drums and bass with some eerily angelic Italian choir vocals.

I actually had the opportunity to see Mr. Frizzi perform the score to “The Beyond” live in Little Rock at Vino’s — of all places. I arrived early to the event, and went to take my seat, table 1 seat 1. But when I got there, a jacket was hanging on the back of my assigned seat.

I stood there befuddled for minute before someone came up to me and informed me that the jacket belonged to Frizzi and that he he would be down to collect it in a minute. So I stood by my table, beer in hand, and watched as the band tuned their instruments. And after about five minutes this short, 70-year-old Italian man apologized to me, in some of the worst broken English I have ever heard.

“The Beyond” is the second part of a trilogy that Fulci made consisting of “City of the Living Dead” (1980) and “The House by the Cemetery” (1981). All of these movies sprung up as part of the Italian zombie movement. Early in Fulci’s career he was more associated with Giallo pictures, which are highly stylized, bright colored, mystery-suspense films that have a heavy touch of horror in them. His most famous Giallo was “Don’t Torture a Duckling” (1972), which was a film about the mysterious deaths of young boys. That movie was highly critical of the Catholic Church, which was quite a brazen stance for that time period. But after the release of George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” Fulci made an unofficial sequel, “Zombie 2,” which has very little to do with the Romero movies.

Fulci continued to make these surreal fever dream horror movies until his death in 1996. But at that point in time, most of his work was under appreciated and ignored by mainstream critics and audiences. But now that directors like Quentin Tarantino and Dario Argento have championed his movies over the past decade, Fulci has become a cult icon. And as the story goes, a few months before his death at 68, he received a standing ovation at a Fangoria horror convention that brought tears to his eyes as he realized that his images of the grotesque spoke to avid horror fans across the world.