The Beyond

Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci had filmed in the United States twice before cameras rolled in Louisiana for The Beyond (L'aldilà, 1981). Footage of the living dead navigating New York harbor in Zombie (Zombi 2, 1979) yielded the instantly iconic image of moldy flesh-eaters hoofing it across the Brooklyn Bridge and Fulci made good use of mossy Savannah, Georgia as a stand-in for the fictive Dunwich, Massachusetts setting of City of the Living Dead (Paura nella città dei morti viventi, 1980). Death and magic-obsessed New Orleans was a good match for the apostate Roman Catholic, whose journeyman career was divided between comedies, period dramas, westerns, crime films and occasional Italo-psycho-sexy thrillers that were in vogue with the success of countryman Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970). Somewhat late in life, Fulci settled into Maestro of the Macabre mode; his films through the Eighties were grindhouse and drive-in staples before their rediscovery during the VHS boom. The Beyond finds the combative, impish Fulci at his most iconoclastic and unpredictable, thumbing his nose at tradition, thwarting audience expectations, and quite literally raising Hell. Written by Fulci and regular collaborator Dardano Sacchetti with Giorgio Mariuzzo, The Beyond borrows a page from such earlier films as Michael Winner's The Sentinel (1977), Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and Argento's Inferno (1980), positing the existence of a precise number of doors to Hell and dispatching (with excessive force) a variety of characters luckless or inquisitive enough to attempt crossing that threshold or slamming shut the door. Fulci's dramatis personae is composed of tradesmen (painters, plumbers, architects, technicians) and public servants (including hotelier Catriona MacColl and local physician David Warbeck, the film's grittily attractive protagonists) while a motif of care-giving and restoration underscores the requisite investigations into past misdeeds. Narrative logic is at a premium, supplanted by visceral shock sidebars: a cellar wall crumbling like decomposing flesh, a child backing away from a Blob-like broth of blood and liquefied human tissue and a Diabolique (1955) style bathtub resurrection that leaves its witness driven not to a fear-induced heart attack but backward onto an exposed spike, which penetrates her skull and pushes one eye out of its socket like the money drawer of a cash register. As did City of the Living Dead, The Beyond has a similar vibe of running down the clock. While the earlier film ended on an ambiguous note that allowed audience members to decide for themselves whether good or evil had triumphed, the protagonists here never really seem to have a fighting chance and the wrap-up is explicitly apocalyptic, with a view of the Hereafter (the worst case scenario) that is as flatly mundane as it is indescribably awful. (In 1999, film critic Stephen Thrower likened the petrified denizens of Fulci's Hell to the lava-encrusted victims of Vesuvius but there exists for the post-9/11 viewer another possible layer of meaning.) A decade ago, Quentin Tarantino backed a re-release of The Beyond under the auspices of his Rolling Thunder company (then a subsidiary of Miramax), which played to packed and verbally abusive midnight movie houses. That the film can be so easily hooted and jeered at does not however mitigate its strange power or the fact that new viewers are still coming to the film thirty years after it was made. As if he had worked out that horror is best appreciated at its most hysterical, Fulci never sweated absurdities of plot or dialogue, preferring to pig-pile the outrageous atop the fantastic for the sheer spectacle of watching his own house of cards teeter, topple and fall. Director: Lucio Fulci Producer: Fabrizio De Angelis Writers: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, Lucio Fulci Photography: Sergio Salvati Music: Fabio Frizzi Editor: Vincenzo Tomassi Production Designer: Massimo Lentini Costumer: Massimo Lentini Special Effects Supervisor: Giannetto De Rossi Cast: Catriona MacColl (Liza), David Warbeck (John McCabe), Cinzia Monreale (Emily), Antoine Saint-John (Schweick), Veronica Lazar (Martha), Giovanni De Nava (Joe the Plumber), Al Cliver (Harris), Michele Mirabella (Martin), Giampaolo Saccarola (Arthur), Maria Pia Marsala (Jill), Laura De Marchi (Joe's wife), Lucio Fulci (The Librarian). C-80m. by Richard Harland Smith