It is the second film in Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy after City of the Living Dead (1980), and was followed by The House by the Cemetery (1981). Its plot follows a woman who inherits a hotel in rural Louisiana that was once the site of a horrific murder, and which may be a gateway to hell. "… And you will live in terror! The afterlife") is a 1981 Italian Southern Gothic supernatural horror film directed by Lucio Fulci, from an original story created by Dardano Sacchetti, and starring Catriona MacColl and David Warbeck. That’s practically the definition of “winner”.The Beyond ( Italian: …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà, lit.
I mean, dude, a zombie kid gets the front half of her head blown off by a handgun. Setbacks in acting and dubbing aside, The Beyond is a definite winner. Crazy early 80s techno just doesn’t send shivers down the spines of a modern audience like it used to, I suppose. The music can also seem, how shall I put this…”inappropriate”. And to be fair, while the acting isn’t great, it’s nowhere near the stomach-churning quality of House by the Cemetery.
THE BEYOND MOVIE MOVIE
I admit, watching a movie with bad acting and worse dubbing is no picnic, but it just wouldn’t be a proper Fulci experience without it. And with actors who aren’t particularly good, this can turn away a lot of people. Like all of Fulci’s other offerings, The Beyond is dubbed… badly. I admit, this approach can occasionally begin to get tiresome, as you watch some lady get her face melted off by quicklime for ten minutes, but for the most part I love it. When a character gets his face eaten by tarantulas, Fulci never implies the horror or cuts away before the deed is finished, but shows you everything that happens for however long it takes. One of the things I always liked about Fulci was that he never shied away from showing the audience the gore and, in fact, seemed to revel in making the audience squirm for as long as possible. While the plot summaries for these things never sound entirely intriguing, what makes these movies so entertaining is the collection of memorable, horrific and inspired incidents which carry you through to the end. “One of the Seven Doors of Death is opened, weird stuff happens, people die, The End”. Like the other installments in the trilogy ( City of the Living Dead and “House by the Cemetery”), The Beyond isn’t particularly big on plot. The Beyond is essentially “the ultimate Fulci flick”, at least as far as I’m concerned. It features all the things that make a Fulci flick stand out, such as gruesome eyeball trauma, zombies fighting animals, bad dubbing and an ending that makes no sense, but features all these “Fulci-isms” to their finest degree. Of all his movies, The Beyond truly stands heads and shoulders above the rest. That meaningless tangent aside, I consider The Beyond to be the zenith of Fulci’s career. So no one can ever claim that horror movies don’t teach you things, because I bet most of you reading this don’t know what quicklime is, either. I didn’t even know what that s-t was before I saw this movie. If The Beyond taught me anything, it’s that quicklime is awesome. Ghosts, tarantulas, zombies and piano-playing blind chicks are but a few of the horrors that the Seven Doors Hotel has just unleashed upon the Earth. Liza finds her world turned upside down, as various horrors begin to crawl out of the woodwork. What she doesn’t know is that back in 1927, a warlock named Schweick (Antoine Saint-John) was brutally murdered in his hotel room, forever damning the place to be one of the Seven Doors of Death. Liza Merril (Katherine MacColl) has just inherited the Seven Doors Hotel (very subtle) deep in the heart of Louisiana. Listen to the latest episode of the AIPT Movies Podcast!
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