Film: The Beyond
Release date: 13th October 2003
Certificate: 18
Running time: 83 mins
Director: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Katherine MacColl, David Warbeck, Sarah Keller, Antoine Saint John, Veronica Lazar
Genre: Horror
Studio: Vipco
Format: DVD
Country: Italy
This is an English-Language release.
In the early-80s, the Italians, and in particular Lucio Fulci took gore and exploitation to new levels, and The Beyond was one of the notorious ‘video nasties’ banned with the Video Recordings Act 1984. The film was released uncut by Vipco in 2003.
The Beyond tells the story of Liza, who inherits a hotel in Louisiana. The hotel harbours a dark secret in its basement. As Liza sets about renovating the hotel, there are a series of bizarre accidents, and she also has some crazy hallucinations.
As she searches for an explanation to the mysterious events, Liza joins forces with Dr John McCabe, a heroic doctor from the local hospital.
As they investigate the house and local folklore, Liza discovers that the hotel is actually built on one of the seven deadly gateways to hell. Liza spends the next 83 minutes trying to understand the horrific events as heaven and hell begin to merge…
Brought to you by the late great godfather of gore, Lucio Fulci, and widely regarded as being his finest work, The Beyond is a very difficult film to understand. It draws upon a Lovecraftian aesthetic and sensibility which defies many of the conventions of cinema and even narrative itself, and can easily be mistaken as video fodder by the lazy critic.
To understand and appreciate Italian horror in general, it is necessary to understand how they differ from Hollywood in the way they are produced. There are no giant budgets, and filming is often done within a very tight schedule. Since the majority of Italian film audiences are non-domestic, they built their industry around dubbing.
This creates a unique filmmaking environment where no sound is used on set, so the cast would be speaking their lines in various languages. This environment developed to the point where actors wouldn’t even know the title, let alone see a script before the day of shooting. Therefore, we have a very improvisational and unrehearsed acting style. Fulci had great faith in his actors, and almost always allowed them to create their own roles. Therefore, it is impossible to regard the acting in such a film in the same way one would in a Hollywood movie.
Central to The Beyond is its ethereal aesthetic. As the film progresses, and the merge of hell and earth takes hold, the ethereal and confusing look becomes increasingly defined. This allows the viewer to learn the film’s own distinct logic before they are completely immersed in it.
Fulci creates this by an almost total abandonment of establishing shots: hazy lighting; off key colour grading (which the now archaic no frills film stock adds to implicitly) and both spatial and narrative distortion. In any other film, these elements would indeed create nothing other than confusion and discomfort for the viewer; however, in the context of The Beyond, this aesthetic is crucial to building on the film’s central themes.
As the hell portal is opened, the diegetic laws of physics cease to function. The character of Joe ‘the plumber’, who appears at the start of the film and dies, turns up next in the hospital morgue and then later he shows up back in the hotel. Most confusingly, there are scenes where the characters will leave the hotel and surface in the hospital, as if they are next door to each other.
This gives rise to a central theme of the inescapable. The characters are inexplicably trapped within the Seven Doors Hotel. Liza says early on that she is financially tied to the hotel and couldn’t leave if she wanted to. Whenever she ventures elsewhere to explore, she finds herself back at the hotel.
The very passive nature of the characters is also used to bring out their helplessness in set-piece after set-piece of foregrounded gore and abjection. At no point do we ever see someone runaway (although there are some heroics) from certain death. They are constantly paralysed, frozen with fear, trapped in a corner or just plain confused. It is as if the characters simply accept their horrific fates.
This idea of passivity is evident on several levels. For the most part, the characters’ actions are driven by the story. They never really do or achieve anything, but simply allow themselves to be ushered towards the ultimate conclusion.
The foregrounding of gore, for which the film is famous, works with the mise en scene to create as abject and disgusting an experience as possible. The Beyond is daring enough to portray a man’s face being eaten by tarantulas; a crucifixion; acid melting a corpse’s face - the list goes on. However, there is a constant emphasis on eyes. This is also coupled with inordinate amounts of gunk, ooze, brown water, dripping, and toilet sounds and bodily fluids.
The Beyond has an overall gothic feel to it, despite being set in 1981. There are several allusions to graveyards, tombs and fences that Poe would have loved the chance to describe. There is a mystic book which is centuries old and foretells doom and apocalypse. The hotel itself is an old Louisiana plantation house, echoing the sins of the past, and giving yet further darkness to an already bleak canvas. Most notably is the pseudo-MacGuffin of the painting, around which the plot constantly revolves. The painting depicts an otherworldly landscape littered with petrified human shapes, lying flat as if eternally helpless.
The Beyond could be considered more of an art film with a horror setting. It is a vision that has only partly translated to film, and, for the most part, is speaking a different visual language altogether. It defies many of our established notions of narrative cinema. It assaults its audience from all angles with revolting images, off and on camera, and all in a package that is so extreme, all one can do is laugh. DOB
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