#224. The Beyond (1981)

Directed By: Lucio Fulci

Starring: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale



Tag line: "Behind this doorway lie the terrifying and unspeakable secrets of hell. No one who sees it lives to describe it. And you shall live in darkness for all eternity."

Trivia: The zombie rampage was done at the insistence of the film's German distributors, whose movie market was going through a zombie craze

Lucio Fulci's The Beyond is a horror fan's delight. Featuring ghosts, demons, zombies, and even a dozen or so carnivorous tarantulas, odds are you'll find something to your liking in this very creative, very potent horror film. 

New York native Liza (Katherine MacColl) has just inherited an old Louisiana hotel, which she plans to renovate and re-open to the public. But one of the workers she hires to fix the place up stumbles uipon an ancient secret: the basement of this hotel houses one of the seven gates of hell, which is inadvertently opened. 

With the help of the local doctor (David Warbeck) and a mysterious blind girl (Cinzia Monreale), Liza must find a way to close this gate before its evil can spread throughout the city, causing the dead to rise from their graves, 

The Beyond is a near-flawless marriage of several horror sub-genres. At times a creepy supernatural tale (the call button for room 36 constantly lights up at the hotel's front desk, despite the fact nobody has occupied that room for 60 years), The Beyond will also satisfy gore hounds, with blood and carnage aplenty. While working in the basement, a plumber (Fiovanni De Nava) accidentally breaks through the wrong wall, and before he can figure out what happened, a hand thrusts out of the freshly-made opening and grabs hold of his face, squeezing the life out of his body and one of his eyes out of its socket. 

There's a lot going on in The Beyond, and you never know from which direction the next scream is going to come. This is a film with very little “down time”; each scene holds the promise of a new scare, and damn near every one of them delivers. 

Released in 1981, The Beyond is the middle chapter in what's been deemed Fulci's “Gates of Hell” trilogy (starting with 1980's City of the Living Dead and concluding with 1981's The House By the Cemetery). Widely regarded as not only the best of these three movies, The Beyond is also one of its director's finest films.  

So if you should find yourself with nothing to do on a lazy weekend afternoon, might I suggest a “Fulci Double-Shot” of Zombie and The Beyond, two excellent horror flicks made by a filmmaker at the very top of his game.

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