Start Making Sense – THE BEYOND

In the world of cinema, Italian Supernatural Gore films are rare and magical beasts.  They were only created during a small window, between the mid ‘70s to mid ‘80s.  Born from a heady mix of extravagant set pieces, dream logic, and excessive violence, they could simultaneously be wildly unexpected and thoroughly predictable. Plot took a backseat to atmosphere and spectacle.   Sometimes plot took a separate car altogether, and made frequent rest-stop breaks.  Concepts like continuity and coherence were afterthoughts.  Was it all an excuse to string together a bunch of gory deaths, or do you just have to be crazy to follow them?  Probably the former, but I’m concerned that after multiple viewings of Lucio Fulci’s most inexplicable masterpiece, THE BEYOND, I’m starting to make sense of it.  

The Capsule:

New York gal Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) jumps at the chance to reinvent her life when she inherits a historic hotel in New Orleans.  Unfortunately, she finds the Seven Doors Hotel in need of a major overhaul.  The shutters need fixing, the electrical system is wonky, it was constructed on one of the seven gateways to hell, and it badly needs dusting.  Her new spooky blind friend Emily (Cinzia Monreale) tells her the hotel went downhill 60 years ago when a torch wielding mob got mad at this painter for reading a weird book and crucified him in the basement.  Liza decides to tough it out and stay, despite all the people around her having random accidents like falling from a scaffolding or having their face eaten by spiders.  Her jerky doctor pal John (David Warbeck) thinks she is going nuts when she starts having horrific visions of mutilated corpses and the Book of Eibon, but Liza fears it may already be too late to avoid a one-way ticket to The Beyond.  

Let me start by admitting THE BEYOND is my favorite Fulci, and I like a lot of Fulci.  I hold it in higher regard than ZOMBI 2, my love of which has been well documented.  The entire film is smothered in a thick, invasive atmosphere of doom.  It is filled with stunning, haunting images.  Make no mistake, though, this flick is baffling.    The sepia toned opening gives the impression this will be a straight forward cursed house movie, perhaps in the vein of Fulci's also delightful HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (released in the same year!).  The deeper we get into the story, however, the less coherent it becomes.  Nothing ties together and more crazy elements get added as we go.  Who is this Eibon guy, and why is his book important?  Why mention seven gates to hell if you are only going to talk about one.  Did that plumber open the gate, or was it already open?  By the time we hit the surreal, elliptical ending, you could make a quilt out of all the loose threads.  

Catriona MacColl plays a perfect surrogate for the audience, a woman destined to be overwhelmed.  Liza starts off cool and in control, determined to make a go of restoring this hotel she’s inherited.  We never find out who she inherited the place from, but that’s the least pressing question in the movie.  A lifetime New Yorker (despite her hybrid British/Southern accent), she thinks she is prepared for anything.  She takes the first few accidents in stride.  Painters occasionally fall from their scaffolding, plumbers sometimes get their eyes gouged out while fixing a pipe.  Things like that can happen in any restoration.  

The tale really starts to get strange when Liza meets the mysterious Emily.  If there is a face of THE BEYOND, it’s Cinzia Monreale (credited as Sarah Keller).   The former model had an ethereal quality even before donning the most painful looking contact lenses ever made (seriously, they look like broken china plates covering her eyeballs).  In full makeup, Emily looks like a vision out of place and time.  She’s introduced just as dramatically, standing in the middle of the 24-mile-long Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, with her seeing eye dog, right in the path of Liza’s car.  That seeing eye dog is terrible at its job, in my opinion.  Emily fills Liza in on the sordid events that happened in the hotel 60 years ago, though she doesn’t mention the part about her being there when it happened.  It’s never made clear what Emily is supposed to be (ghost? witch? ghost witch?) or exactly why she is there.   She is like the personification of the film, an unknowable beauty. 

Emily also warns her never to go into Room 36, the crucified painter’s old room.  Naturally, the next scene is of Liza busting open the door to Room 36.  From then on, she is tormented by visions of the painter’s corpse and other inexplicable sights.  She gets no support from her studly love interest, John.  Dr. Condescending practically pats her on the head when she tells him about the clearly supernatural events happening around her.  At one point, he even accuses her of setting the whole thing up just to mess with his head.  There’s an open gateway to hell to deal with, John, it’s not all about you.

THE BEYOND shares several similarities with Dario Argento’s gorgeously bizarre INFERNO.  Both are about haunted high occupancy dwellings.  Both have prominent mysterious books that don’t really amount to anything.  Most of all, both are relentlessly confounding, emphasizing the parts over the whole.  Specifically, they are all about the fantastical set pieces.  Fulci never had Argento’s eye for striking composition and color, though.  His magic comes in the form of inventive, unconventional, and profoundly excessive gore effects.  Fulci doesn’t film death scenes, he creates blood operas.  They are so elaborate and audaciously staged that it doesn’t matter if they are utter nonsense.  

Many of the deaths in THE BEYOND are from supernatural happenstance, along the lines of THE OMEN.  This gives Fulci the excuse to really go wild.  Take the unfortunate demise of Liza’s interior designer.  He is high up on a library ladder when he makes a startling discovery about the hotel’s floorplans.  We never find out what he discovered, since a sudden crash of thunder makes him fall to the floor.  The fall seems to have paralyzed him, so there is nothing he can do when a swarm of Louisiana Squeaking Tarantulas noisily crawl over him and—in exactly the way spiders don’t—chew his face off.  They don’t just eat it, though, they slice his mug to pieces with their pincers (?) like a retiree cutting coupons from the Sunday paper.  The camera lingers on the dissection in close-up, paying special squirm inducing attention to the eyeball (eye trauma is the Fulci calling card) and the tongue.  There is no part of this sequence that is not insane.  In that sense, the obvious cheapness of the effects (a prominent spider appears to be a windup toy) only enhances the spectacle.  

My favorite set piece is less absurd and more beautifully grotesque.  A mourning wife of one of the hotel’s victims goes into the stark white hospital morgue while the doctors are away and finds her husband’s body on the slab.  Clearly under a tight timeline, she starts dressing the corpse—mid-autopsy—in his funeral suit.  Something (again, we never get to see what) frightens her so much she either passes out or dies.  Hopefully she died, because her body hitting the floor sets off my all time favorite preposterous horror gag, the uncovered container of acid perched precariously on a high shelf.  The container tips, and her creepy daughter (by law, all children in Italian horror are creepy) walks in just in time to see her mother drenched by acid.  It must be a deceptively large container, since the acid flows in an unending stream until the woman’s entire head has melted.  If that wasn’t disturbing enough, the frothy blood puddle expands across the whole floor as the little girl desperately tries to avoid getting her mom’s face on her shoes.  For such a horrendously violent scene, it is strangely serene, like really gross performance art.  

Don’t worry, that scene does not involve any physical harm to the child.  Fulci saves that for the climax.

I always thought THE BEYOND was best enjoyed by simply surrendering to the madness of the story, just float along and take in the sights.  Imagine my surprise this time, on probably my sixth watch, things suddenly started to fall into place.  That place is still Crazytown, and it is filled with gaps and mysteries, but I think there might be a (semi) rational story under all the blood, fog, and cobwebs.  

I won't go into my theories here (you're welcome).  There is no way of knowing if my interpretation is what Fulci had in mind.  It's highly likely he just said, "Let's make a movie where some spiders eat a guy's face."  That's fine, too.  THE BEYOND is wholly unique and wondrous any way you slice it.

 But seriously, does anybody know the deal with this Eibon guy?

C Chaka