The main thing I remembered about seeing The Beyond (1981; E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà) a long time ago was the eerie ending and several scenes of ultra violence (the sequence with the spiders is the first that comes to mind). Rewatching it again for Halloween in an effort to watch all of director Lucio Fulci’s ‘Gates Of Hell’ trilogy (City Of The Living Dead, The Beyond and The House By The Cemetery), it was satisfying to realise there’s not much else to remember. I mean, the film only gives you a basic set up – a young woman, Liza (Catriona MacColl), inherits a hotel in New Orleans that sits upon one of the seven gates of hell – and cares very little about deepening or resolving any of the plot. After a sepia toned prologue, it’s not ten minutes before some poor handyman working on the hotel’s restoration gets brained due to the cursed spirits of the place. From there on, it’s a cavalcade of trademark Fulci protracted gruesome sequences of splatter and gore as anyone who is even tangentially connected to renovating the hotel gets monumentally boned. David Warbeck is the doctor who is investigating all the corpses being delivered from the hotel (and who has a revolver in his desk drawer, which comes in handy with a zombie attack). Cinzia Monreale plays Lisa, the blind woman with a German Shepard, who appears to Liza with countless warnings that go unheeded. If the main visual motif in City Of The Living Dead was the back of people’s heads grabbed until their brains squeezed out, here dissolving faces is the recurring theme. That and glassy white orbed eyeballs staring at you. The Beyond was a pleasure to revisit and gleefully yell at the screen at every gloriously messed up death. Great score by Fabio Frizzi. Recommended.
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