The Beyond

A couple of years back (late 90's), I had the pleasure of experiencing Fulci's The Beyond the way it was meant to be watched...on the big screen at the Angelica Movie Theater in Soho (NYC) at midnight, in all of its uncut glory (thanks to Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder Films).

For a couple of hours, I was taken aback to the greatest days of horror! It even had previous of movies like 2000 Maniacs, The Evil Dead and Zombie (aka Zombie 2) before the movie started. To truly appreciate this movie, one has to remember the era it came from. The post Exorcist and Dawn of the Dead period saw many imitations, especially from Italy. However, there were a handful of filmmakers that had actual imagination, skills and creativity to set their pictures apart from the rest. Of the bunch, Argento, Bava (father and son), and Fulci stood quite apart from the rest, each with their own talents.

Fulci was perhaps the most prolific of them, adding a flare of his own Art to his works. His movies each played like paint on canvas from beginning to end. The Beyond was his greatest Masterpiece, combining a better plot than most of his works, with the high quality level of gore Fulci was and always will be well known for.

The Beyond starts with a Warlock being executed in the 1930's by a lynch mob. Little do they know that the hotel where the act takes place happens to be one of the seven doorways to hell. Flashing forward about 50 years later, Liza inherets the hotel and decides to restore it. From there all hell breaks loose. The ending is as disturbing as it gets, and the deaths are both unique and horrifying (vintage Fulci).

I remember walking to the subway station that night, still thinking about what my eyes had just seen (occasionally looking over my shoulder) - realizing I had been genuinely scared and disturbed by a movie that at the time was about 17 years old. Man I miss the "Hey-Day" of horror, and the true masters of it!