The Beyond () is a 1981 Italian supernatural horror film directed by Lucio Fulci. The Southern Gothic work is based on an original story by Dardano Sacchetti, starring Catriona MacColl and David Warbeck. Its plot follows a woman who inherits a hotel in rural Louisiana that was once the site of a horrific murder, and which may be a gateway to hell. It is the second film in Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy after City of the Living Dead (1980), and was followed by The House by the Cemetery (1981).
Filmed on location in and around New Orleans and at De Paolis Studios in Rome, in late 1980. Released theatrically in Italy in the spring of 1981, The Beyond did not see a North American release until late 1983 through Aquarius Releasing, which released an edited version of the film titled 7 Doors of Death; this version featured an entirely different musical score and ran several minutes shorter than Fulci's original cut, and was branded a "video nasty" immediately upon its release in the UK. The original version of the film saw its first US release in September 1998 through a distribution partnership between Rolling Thunder Pictures, Grindhouse Releasing, and Cowboy Booking International.
Following its release, the reception of The Beyond was polarized. Contemporary and retrospective critics have praised the film for its surrealistic qualities, special effects, musical score, and cinematography, but note its narrative inconsistencies; horror filmmakers and surrealists have interpreted these inconsistencies as intentionally disorienting, supplementing the atmospheric tone and direction. The Beyond is ranked among Fulci's most celebrated films, and has gained an international cult following over the ensuing decades.
Plot In 1927, artist and warlock Schweick works on a painting in Room 36 of the Seven Doors Hotel in New Orleans. He protects one of the seven gates of hell, which, if opened, will bring about the end of the world and the death of mankind. A lynch mob drags Schweick from his room and into the hotel's basement, killing him for practicing black magic. Meanwhile, a white-eyed woman reads from the ancient tome "Eibon", prophesizing the opening of one of the seven gates.
Decades later, in 1981, Liza Merrill inherits the hotel and moves from NYC to refurbish and reopen it. A worker glimpses a white-eyed woman through a window and falls off his scaffolding. Local doctor John McCabe takes the injured man to the hospital. The bell for Room 36 rings, but Liza dismisses it as a malfunction, as the hotel has yet to open. A plumber named Joe investigates the lack of running water. In the flooded basement, he uncovers a bricked-off area and accidentally opens the gate to hell. He is attacked by a ghoul, blinded, and killed. The bodies of both Joe and Schweick are discovered by a maid, Martha, and are taken to the local morgue.
While driving into town, Liza encounters a blind woman named Emily and her guide dog, Dicky. Emily warns Liza that reopening the hotel would be a mistake and that she should return to NYC. At a bar, John urges Liza to give up on the hotel project. However, she refuses, thinking it is her only chance at financial success.
Later, Emily tells Liza about Schweick and warns her not to enter Room 36. Upon examining Schweick's painting, she states it was part of his seance, and his own death counted as a sacrifice to curse the land. After Liza scoffs at the warnings, Emily's hands begin to bleed, causing her to run with Dicky from the hotel in terror. Liza noticed that neither of them made audible footsteps as they left. Despite Emily's warning, Liza enters Room 36 and discovers the Eibon as well as Schweick's corpse nailed to the bathroom wall. She returns to the room with John, but the Eibon and the corpse are gone. Liza tells John about her encounter with Emily, but he insists that no blind woman lives in town. Furthermore, he says that the house where Liza claims Emily lives has been abandoned for years.
Liza's architect, Martin, visits the town library to inspect the hotel's blueprints, which reveal an ample, unexplained space in the basement. Upon discovering this, he is knocked off his ladder by an unseen force, breaks his neck, and is paralyzed. As he lies helpless on the floor, tarantulas eat him alive, and the blueprints gradually disappear from the paper, rendering it blank. Back at the hotel, Martha is cleaning the bathroom in Room 36 when Joe's corpse emerges from the bathtub water and kills her. John breaks into the old house where Emily is supposed to live. It is abandoned, but he finds the Eibon and begins to read it, learning that the hotel is one of the seven gates to hell.
Emily is confronted in her home by the animated corpses of Schweick and the other recently deceased. She commands Dicky to attack. Although the dog chases away the undead, he next turns upon Emily, killing her. Meanwhile, Liza returns to the basement and is attacked by an undead worker. In her escape, she runs into John at the entrance. Upon investigation, there is no sign of the undead worker, and Liza begins to question her sanity. The two drive to the hospital and find it deserted except for Dr. Harris, Joe's daughter, Jill, and a horde of the undead. Harris is killed by flying glass, and John dispatches Jill when she transforms and attacks Liza.
John and Liza escape down a staircase but discover they have again arrived in the hotel basement. They proceed through the flooded labyrinth and stumble into a wasteland—the same landscape in Schweick's painting. No matter where they turn, they return to their starting point. They are ultimately blinded, just like Emily, and disappear.
Cast
Pictorialist interpretations and themes John Thonen of Cinefantastique wrote that The Beyond has "a story structure akin to that of an advanced fever dream". Film scholar Wheeler Dixon similarly wrote that the "slight framing narrative is merely the excuse for Fulci to stage a series of macabre, distressing set pieces". Writer Bill Gibron suggested that the film has a subtext of "slavery, witchcraft, mob justice—and perhaps the key to almost all Fulci narratives—revenge" at its core.
The concept of "the beyond", which the characters Liza and John enter in the film's final sequence, is interpreted by film writer Meagan Navarro as a statement on "the Catholic concept of purgatory". Fulci himself was a Catholic, and previous films of his dealt with aspects of his faith that troubled him, such as Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), which touched on corruption among clergy.
A prominent theme, according to Phillip L. Simpson, is that of blindness as a result of exposure to evil, specifically tied to the Book of Eibon: "The book, like many other (in)famous 'evil' books found in literature and cinema, is a physical, written record of valuable occult knowledge that attempts to codify—accompanied by dire warnings that careless or ignorant deployment of that power will result in horrific consequences—what is otherwise usually represented as literally 'unseeable'." Simpson interprets the film's "pervasive images of blindness and eye mutilation" as being directly consequential to characters' exposure to the book. Simpson points out that only Schweick, the warlock lynched in the film's 1927 prologue, and Emily, a "seeress who transcends temporality", possess the "necessary sight" to interpret the book's content.
Production Development and pre-production Producer Fabrizio De Angelis said that on his previous collaboration with Fulci, Zombi 2 (1979), they had aspired to make "a comic book movie… that is, instead of being scared, people would laugh when they saw these zombies". Instead, audiences largely responded with fear, prompting them to make a straightforward horror film. After making City of the Living Dead (1980), Fulci sought to make a follow-up film as part of a trilogy with the "Gates of Hell" being a unifying theme. Simpson describes the trilogy as being loosely "connected by the trope of hapless mortals literally living on top of an entrance to Hell and then inadvertently falling into it".
The base concept for The Beyond was devised by Fulci, Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Dardano Sacchetti, with Sacchetti creating the film's original story. A poster designed by Enzo Sciotti was produced based solely on the treatment in hopes of selling the film to international markets, and the film's title was chosen based on a conversation between Fulci and De Angelis. De Angelis recalled Fulci discussing the film's concept with him: "So he's telling me this story about a couple moving into a house, where underneath is hell. And I was like, 'What does this mean?'… there weren't any dead people, maybe killed… No, there was hell under that house!" And he said 'the beyond'. And when I heard 'The Beyond', that was already the title." After receiving De Angelis's approval, Fulci requested that Sacchetti begin writing a full screenplay based on the brief treatment they had completed. According to De Angelis, much of the plot was devised based on vague ideas Fulci had for various death scenes, as well as several key words that he felt unified his vision. Some elements of the screenplay were derived in an arbitrary manner, such as the design of the Eibon symbol, which Fulci based on the shape of a trivial amateur tattoo his daughter had gotten on her arm.
Sacchetti's conception of the "beyond" was based on his own ruminations on death, and the "suffering of being born condemned to death… [of being] born to be erased". Sacchetti sought to depict the beyond as a hell full of dead souls, an otherworld existing "outside of Euclidean geometry". Originally, the film's final sequence in which the characters enter the "beyond" was meant to take place at an amusement park, where the two main characters, now dead, are able to enjoy themselves in a "great amusement park of life". Due to logistical restrictions, however, this was unable to be filmed, and the existing final sequence—in which the characters enter a vast desert landscape full of corpses—was devised by Sacchetti "on the spur of the moment". In an interview, Fulci gave the film's budget as 580 million Italian lire, half the amount that De Angelis would declare it cost.
Casting Although Fulci originally intended to cast Zombi 2 star Tisa Farrow as Liza Merrill, English actress Catriona MacColl was chosen after having worked with him previously on City of the Living Dead. She would go on to appear in the subsequent final film of Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy, The House by the Cemetery, as well. MacColl would later deem The Beyond to be her personal favorite film of the trilogy, stating that she remains drawn to the "decadent Italian macabre poetry" that she feels the film exudes.
David Warbeck was cast as Dr. John McCabe after he and Fulci became friends during the making of The Black Cat (1981). Originally, the roles of Joe and Professor Harris were to be played by Venantino Venantini and Ivan Rassimov, respectively, but they were replaced by two of Fulci's friends, stage actor Tonino Pulci and Zombi 2 co-star Al Cliver, whom the director affectionately nicknamed "Tufus". Partway during the shoot, French actor Antoine Saint-John, who played the doomed painter Schweick, was replaced by Giovanni De Nava, who played the "zombified" version of the character; De Nava is sometimes mistakenly credited for playing Joe.
For the role of the ghostly Emily, Stefania Casini was originally considered, but Casini turned down the role as she did not want to wear the blinding contact lenses she would have been required to wear. Fulci instead cast actress and model Cinzia Monreale, who had previously starred in his Spaghetti Western Silver Saddle (1978). Monreale was drawn to the film as she felt Fulci's concept was "well written and full of mystery," and she had enjoyed her time working with him previously.
Filming