31 Days of Halloween: The Beyond (1981)
No Halloween movie list is complete without a film by Italian film director Lucio Fulci. While most people will lazily toss Zombi on the list and call it a day, I am choosing The Beyond for my list. This 1981 film is, in my opinion, the best film that Fulci has put together. It’s chock full of grisly horror, eye-gouging, ginger murder, giant spiders, more eye-gouging, atmospheric music, and surreal imagery.
The story centers around The Seven Doors Hotel in New Orleans that is apparently a passage way to hell. In 1927 an eccentric painter is accused of being a warlock and is put to death by the locals, opening one of the doorways. However, things don’t really kick off until Liza Merrill (Catorina MacColl) inherits the old hotel and decides to re-open it to the public. This causes the doors to hell to come crashing open leading to a series of grisly murders. A young blind woman named Emily (Cinzia Monraele) tires to warn people of the danger but, as these things tend to go, nobody really takes this seriously until shit starts hitting the fan. Emily enlists the aid of Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck) try to learn the mysteries of the hotel as bodies begin stacking up.
The Beyond, unfortunately, is not a perfect film. The story and narrative doesn’t always make sense. Some people say this was intentional to add to the film’s overall surreal atmosphere. However, the English dubbing kind of shatters this excuse in my mind. They didn’t exactly have the best voice actors to dub in the English dialogue. I suspect that same things were just lost in translation. Despite its flaws, this movie is still visually stunning.
Still, this doesn’t take away from the film being totally surreal, they nail that out of the park. The movie is beautifully shot and the special effects are top notch for the era that it came out of. This isn’t a movie for the squeamish however as Fulci, the master of the cinematic eye-gouge, turns the knob up to 10 and snaps it off. There are three eye-gouges in this movie. Spiders eat a guy alive. A face is dissolved in acid. A little girl gets her head exploded in a magnum blast. This movie is wall-to-wall gore and it is glorious. Then there’s that ending. It’s breathtaking.
As far as I’m concerned this is peak Fulci and all the other movies can be tossed in the trash. If there is any Fulci movie to watch on Halloween it’s The Beyond. End of list.
The ultimate release of this film was the Blu-Ray that was put out by Grindhouse Releasing back in 2015. You can find a version of this movie on Amazon Prime under the title Seven Doors of Death, but it is heavily cut, so don’t bother.
