The Beyond () is a 1981 <!-- Please source language tag. --> Italian Southern Gothic supernatural horror film directed by Lucio Fulci. It 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 USA 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. 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 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.
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. 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.
The historic Otis House near Lake Pontchartrain, located within the Fairview-Riverside State Park, served as the Seven Doors Hotel. During filming, the production designers aged the home's exteriors by spraying the siding with water and dark dye, as well as throwing cement and sand on the floors to make it appear dusty and dilapidated.
To achieve the film's stark visual style, cinematographer Sergio Salvati photographed the New Orleans exteriors using "warm colors" in hope of capturing the "sun, the heat, [and] the jazz" of the city.
After filming had completed in the United States, additional photography took place at De Paolis Studios in Rome, primarily for the special-effects-intensive scenes. Among these were the interior shots of the film's opening sequence featuring the mob murder, According to Trani, crafting the sequence was "complicated" but "proved to be simpler than expected". Commenting on writing the score, Frizzi said: "The distinctive aim of the film's soundtrack was to achieve an old goal of mine. I wanted to combine two different instrumental forms I had always loved: the band and the orchestra. When I started writing music some years before, I had learned to combine these two sounds, but for many reasons, the roles of strings and wind instruments were mainly created by keyboards. This time I decided to get serious." In 1981, the score was released in Italy on vinyl through Beat Records Company. On October 30, 2015, the independent record label Death Waltz issued the remastered score on vinyl. A CD version had been released previously in 2001 by Dagored Records. Grindhouse Releasing now includes the soundtrack with the Blu-ray release in the USA.
On October 17, 2019, Eibon Press announced that Grindhouse Releasing had discovered the original recordings of the score for the US 7 Doors of Death cut, and they had collaborated to release a limited-edition CD with a comic book adaptation of the film.
Reception and legacy
Theatrical distribution
The Beyond was released theatrically in Italy on 29 April 1981, where it grossed 747,615,662 lire on its initial run; film historian Roberto Curti described this as "OK business", noting that while these takings were less than that of several of Fulci's earlier horror films, the film was widely distributed in other countries, and was especially successful in Spain. In England, the film had difficulty with censors. The BBFC passed it with an X rating demanding several cuts and subsequently it was considered a Video nasty. It would not be released in the United Kingdom uncut until 2001 on home video. In Germany, the film was released under the title Die Geisterstadt der Zombies (). The German theatrical version was the only version of the film in which the pre-credit sequence was printed in color; in the Italian and international versions, the sequence was printed in sepia.
The Beyond did not see a U.S. release until 1983, when it was acquired for theatrical distribution by Terry Levine of Aquarius Releasing, a New York City-based distributor who had previously handled regional distribution for John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Faces of Death. Levine purchased the U.S. distribution rights for around $35,000, The title change was due to Levine's belief that the original title was too nebulous, and that the film's "Seven Doors" plot device was a more interesting narrative hook that would intrigue audiences. Levine estimated that the film turned him a profit of roughly $700,000. By July 26, the re-release had made $123,843 at the box office. Murawski's ownership of The Beyonds U.S. rights proved useful while editing Peter Parker's transformation scene in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002): due to a lack of money to create original footage, he inserted a brief close-up shot of a spider from Martin's death scene into the sequence, along with footage from Raimi's Darkman (1990). Grindhouse gave the film a second theatrical re-release in North America to celebrate its 24th anniversary, starting on 9 February 2015 at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Yonkers, and ending on 27 March 2015 in the Music Box Theatre in Chicago.
Critical response
Contemporaneous
Upon the film's 1983 release in the United States as 7 Doors of Death, critic Kevin Thomas of the LA Times deemed the film visually "elegant" but noted: "as a thriller of the occult it's overly familiar, just another rotting-flesh ghoul parade". Bill Kelley of the Sun-Sentinel similarly praised the film's visual elements, including the sepia prologue, but added: "The problem is, whenever someone in the film is trying to act, the camera is recording something that's really not worth seeing", ultimately classing it as a "Z-grade horror movie".
The Akron Beacon Journals Bill O'Connor criticized the plot for a lack of coherence, writing: "People get killed all over the hotel. Then, after they're killed, they get ugly. ... We never know why they get killed or why they get ugly, which leads me to suspect that maybe this is an art film. At the end of the movie, the dead walk. ... Then the people leave the movie theater. They look just like the dead people who walked out of the morgue. Maybe this is not an art movie. Maybe this is a documentary."
Tim Pulleine (The Monthly Film Bulletin) stated that the film allows for "two or three visually striking passages-and granting that, from Bava onwards, narrative concision has not been the strong suit for Italian horror movies—the film is still completely undone by its wildly disorganized plot". The review also critiqued the dub, noting its "sheer ineptitude". In 2000, he included the film in a book of his "most-hated" movies.
On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, The Beyond holds a 75% approval rating based on 24 critic reviews.
AllMovie called the film a "surreal and bloody horror epic" and labeled it "Italian horror at its nightmarish extreme."
DVD Talk said, "The likeable main characters, the sense of place (and anti-place) make it work for me -- and I thought I had plenty of sales resistance to modern guts 'n' gore horror."
Time Out London, alternatively, called it "a shamelessly artless horror movie whose senseless story—a girl inherits a spooky, seedy hotel which just happens to have one of the seven doors of Hell in its cellar—is merely an excuse for a poorly connected series of sadistic tableaux of torture and gore."
Critic John Kenneth Muir wrote in Horror Films of 1980s: "Fulci's films may be dread-filled excursions into surrealism and dream imagery, but in the real world, they don't hang together, and The Beyond is Exhibit A."
Bill Gibron of PopMatters, wrote in 2007: