Lucio Fulci's The Beyond

A Louisiana hotel was constructed on one of the seven gateways to hell. An artist named Spike, renting a room at the hotel, found a key to the door to hell, was mauled by angry townsfolk with chains,  crucified to a wall with spikes hammered into his arms, receiving an acid bath, and to top it off sealed in the basement behind a wall.

On the day the gates of hell are opened, the dead will walk the earth.

Such text comes from this book called Eibon. It was found in the hotel in Spike's room, Room 36, then later, mysteriously, in the abode of a blind blond girl (her eyes have those purposely freaky albino pupils), cob-webbed and open with pages that are dry and weary.

And you will face the sea of darkness and all therein that may be explored...

When you read from the typical devotee of the late Lucio Fulci, The Beyond is considered his masterpiece. I will call it a masterpiece....a masterpiece of excess. There's eyeball violence of epic proportions. I think there are three sequences where eyeballs are removed from their sockets. In fact, faces to those who are unfortunate enough to suffer the poisonous toxin that is the Louisiana hotel of this film (a mark is often established (a hex from Hell, if you will...) on objects, the Eibon, on bodies, anything or anyone associated with the hotel where Spike was killed, located over a door to hell) are annihilated in gratuitous, lengthy fashion.

For instance, the maid gets the back of her head slammed through a nail in the wail, her eyeball popping out immediately. The very one who killed the maid, the plumber, has his eye plucked out by the zombie-fied Spike, whose body resembled to me a piece of petrified wood in a humanly form. Oh, but the grand eyeball gore comes when the hired hotel renovator falls from a ladder in a library as he was about to acquire the architectural designs for the place, rendered incapacitated (I guess his spine was damaged, causing paralysis), as tarantula spiders (!!!) show up from out of the blue, crawling over to his body, onto his face, tearing it apart...seeing a tarantula pry away a fake eyeball, I have seen quite a bit in my time as a horror fan but this was surreal. I guess only the killer snails (haha!!!) in Ænigma are more surreal.

The face violence, however, is rather noticeably the plaster cast of the actors' faces, although the ghoulish fate of the blind girl, by her "possessed" canine (because it attacked Spike the Zombie, receiving cuts from him, it was "marked"), including ripped throat and ear (lots of gushing blood) right off the head,  is quite impressive (well, impressive if you consider seeing a teenage girl from "the beyond" getting her throat ripped out by her own pet; by the way, was she supposed to be a ghost or what? If she's a ghost, how could she even get her throat ripped out? And if she's a zombie, how come her blood looks so fresh? By the way, what is her real purpose besides momentarily meeting Katherine MacColl and telling a tiny lil bit about the hotel?).

I think, though, that the violence reaches its zenith when a little redheaded girl who was held prisoner by the traveling pool of blood and acid (!!!) from her mother (who, for some reason, collapsed on the floor, I guess from fright, with a glass pitcher of acid pouring out over her face, slowly sizzling and fizzling into the aforementioned pool), now a zombie because her pops--the previously mentioned eyeball-less plumber--was marked, gets half her face taken off by a bullet from doc David Warbeck's pistol (which has an endless amount of ammunition...).

All of this with the accompanying rousing, ethereal score of Fabrio Frizzi and his chorus of enchanting voices who apply a quality of epic to Fulci's film that perhaps it might not necessarily deserve. I mean, when slow-moving spiders eat away a guy's face, this isn't the type of score you typically figure you'd be hearing augmenting the whole experience.

All of this aside, that ending is really rather fantastic, I thought. It does rather leave one spellbound and it says that escaping Fulci's hell may be impossible. The final sequence, extended from the point of leaving the hotel (the silhouetted images of the zombies appearing inside is rather neat), driving to the hospital, under siege by the morgue zombies (there's another cool scene that shows one of the corpses in a body bag ripping out with one finger...), finding their way "into Spike's portrait", in essence, walking unknowingly into "the beyond" never to escape, is quite unnerving considering the circumstances MacColl and Warbeck find themselves. Fulci, to me, always seems to find ways to place characters into a predicament, where they just enter peril by no fault of their own. You die because you are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time...not only that, but when you die, you do so horribly. And when Fulci kills you, expect flesh torn away and eyeballs gouged. That was just his cinematic contribution to the world of horror. I have to say, in closing, that I loved the way he could light those zombies, shadowing them as they appear, zooming in nice and tight when he wants to repulse you with the rotted flesh and deteriorated faces of his undead ghouls. At least when he made his zombie movies, they were based out of his own universe of weird, while poor Bruno Mattei and others tried desperately to mimic Romero to no avail...