The Hell Hotel

Emily can't escape The Beyond

I follow on YouTube a particular horror film/DVD/Blu reviewer and his host of friends across the country (and Canada) and one such episode of their series focusing on a subject they all discuss was on Lucio Fulci. I haven’t watched a film of Fulci’s in quite some time. Not long before watching this fun episode of their YouTube series, I had recorded “The Beyond” (1980) from Showtime Beyond, a scifi/horror channel among Showtime’s premium package. I do believe I wrote about this on the blog a few years ago, but a fresh assessment was on the mind. So I took the plunge Monday evening. Cult films like “The Beyond” (or a lot of Fulci’s resume) are readymade for the Midnight Movie format, a 3 AM Saturday morning when insomnia hits and fails to release its clasped jaws.

“The Beyond” cracked me up tonight. Fulci certainly can’t help himself. Warbeck moves through a morgue just shooting corpses rising from slabs due to the demonic presence in their midst…the body of a decrepit warlock, killed by locals with chains and connected hooks, who happen upon him in his Room 36 in a Louisiana hotel in 1927. They drop when he shoots them in the head. The Romero zombie death is still canon even though Fulci’s “The Beyond” has its own set of bizarre rules. Liza, seemingly a blind ghost from 1927, returns (or is allowed to return in order to help the warlock) and warns the hotel’s new owner (a New York resident), played by Catriona  MacColl, to not reopen it. The warlock is later discovered behind a wall as the basement is flooded by a plumber and all hell breaks loose…literally!

I see why MacColl was such a favorite of Fulci’s. Her beauty and presence seems to look great on camera, and within a decaying house with a basement that seems to run for miles, drowning and holding pure evil within its walls, MacColl was quite visually striking among the ruins. This location, the house, and the grotty rotted corpse of the warlock that shows up in different places throughout the film, is wonderfully grotesque and Fulci gets all the mileage he can out of it. I often have no idea what is going on, and at some point during the film tonight, I just said to myself, “This is evil incarnate, unleashed and uncontained”. That is how I could deal with the endless barrage of surreal. The plumber actually pops up in a water-full bathtub, driving the maid’s head through a spike in the wall (and her eyeball, of course, pops out). What makes that scene pop is Fulci’s photography of the eyeless, rotted face of the corpse and how it rises from the bathtub, approaching the maid (us) as its outstretched hand grabs forward…similar to how the warlock drives forward when discovered behind a wall, its hand grabbing the plumber’s face, popping out his eye (of course). And if you think that is all the eye violence there is, Fulci tops that with slow-crawling tarantulas, eventually climbing upon an associate of MacColl’s, who couldn’t move, it seems, after falling from a library shelf ladder to the floor, having discovered architectural plans he shouldn’t have. The tarantulas pulling out an eyeball and tongue from an obvious mannequin face has to be seen to be believed. Fabio Frizzi’s fab score just helps Fulci out so much. It gives “The Beyond” grandeur. The conclusion with Warbeck and MacColl trapped within “hell” (a painting was finished by the warlock prior to his demise, a very grisly display of violence where hooks attached to chains rip across his flesh before the locals in 1927 crucify him), their eyes “blinded” white, is left to our interpretation. It does seem that encounters with the warlock often result in victims’ eyes going white, unable to escape his evil. A redheaded girl whose mother’s face is melted by a jar of acid in the morgue while visiting her plumber husband’s body ends up with blinded eyes, lunging at MacColl before Warbeck shoots a giant hole in her face! A ghost from the past named Emily (Cinzia Monreale), with a dog as her guide (and protector…for a while) is also blind, seemingly a victim of the warlock’s, eventually alone and in a room. Emily begs the warlock (his recently turned victims are there, too) to leave her be, releasing her dog to cause him momentarily discomfort before the protector and guide turns on her. I was never sure how Emily could be mortally wounded in such a graphic manner…her throat and ear ripped asunder, with lots of torn flesh and blood offered as a result of the attack.

Much like “City of the Living Dead”, “The Beyond” doesn’t operate with much realism. I never felt like the film remains too lucidly tied to any plain of true reality once the warlock is released from his tomb. It sort of made sense up until then. Once the warlock is freed, claiming victims (or his victims claiming victims), and the Eibon book is found and read (by Warbeck), Fulci’s film departs from any realm of serious possibility and takes a turn into the otherworldly. And I think that is why it remains such a Fulci fan favorite. To many of my peers who love him, this is one of his masterpieces. Part of a trilogy of ghoulish terror, “The Beyond” seems to be well favored by many of the three films, “City of the Living Dead” before it, and “House by the Cemetery” the final part of the trilogy. Depending on who you ask, each of the three is considered the best of the trilogy. While each film has something to offer—and decides to retreat from conventional storytelling in order to veer off into a rabbit hole of dark gore fantasy—I guess I prefer “The Beyond” a bit more than the other two, although all three leave me scratching my head and giggling at Fulci’s excessive content. I will take tarantulas to snails, I guess.

The house, though, is a masterwork, and I often LOVED how Fulci presented his undead. The soundtrack often lends some unnerving voices to them, too. I truly understand, though, why he remains so polarizing and has his critics. These films are an acquired taste.