10 Horror Films That Will Make You Nostalgic For The 1980s

Less a coherent movie than a surreal nightmare, The Beyond favors mood and style over plot and character. There’s a basic story of a young woman inheriting a hotel that turns out to have been built over one of the seven gateways to hell, but it’s really an exercise in atmosphere where most of the people are there to be victimised.

For all the gory kills in the movie, the quiet moments stay with you, such as when Catriona MacColl encounters a lone woman in the middle of an empty highway, a location that impressed director Lucio Fulci so much that he posed for several photographs. There’s also a red-headed girl who says next to nothing, has no real purpose in the story and still manages to be one of the creepiest kids in any Fulci movie.

Also noteworthy is the zombie attack in the hospital (a sequence imposed by producers that wanted another Zombie Flesh Eaters), where the living dead are more like ghosts than flesh-eating ghouls, interested in scaring our heroes rather than actually devouring them. It’s a remarkable sequence, and Atsushi Moroga pays homage to it in Junk (2000) with zombies that walk in the same eyes-closed heads-bowed manner