10 Horror Movies Nobody Understands
2. The Beyond (1981)
Lucio Fulci himself referred to The Beyond as an ‘absolute’ film, one almost entirely bereft of a traditional, linear narrative. Where Uzumaki begins and ends with terrifying iconography, Fulci’s surreal masterpiece is composed of nothing but a portmanteau of devastating images.
The Beyond owes a clear debt to Lovecraftian cosmic horror, revolving around the Seven Doors Hotel in Louisiana, a haunted building with a troubled past that may contain a portal to the world of the dead. Reading that, you’d be forgiven for thinking it sounded derivative, but Fulci uses the generic premise as a starting point and then simply leaves it behind.
Fluid and mercurial, Fulci’s baffling film evokes the heartstopping, uncanny nature of dream and nightmare. Worried that the film would bomb, his producers demanded that he insert a bloody zombie-filled shootout into the climax. Another director would have crumbled under such heavyhanded interference, but Fulci doesn’t miss a beat: the chase through the sterile rationality of the hospital just creates the appearance of agency, as though the protagonists had influence over their fates. As though they could win if only they tried hard enough.
It’s an illusion. Escaping down a flight of stairs, they find themselves somehow back in the hotel’s ruined basement, victims of dream logic once again. Stepping through a jagged hole in the wall, stumbling into a wasteland of bleached, open graves, suddenly blind and lost in a sea of darkness, they disappear from sight...