And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored No relation to Gordon's From Beyond, Lucio Fulcis fantastic 1981 surreal horror was also inspired by Lovecraftian storytelling, as well as some aspects of the mythos that Lovecraft brought to the horror genre. The film deals with a hotel that acts as a portal to the world of the dead: in 1927, an angry mob murders an artist staying at the Seven Doors Hotel in Louisiana, believing him to be in league with the devil. Scores of years later, a young woman inherits the building and determines to renovate and reopen the Seven Doors. Little does she know that one of those doors is still open https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vltPK0IfP4M So far, so haunted house but thats probably the only degree of solidity in the film. The rest is fluid, a mercurial non-linear succession of images. Fulci was determined to bring the unsettling nature of dream and nightmare to the traditional horror format:
my idea was to make an absolute film, with all the horrors of our world. It's a plotless film: a house, people, and dead men coming from The Beyond. There's no logic to it, just a succession of images. The Sea of Darkness, for instance, is an absolute world, an immobile world where every horizon is similar.
Fulcis producers, however, werent up for distributing a surreal haunted house movie, and given that zombies were still big box office in Europe, had Fulci shoehorn in that final shootout at the hospital. He did so without missing a beat: the physical chase through the rational, sterile hospital, with a pistol a viable weapon against the dead, provide the protagonists some degree of agency, of power over their fates. The audience, in turn, are provided with their own degree of certainty that the horror can be avoided that the protagonists can escape. Nothing could be further from the truth. The orphaned girl theyre protecting is revealed to be possessed, and theyre forced to murder her to get away. The gun is empty, and thrown away. Down a flight of stairs they go to find themselves back in the hotels wasted, ruined basement level, something that shouldnt be possible. At that moment, the viewer knows theres no escape. The horror isnt the dead things pursuing them, but the sea of darkness thats descending down upon them, and theres no running away from a tsunami. They move forward through the broken, flooded shadows and step through a jagged hole in the wall, stumbling into a misty wasteland, a desertscape of open graves and bleached rocks. The wall behind them is gone no matter which way they turn, the same barren, hopeless vista is presented to them. Finally, horrified beyond belief, their eyes film over and unable to see, lost on a sea of darkness, they disappear from sight.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
