6. The Beyond (1981)
Widely regarded as Lucio Fulci's piece de resistance, The Beyond is a film that doesn't really make any narrative sense but captivates the viewer's attention with some arresting visuals and its sheer weirdness. Apparently the gates of Hell have opened in a hotel in the South of The USA. This portal vomits out numerous unpleasant things for the people who have ties with the Hotel - spider attacks, the living dead, the ghost of a blind girl. In one of Italian horror cinema's most famous and bleakest endings, the hero and the heroine are trapped in a desolate landscape, lose their sight and presumably die. Fulci himself said that he wanted to make a plotless horror film - a film whose impact derived from what is seen and heard. The film should be thought of as a painting in which Fulci imparted the deepest horrors of his psyche. It is a gory film as well as being an arty film. The Beyond has a non-linear plot and exists as a series of images which it is up to the audience to interpret. This is peculiar to Italian horror cinema and splits critics right down the middle: is The Beyond a work of art or a boring mish mash of outlandish images? I will leave you, the viewer, to reach your own conclusion.