8. The Beyond (Fulci, 1981)
Part of the Gates of Hell trilogy, along with City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond is often cited as horror veteran Fulcis best film and has been championed by directors like Quentin Tarantino whose Rolling Thunder Pictures distributed the film on DVD in America. The Godfather of Gore as he is referred to by fans was an Italian genre nomad, directing everything from sex comedies and gialli (amateur detective murder mysteries) to peplums (sword-and-sandal historical epics) but he is most well-known and revered for his horror output. Not quite as respected as genre greats such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento, Fulci nevertheless has a significant cult following thanks to the gory, surreal and often incomprehensible nature of his films. His films are truly an experience. Like the majority of Italian horror films the plot is not exactly important. Indeed, to quibble about the inconsistencies and irregularities in an Italian horror film is to miss the point entirely. Scripts were sometimes written over a period of a few weeks as they were hurried into production. The joy of Italian horror films comes instead, primarily, from their set-pieces and imagery. For what its worth, The Beyond is about an old hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, which has opened one of the Seven Doors of Death allowing the dead to cross over into the world of the living. Ostensibly, it is a zombie film. An incredibly violent, almost dreamlike zombie film. Highlights include a man being ravaged by possessed zombie spiders, a woman having her head thrown against a nail causing her eye to fly out of her head and one of the undead having their face blown off with the help of a shotgun. Because of scenes such as these the film was heavily censored when it released back in 1981 but the film is now available on both DVD and Blu-Ray and is well worth revisiting.