Sea of Darkness: Lucio Fulci's The Beyond

            Whenever the discussion arises about what the main difference is between classic American and European horror films, I usually give an example that highlights the archetypical contrasts between these two monolithic schools of terror. The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, is perhaps the quintessential American horror picture. Set and filmed at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., one would be hard-pressed to find a scary flick that is more definitively American. It features a clearly explained dilemma, a well-plotted succession of shocks, a superbly crafted script filled with crackerjack dialogue, and perhaps most recognizably, a parade of remarkable special effects that hold up to this day. Nevertheless it strives to appear gritty in spite of the intense production values on display. Another way to describe it: American horror practices the art of being polished without looking polished. Long story short, The Exorcist embodies well the standard American approach to horror, so well in fact that it is still the blueprint for mainstream Hollywood frights today, such as Insidious (2010) and Deliver Us from Evil (2014).

            On the other side of the spectrum we have The Beyond (1981), or under its original Italian title E tu vivrai nel terrore! – translated And You Will Live in Terror! Director Lucio Fulci’s masterpiece of overwhelming terror and dread may be the best representation of European horror as whole ever made – at least as it was in the 1970’s and 1980’s. All the good, the bad, and the ugly of Eurohorror is present and accounted for. There is the atmosphere, complete lack of discernible plot, extreme gore effects, breathtaking visuals, and impossibly out-of-synch dubbing that you simply get used to after watching such films for a while.

            Putting these two examples side by side clearly illustrates the night and day differences in filmic approach between us Yanks and our neighbors across the pond. Most would rightly see The Exorcist as the clearly superior film in terms of… well… pretty much everything. Nonetheless I prefer the latter. The Beyond is a singular achievement that is admittedly an acquired taste, but I am determined, resolute in fact, on helping you to acquire it.

            The Beyond opens with a scene that blatantly telegraphs what the viewer is in for during the next hour and a half. With text telling us that what we are seeing is occurring in ‘Louisiana, 1927’, we see a mob complete with torches and pitchforks paddling their way up a bayou in boats towards a decidedly Southern Gothic hotel. When they reach their destination, they gorily attack their target – a slightly off painter who rants about the end of the world – with chain-whipping, crucifixion, and a bath of lye. Little do the attackers know, the hotel is built atop one of the seven gateways to Hell! Cut to modern day (read: 1981) and Liza (played by the gorgeous Catriona MacColl) has inherited the hotel unaware of its sordid history and she soon must contend with zombified ghouls, a mysterious blind girl named Emily, flesh-eating tarantulas, and the forces of evil from Hell itself!

            It’s interesting to the note that, despite the completely European aesthetic and approach, the film is still set in the United States in an attempt to attract an international audience. This was also the aim of the casting, where London-born Catriona MacColl was billed as Katherine MacColl in an effort to make her sound more traditionally English even though she was indeed English anyway. British genre actor David Warbeck, popular already from his work in Hammer Studios films such as Twins of Evil (1971) plays opposite MacColl as a doctor and concerned friend.

Other cast members came more locally from Italy and included Cinzia Monreale as the blind girl and Al Cliver as Harris the doctor’s assistant – Al Cliver’s real name is Pierluigi Conti and he was born in Alexandria, Egypt. Lucio Fulci himself even has a cameo role as a librarian. As was common practice back then, each actor spoke their lines in their own language and was dubbed over in post-production. In fact, standard operating procedure in the Italian film industry at that time was to film whole productions silently and overdub the entire soundtrack after the fact. The result was an eerie disjointedness that just so happened to serve horror films like The Beyond fairly well.

            Maybe the single biggest reason The Beyond works so well is that at the helm is maestro of the macabre Lucio Fulci, seminally adorned with the title The Italian Godfather of Gore. Though he is justifiably well-known for excessive amounts of grue, from throat-rippings to head-crushings, Fulci has been sadly overlooked as a powerfully talented artist. Some of his films, such as The New York Ripper (1982), certainly scrape the bottom of the sleazy barrel, but several are truly bonafide works of art. Zombie (1979) is a worthy walking dead film featuring incredible make-up and gore effects as well as a great score by Fabio Frizzi – whose score for The Beyond is nothing short of brilliant. Fulci’s early giallo Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) is also known as a masterpiece of the genre with dazzling set pieces and wide-angle tableaus.

            With The Beyond, Fulci brings the full weight of his deliriously impassioned nightmares to bear. The motif of eyes – one of the director’s most prevalent obsessions – are a major focus of the film. The characteristic close-ups he employs are a hallmark of Fulci’s style, but the number of ocular organs that get altered in some way or mutilated completely here excessive to say the least. Emily isn’t the only character struck blind with some sort of milky-white cataract, so is a young girl named Jill, and a couple others by the end. The plumber, Joe, gets his eyes gouged out by the rotted fingers of a zombie, and then his zombified corpse puts a nail protruding from the wall to grisly use by mangling the eye of the housecleaner. All this together makes eyes seem more like an obsession of the director’s as opposed to a motif.

            The gore in The Beyond is certainly its most notorious selling point, and many viewers might see it as nothing more a parade of gruesome set pieces tied together by a story that makes very little sense. Even if this was all the film offered, it would still stand tall above others of its ilk. Acid baths, throats torn to unleash fountains of blood, and even an exploding head… Anyone in search of messy practical effects (courtesy long-time Fulci collaborator Giannetto De Rossi) will not be disappointed. Still, The Beyond is much more than gore and surrealism. It is an exercise in dream logic and the deep seated terror of knowing that the thin veil of reality has been ripped away, revealing the indescribable horror underneath.

            The hotel sits atop a gateway. This doorway to Hell does not conform to the laws of reality. Bodies discovered and taken away to the hospital morgue reappear, decomposing in a bathtub or jumping suddenly from the flooded bowels of the basement. The opened doorway seems to hold an evil sway over man and animal alike, not only bringing back the dead but causing accidents and influencing animals such as tarantulas and dogs to attack and kill.

            More than once, characters seem to show up in a place without explanation. Emily manifests out of thin air with her German Shepherd (named Dickie) in the middle of a barren highway, causing Liza to slam on the brakes. The little girl Jill, ostensibly the daughter of the ill-fated plumber, mysteriously reappears in the hospital morgue during the finale with absolutely no way to have gotten there. And of course, the infamous turn of logic in which Warbeck and MacColl, in an attempt to escape the onslaught of walking dead at the hospital, open a door and find themselves inexplicably back in the basement of the hotel. It is as though the characters are trapped in a nightmarish alternate reality created by the opening of the gateway.

            Time is also displaced so that characters from the past and present interact. Emily, stricken blind by her visit to the sea of darkness, comes from a place in time sixty years before the film takes place. She has Liza visit her at her home, yet when Dr. John (David Warbeck) travels to the house to verify the story, it is boarded up and long abandoned. Other events seem out of order, or accelerated. For example, Martha the housekeeper discovers both Joe’s mangled corpse as well as the mummified body of the painter murdered decades earlier. However, we don’t see her call the police or the hospital, and we don’t see the bodies taken away. The next instant we are shown both bodies lying on slabs at the morgue, with only a few scenes of dialogue in between. It is as if time is jumping from one moment to the next and the characters are completely unware of it until it is too late.

           

The resultant effects of such dream logic are that The Beyond feels very much like a celluloid nightmare as opposed to your stereotypical hack-n-slash. It aims at a sort of deep-seated terror that lumbering hulk-ish killers like Jason Voorhees or Leatherface (from the Friday the 13^th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre series’ respectively) just cannot inspire. Of course, today’s audiences, used to jump scares derived from sudden reveals and loud musical cues and plots that run like the wind, probably would find The Beyond’s slow-burn dread to be boring and the old plaster effects to be unrealistic…

But to those of us that love such films, these are qualities to be aspired to. Watching Fulci’s masterpiece is a reminder that makes us harken back to a time in cinematic history when the blood was redder, the atmosphere heavier, and the frights harder earned. I highly encourage you to check it out, for if you do, “you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored…”

Garbage In: Loving Exploitation Cinema

            Picture it: A little person in red flannel with a limp running an underground house of ill-repute posing as a landlord for a rundown flat. Abductions of teenage girls played by actresses in their 30’s, a toy shop dealing heroin, impromptu performances of off-pitch cabaret, and disemboweled – err, fluffed – teddy bears ensue… Such are the dubious experiences of The Sinful Dwarf (1973), a curiously depraved little picture also known as The Abducted Bride in the United States and Dvaergen in its home country of Denmark. The film is but one trippy example of an entire genre of film that spans the globe: Exploitation.

            Many have never heard of exploitation, or perhaps the closest they’ve come to it is seeing the Tarantino-Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse (2007) that paid homage to the rugged, scratchy prints of yesteryear that played in double-billed loops at drive-ins and theatres in the scuzzier side of town throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Simply put, exploitation casts a wide net over many other genres but often finds itself limited to an audience that seems doomed to having to explain themselves to their friends and family over and again as to why they love these films so darned much.

            Exploitation is not a polite or decent realm of filmmaking in the least. These are the films that teenagers sneak off to watch while their parents are out or asleep. Usually the image conjured up when the term ‘grindhouse’ is said is that of figure in a trench coat and shifty eyes ducking into a worn down theatre with sticky floors and musty seats. The truth is, the majority of modern Hollywood fair, from The Hunger Games (2011) to the Harry Potter series, has its roots in the seedy tropes of exploitation.

Film, in the classical sense, has been just as artistic a medium as paint and canvas, music, or the written word. Society reveres master directors such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, and Stanley Kubrick as artists. Films from these greats are usually labeled art cinema today, but for the majority of the 20^th Century, they were the respectable and highly-anticipated output of the Cineplex.

These features showcased high-minded ideas and deliberate art direction. Often they conformed to guidelines set by censorship organizations, such as the Hays Code, MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), or the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors). If they pushed the envelope, and films such as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1932) certainly did, it was done subversively.

The easiest way to describe exploitation is to say that it is the exact opposite. It isn’t about art. It has no sense of propriety whatsoever. That might be the kind way to explain it, since many would use the terms sleazy, dirty, or at the very least low-budget and B-movie. Certainly there have been times where art film and exploitation have crossed paths. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) obviously comes to mind, and another glaring piece underground skullduggery – Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! (1975) which combined explicit adult entertainment with exaggerated high-theatre hysterics in a classic gothic haunted house.

Exploitation itself takes its name from its very intent: to exploit for financial gain. One of the threads that ties together the many subgenres of this niche of filmmaking is the need to make a buck. Often times the exploited themes would be sexuality, violence of all kinds, or ripped-from-the-headlines current events such as drugs, prostitution, or even social justice issues. Necessarily, many of these films were marketed for adults (though they definitely played to teenagers rebellious and daring enough to sneak in).

The wide variety of topics available to be exploited resulted in grindhouse cinema becoming perhaps the most diverse genre of film in history. Much like Metal in the music world, exploitation has literally hundreds of derivative subgenres, each subject denoted by a mash-up title such as sexploitation, blaxsploitation, nunsploitation, or even ozsploitation – which is simply the entirety of exploitation films from Australia such as Mad Max (1979) or Turkey Shoot (1982). One of the reasons for such a large canon is perhaps that the genre has been around for quite a long time.

In point of fact, the genre itself has proliferated conceivably since the advent of cinema. From one-reel nudie shorts shown at carnivals and travelling shows at the turn of the 20^th Century, to the mega-hit television show The Walking Dead, exploitation (also called paracinema) has nearly always been with us since the medium was invented. Though the films come in all kinds, there is one thing that is has always stayed the same: the lurid, wide-eyed gleefulness of the less-than proper subject matter.

Two ingredients in particular have been necessary to fulfill a proper exploitation flick: sex and violence. Sex easily came first, being easier to justify in so-called ‘educational’ films that were trucked from town to town in the name of moral superiority. Titles such as Reefer Madness (1938) and Mom and Dad (1945) showcased fornication and drug use under the guise of ‘spreading awareness’. Violence emerged early in the form of horror films that dealt with the grotesqueries of World War I such as the hollowed eyes of Lon Chaney Sr. in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and later Universal monster pictures like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931).

The sci-fi B-movies of the 1950’s, such as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), It Conquered the World (1956), and The Blob (1958) exploited the public fears of technology and the repercussions of nuclear power. The turmoil of the 1960’s yielded grittier pictures that made good use of the new MPAA ratings system and sported true adult content for the first time in films like Blood Feast (1963) – often considered the first true American gore film – and The Undertaker and His Pals (1966). But it wasn’t until the 70’s that exploitation as we commonly think of it really began to hit its stride.

If we are to accept the oft-stated belief that art imitates life, then we can be reasonably sure of the 1970’s being a time of cultural disillusionment. Especially in the United States, where economic recession combined with rapid inflation existed alongside a country coping with a long and failed military conflict and the revelation of corruption at the highest levels of government. The art films of the time are darker and heavier, but the true explosion of paracinema begins here.

Taking a cue from many of the prison dramas of the 40’s and 50’s, Roger Corman with his brand new production company New World Pictures released several Women-in-Prison pictures to wild success. The biggest of these were director Jack Hill’s bawdy, good-time hits The Big Doll House (1971) – which brought the world ebony bombshell Pam Grier – and its sequel The Big Bird Cage (1972). Watching these films today is impossibly great fun and it’s not hard to see why they have achieved cult status. Tough babes in scant clothing busting out of a jungle prison with machine guns and beating men at their own game? What’s not to like? There’s something for everyone.

Grindhouse favorites proliferated everywhere and funding could come from anywhere. Tobe Hooper’s infamous The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was bankrolled by a company that turned out to be a front for organized crime and when John Carpenter made Halloween (1978) he did it with barely $300,000 scraped together on a bet producer Irwin Yablans made with financier Malek Akkad. The shoe-string budget was simply part of the deal with exploitation. Spend a little, make a lot.

As with any money-making venture, selling the product is a major piece of the puzzle. Often times the content of the films barely matched the lurid brilliance of the posters, taglines, and trailers released to promote the low-budget trash to the masses. Imagine yourself on New York’s famous 42^nd Street. The year is 1982 and you are strolling in to an afternoon matinee of something called Dr. Butcher, MD (Medical Deviate). Over in Italy, where it was made, it was titled Zombie Holocaust. You see a poster for an upcoming euro-import attraction titled Pieces. On it is a silhouetted figure with a chainsaw, and below that the image of a naked, dead girl apparently stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. The tagline reads, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre!” and at the bottom, “Pieces – it’s exactly what you think it is”.

Most marketing campaigns for exploitation films hard-sold the lewd, crude, and nude aspects of their productions, often far over-hyping what the audience got to see. With director Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces (aka Mil gritos tiene la noche) [1982], the American release struck brilliance by neither over nor underselling the product. It’s exactly what you think it is. Nevertheless, the taboo nature of forbidden pleasures has always been the hook to bring audiences into the theatre. Even today movies are sold to the public with lines like “The biggest action movie of the year!” so this is simply nothing new.

Exploitation movies became mainstream fair with the unprecedented success of one particular aquatic nightmare: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). Prior to that, any film about a rampaging carnivorous creature was relegated directly to B-movie status. Jaws was so massively popular that the term blockbuster was coined to describe its box-office crushing numbers. Shortly thereafter the Great White was followed by dozens of exploitation films masquerading as respectable art. Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), and Spielberg’s own Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) are just a few of the flood of mainstream thrills, chills, and spills that soldiered on to this very day in the form of Transformers (2007), Twilight (2008), and even The Lord of the Rings series.

So the next time you catch your friend or family member watching something like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or Friday the 13^th (1980), before you jump to the usual, “Why do you like that stuff? Garbage in, garbage out…” remember that your favorite movie is Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) in which a bunch of very good looking and scantily clad men and women fight off a cursed, undead horde on the high seas. Or The Avengers (2012), which revolves around a group of freaks led by a man made powerful by a sci-fi super soldier serum who fight off an alien invasion.

The point is, you like that stuff too. Happy viewing!