The Beyond (1981)

Lucio Fulci's The Beyond arrived in 1981 with a premise that could not be less interested in the concerns of the present day. A New Yorker named Liza Merril inherits a Louisiana hotel, sinks her savings into reopening it, and discovers that the basement houses one of the seven gateways to hell. A warlock was lynched there in 1927 for practicing black magic. The building has opinions about being renovated. Fulci, working from a three-page treatment and inventing much of the film on location, stages the consequences as a sequence of macabre set pieces: a plumber blinded in a flooded basement, tarantulas eating a paralyzed architect, a morgue full of the restless dead, and a final walk into an ash-colored wasteland where the protagonists are struck blind and vanish.

There is no argument being made here. There is no thesis, no advocacy, no invitation to examine our assumptions. The Louisiana setting supplies gothic atmosphere and a torch-bearing mob as a plot device, and the film extends that mob no sociological commentary whatsoever. Liza's financial stake in the hotel is a motive for her to ignore warnings, not a critique of property or capital. Emily the blind seeress exists to deliver exposition and bleed from the palms. The film's thematic interests, as its interpreters have noted, run toward purgatory, the Catholic problem of sight, and the notion that knowledge of the wrong book costs you your eyes. These are metaphysical preoccupations, not political ones.

This is a clean specimen. The horror is visceral and the meaning is cosmic, which leaves no room for the instructional impulse that defines so much contemporary cinema. Nothing in the film pauses to explain its audience to itself. It simply opens a door, kills everyone who walks through, and ends in a desert with no exit. The classification is straightforward, and the score reflects a work of art entirely untouched by the cultural currents of four decades hence.