THE BEYOND

Aka: Seven Doors Of Death
Director: Lucio Fulci
1981

The Beyond is considered to be the best film in the long and active career of Lucio Fulci, who died in 1996 at the age of 69. Like the other two Italian horror masters, Dario Argento (Suspiria and Deep Red) and Mario Bava (Black Sunday and Blood and Black Lace). Fulci took conventional horror stories, added extreme and colorful gore, and combined them with the artiness of Federico Fellini's films. Throw in the zombies from George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, and you have Fulci's The Beyond.

And talk about a plot! An attractive blonde woman, Liza (Catriona MacColl) inherits an old hotel. We see in a flashback that an artist was crucified in his room, and that the hotel holds the location of one of the seven doors to Hell. Liza tries to fix the place up, and people keep dying. A blind woman tries to warn her about the history of the house. A plumber accidentally opens the door, his eyeballs are gouged out, and he becomes a zombie. And after watching her mother's face devoured by a jar of acid, a little girl becomes blind, and then later a zombie. Liza meets Dr. McCabe who refuses to believe any of it ("I'm a doctor, dammit -- I must have facts... proof!"). Room number 36 is supposedly the haunted room, and a mysterious book keeps turning up and disappearing. Then, all the zombies come out and try to eat Liza and the doc. This is when the doc keeps wasting perfectly good bullets shooting the zombies in the chest.

This movie is gory, though. We've got three different scenes of eyeballs being gouged, poked, or pulled out. We've got a spider attack, a zombie dog attack, a human head eaten by acid, nails through wrists, and chunks of glass impaled in someone's face. And we've got blood; lots and lots of blood, spurting and spraying, welling up in pools, and creeping across the floor.
Lucio Fulci had this to say about The Beyond, “My idea was to make an absolute film, with all the horrors of the world. It’s a plotless film, there’s no logic to it, just a succession of images.”