Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ted Sorel
Director: Stuart Gordon
Country: USA
Genre: Horror | Sci-fi
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for the 3rd Annual ThatJaime Horrorfest put on by Next Projection’s own Jaime Burchardt, which runs from October 1st to October 31st. For more information on this online horror film series visit thatjaime.com/horrorfest and follow ThatJaime Horrorfest on Twitter at @ThatJaimeHF.
H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories of the 1920s and 1930s have exerted a widespread influence over the genre in all forms of media, but the best-known film adaptations of his work are associated with writer Dennis Paoli, producers Charles and Albert Band and Brian Yuzna, and writer-director Stuart Gordon. Following the success of their gory and witty Lovecraft update Re-Animator, much of the same cast and crew embarked upon a perhaps even more ambitious follow-up. Its complete title is H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond, but like its predecessor, it greatly expounds upon the original tale in order to honor the spirit of Lovecraft’s malignant cosmology that hides just outside human comprehension; where the author used hints and suggestion in prose, the filmmakers try to show what Lovecraft considered unshowable.
Its complete title is H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond, but like its predecessor, it greatly expounds upon the original tale in order to honor the spirit of Lovecraft’s malignant cosmology that hides just outside human comprehension; where the author used hints and suggestion in prose, the filmmakers try to show what Lovecraft considered unshowable.
The arresting opening incidents drop the viewer in the middle of a plot that depicts the entirety of Lovecraft’s original seven-page story “From Beyond,” in which an unnamed narrator recounts his agitated mentor Crawford Tillinghast’s lethal experiment to stimulate the brain’s pineal gland, a dormant sense organ that could allow its owner to perceive and interact with a wider, parallel universe of unspeakable creatures and possibilities. In the film, the student is Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) and the mentor is Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel, just as deliciously over-the-top as his character’s namesake, Frankenstein’s mentor Dr. Septimus Pretorius, in Bride of Frankenstein), a sexual fetishist obsessed with expanding his sensual horizons. He succeeds beyond his wildest hopes by building a computer-controlled magnetic “Resonator,” but his violent transition from our world to the world “beyond” leaves Tillinghast seemingly insane and complicit in the murder of his mentor, whose headless body is merely the vestige of a disturbing transformation.
Once arrested and committed to a psychiatric ward, Tillinghast intrigues “girl wonder” psychologist Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), who CAT scans his brain to find an enlarged pineal gland, backing up his unbelievable description of events and leading her to want to recreate the experiment seemingly for the sake of knowledge. Ken Foree, best known from Dawn of the Dead, rounds out the core cast of characters as accompanying Detective “Bubba” Brownlee, a taste of comic relief who grows in importance as a voice of reason.
The film reverses roles for Combs and Crampton compared to Re-Animator: the actress is now the confident driver of the plot, with the actor still exuding intellectual seriousness amidst absurdity like no one else but reduced to more-or-less a victim of increasing indignities. McMichaels begins as a seemingly repressed researcher interested in furthering science for the good of humanity, but her over-eagerness asserts itself and, as a stimulated pineal gland also happens to stimulate the sexual drive, she veers into the same S&M fixations that made Dr. Pretorius unhealthily obsessive. Such a shift in character not only allows Crampton to show off her body but also her complexity and the ramifications of an unchecked quest for mental and physical satisfaction.
The visual effects of jellyfish-like creatures swimming through the air, although truer to Lovecraft’s original descriptions, have not aged as well as the disgustingly tactile prostheses and appendages that transform Pretorius from a merely depraved human into a fiend on the order of John Carpenter’s The Thing and the Brundlefly hybrid of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, two other body-horror classics of the same era.
To bring Lovecraft’s shadowy and vague descriptions of creatures “from beyond” to life, the filmmakers try multiple lines of attack. The visual effects of jellyfish-like creatures swimming through the air, although truer to Lovecraft’s original descriptions, have not aged as well as the disgustingly tactile prostheses and appendages that transform Pretorius from a merely depraved human into a fiend on the order of John Carpenter’s The Thing and the Brundlefly hybrid of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, two other body-horror classics of the same era. Those films also share the dread of contagion by touch, in which two things can share essences or even merge through contact, as Pretorius’s mind fuses with the creature from beyond that devoures his head and Tillinghast, although still in our world, begins to take on characteristics of the worm-like beast that tries to engulf him. Even the consequences of an enlarged pineal gland become gruesomely literalized as both Pretorius and Tillinghast burst tiny, phallic tentacles from their foreheads.
A prolific theater director as well as film one, Gordon has a pleasingly functional and unemphatic visual style, the better to absorb and, perhaps through splayed fingers, admire, the imaginative practical makeup effects and frequently eye-popping colors on display. From Beyond may be less overtly funny and accessible than the blackly comic Re-Animator, but it possesses an EC Comics-level appreciation for gleeful bad taste, and when faced with the plethora of its still-shocking images, sometimes all one can do, like McMichaels in the movie’s final image, is laugh.
[notification type=”star”]79/100 ~ GOOD. Sick and transgressive, From Beyond reconfigures Lovecraft into a must-see for body-horror aficionados.[/notification]
