Movie Review – From Beyond

From Beyond (1986)
Written by Brian Yuzna, Dennis Paoli, and Stuart Gordon
Directed by Stuart Gordon

Stuart Gordon was a well-regarded name in American horror cinema, particularly in the 1980s. Born in Chicago in 1947, Gordon was drawn to acting and live theater, which he majored in at university. After graduation, he started his own theater company and engaged in highly provocative stagings. One of these, The Game Show, was designed as an attack on audience apathy. With plants in the audience, Gordon’s cast would begin to provoke the viewers, and each show would conclude with an audience riot that brought the play to a halt. He put on a politically charged adaptation of Peter Pan in 1968, which got him and his wife arrested for obscenity. Live nude actors and allusions to pixie dust being a substitution for LSD seemed to draw ire from the community. Gordon would come around to film in the mid-1980s, with his first production being The Re-Animator and From Beyond as his follow-up.

Dr. Edward Pretorious (Ted Sorrel) and his assistant, Dr. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), live in a rather unremarkable mansion in a quiet neighborhood. Pretorious has devoted his life to exploring pleasure in all its forms. One of these methods is The Resonator, a machine that will open the pineal gland (third eye) to aspects of our universe we typically cannot perceive. The experiment goes as expected, Tillinghast glimpsing eel-like creatures flying around in the lab. One of them bites him, and he shuts the machine off. Pretorious enters and demands it be switched back on, only for the creatures to seem to devour him. 

Tillinghast is arrested and charged with the murder. He’s then put into the custody of Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), a controversial psychologist who brings the now insane man back to the scene of the crime. She is escorted by Detective Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree), who remains skeptical about the outlandish story Tillinghast keeps telling. They both learn it’s all true when Pretorious returns, transformed into a grotesque monster who wants to make these interlopers his new playthings as he allows his mind to fracture and his body to transform further.

The film is loosely based on the H.P. Lovecraft story of the same name. The story is told from Tillinghast’s point of view through his writings, a prevalent structure used by Lovecraft. In the original version, Tillinghast is the chief scientist and is killed by the creatures he sees when using the resonance wave machine. The film version expands greatly on the story, with the original content making up the cold opening of the movie. Having seen The Re-Animator, I would say From Beyond is a more provocative picture. The presence of sex is far more explicit here, from Pretorious’s BDSM room to Barbara Crampton donning a quite revealing leather dominatrix outfit while under the influences of the machine.

What makes From Beyond such fun is how it embraces schlockiness while not phoning in performances or slacking off on the technical work put in. Gordon is making a horror movie, and he wants things to be creepy and weird. He’s tapping into that body horror aspect of Lovecraft’s work to good effect. The budget is clearly not massive, so there’s often a lot of shooting around the strings and seams of puppets and make-up effects, but the end result is such a wild trip you don’t mind.

Combs is a natural at playing neurotic weirdos, hence the career he made for himself in many of these genre films. There’s such an intensity to his performances that walks the line between camp and deathly serious. He’s reunited with his Re-Animator co-star, Barbara Crampton, who is a perfect fit for these kinds of movies. She fits the sex symbol role that Gordon clearly wants in his work, the horror and the horny intermixed, but she isn’t giving some vapid, thoughtless performance. Crampton gets the movie and understands she’s playing someone built on a pile of tropes but still expected to bring something new. I found her character a lot more captivating than Combs. Not that Jeffrey doesn’t deliver on the weirdness.

I wouldn’t say this is a movie with any character development or narrative. Everything you need to know about the movie is established in the opening scene, so the rest of the runtime (only 86 minutes total) is devoted to taking that premise and expanding on it in different ways. I never felt I got a good sense of who Pretorious was other than a sadistic, creepy scientist, but I didn’t need to know more. Why does Tillinghast work for such a sicko? The movie never explains, but I also didn’t find myself wondering about it either. From Beyond is simply a movie about creating a particular mood and playing around with the special effects they have on hand, which goes back to Gordon’s provocative theatrical work.

The special effects here by Brian Yunza are just as icky as you’d want them to be. Everything associated with the other dimension carries this wet, sticky texture. There’s a moment where one character’s pineal gland bursts forth from his forehead and proceeds to suck the brains out of people’s heads via their eye sockets, which is quite gnarly. You pair that with the horniness that is ever present, and it makes for a very entertaining horror-comedy experience. Stuart Gordon certainly dares to go to places other directors might shy away from, revealing that he has an authentic love of the genre, even the bits that might seem silly.