...E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà

Plot synopsis:
New Orleans, Louisiana, 1927. An enraged posse of men descend on the isolated Seven Doors Hotel deep in the swamps. They grab an artist called Schweik (Antoine Saint John), who is cloistered there. Accusing him of being a warlock, Schweik is dragged down to the cellar where he is savagely beaten with heavy chains, tortured with quicklime acid, and crucified with his wrists nailed to a cellar wall, despite his dire warnings of evil to be unleashed.New Orleans, 1981. Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) is a young woman who arrives from New York City to claim the hotel as her inheritance. No sooner has architect friend Marin Avery (Michele Mirabella) begins to show her around the property, strange incidents begin to happen. A painter (Anthony Flees) falls off his rig and is horribly injured, coughing up blood and babbling about, "the eyes, the eyes." Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck) arrives to take the injured man to the hospital, and offers Liza some sympathy. Next, a plumber, named Joe, attempts to repair a major leak in the flooded cellar. However, he is murdered by a presence that emerged from behind a slim-caked wall. The atmosphere at the hotel is further chilled by the creepy-looking servants, Arthur (Giampaolo Saccarola) and Martha (Veronica Lazar), who apparently come with the hotel. Martha discovers Joe's dead body in the cellar, and another much older cadaver lying in a pool of dirty water nearby. It is apparently that of Schweik, the artist.Driving down the 14-mile causeway to New Orleans, Liza encounters a strange blind woman, standing in the middle of the desolate highway. The blind woman introduces herself as Emily (Sarah Keller), and tells Liza that she has been waiting for her, although her eyes are occluded with cataracts. Liza drives Emily over to her opulently furnished house in New Orleans. Liza is warned by Emily to leave the hotel while she still can. Meanwhile at the hospital morgue, Dr. John McCabe is performing the autopsy on Joe the plumber while his assistant Harris (Al Cliver) wants to install an EMG machine to the corpse of Schweik. John laughs it off and leaves for lunch, while Harris remains behind to install the EMG machine. After Harris leaves for a call, the EMG machine begins pulsing with activity. A little later, Joe's wife Mary-Anne (Laura De Marchi) arrives with her daughter Jill (Maria Pia Marsale) to dress up her husband's corpse for the funeral, when she is killed in a horrific way by scalded with acid. Jill is then menaced by the re-animated cadaver of Schweik.Liza meets with John McCabe in a downtown bar to discuss her misgivings and anxieties. He expresses puzzlement when Lisa complains about he ineptitude of her weird servants. John claims to have never heard of them before despite knowing everyone in the area. Then a phone call from the bar arrives from Harris who informs John that Mary-Anne's body was found in the morgue, while Jill was found huddled in a corner frightened and unable to speak. After Joe and Mary-Anne's funeral, Emily appears again to Liza that evening at the hotel. Emily tells Liza about the warlock Schweik, who stayed in Room 36 of the hotel and about the supernatural underworld that the hotel conceals. The hotel was built over one of the Seven Gates of Hell, and Schweik has been the Guardian. Emily is about to reveal more when her hands wander over to a canvas depicting a desolate vision of lost souls in a terrible and arid landscape. Suddenly afraid, Emily says that the painting was painted by Schweik before he died, and she runs out of the hotel parlor into the night. But Liza notices a disquieting fact about her sudden departure: Emily made no footfalls on the bare wooden boards as she ran, and neither did her seeing-eye dog.The next day, Liza ventures nervously into Room 36, a dingy phantasmal of sheet-covered furniture and shafts of dusty light. She finds an ancient book, whose weirdly flesh-like cover bears the single word: Eibon. The closet breaths a cold hind of dark stygian realms from behind moth-eaten clothes. Liza tries to shrug off her fears and strides into the bathroom, only to be confronted with Schweiks rotting corpse nailed to the bathroom wall. She runs screaming from the discovery into the arms of the visiting John McCabe. The two of them return to the cursed room, but find nothing. Two nails are all that remain of Liza's nightmare vision. When Liza says she must have been over stimulated by Emily's tale, John queries her story by saying that there is no blind woman living at the house she described.Liza goes for a walk around New Orleans with Martin Avery, and they happen upon a old antiquarian bookshop. Just for a second, Lisa spies a copy of the book Eibon in the window. But when she runs into the shop, the book is gone. The weird old bookseller tells her that he never heard of a book by that name. Back at the hotel, Arthur is continuing his efforts to re-seal the hole in the cellar wall that Joe unwisely breached when he gets killed off-screen by unseen ghouls.Martin goes on alone to visit a local library in search of the original blueprints to the hotel. The strange librarian (director Lucio Fulci) leaves him alone as he goes out to lunch. Just when Martin discovers a clue in the Seven Doors Hotel blueprints, a bolt of lighting from the unseen forces of darkness knocks him off a high ladder to the floor, breaking his neck. Then, a horde of supernatural tarantulas appear and finish off the paralyzed Martin in a very gory way by eating his face off. Meanwhile, John investigates the house where Liza said she met Emily. But he discovers only a blasted, decaying shell of a house, empty of clues, except for one rotting item on the floor: the book of Eibon.At the hotel, Martha is continuing her lackluster efforts to clean up the hotel, and drain a scum-filled bathtub in Room 36. As the dirty water receds, the living coprse of Joe the plummer rises from the foul fluid. He impals the appalled housemaid through the back of her head on one of the nails jutting from the wall.Meanwhile, the semi-sinister Emily returns to her house which magically appears with all the posh furniture that was seen during Liza's visit. But then she is visited by the motionless, but menacing, figures of the recently dead; Arthur, Joe, Mary-Anne, and Schweik. Despite her pathetic pleas to be allowed to stay in the land of the living she is called back to Hell for she apparently served her purpose. Emily orders her guide-dog, Dickie, into action who attacks the rotting cadaver of Schweik. For a while, it seems that Emily's dog valiant efforts might save her. But with a mesmerizing stare from Schweik to the dog, and in a moment of devilish duplicity, Dickie turns on Emily herself, ripping out her throat in a welter of blood and gore.Back at the Seven Doors Hotel, Liza is suffering a supernatural assault during a visit to the cellar. John arrives from the hospital just in time to save her, but then accuses Liza of being in league with the forces of darkness. Just as John reveals from his research of the book of Eibon which he brought with him, that the hotel is one of the seven gateways to hell, a sudden storm erupts in the confides of the flooded cellar. As they flee to John's car and drive away, the hotel is seen lurking with the undead. The gates of hell have finally been opened.Driving around New Orleans, they notice that there is nobody in the streets. They arrive at the hospital where John gets a gun from his desk drawer, but discover that to their dismay that the nightmare has broken out there too. They run into a group of zombies that stagger through the corridors, and the phone lines are all cut. There are no bodies anywhere, yet no one seems to have survived the marauding undead. When John and Liza are separated, John finds his colleague Harris hiding in a storage room. John and Harris brief exchange of words ends when Harris is killed by flying glass by a magically shattered window, which impales him to a wall.Reunited, John and Liza find the exits blocked by groups of zombies. Corralled into the morgue, they find Jill there, and a fresh horde of reviving corpses. John begins shooting the zombies in the head to prevent them from reviving. Amidst the turmoil, Jill suddenly attacks Liza, her eyes cataracted with the stigma of the living dead. Jill is now an agent for the forces of darkness, as Emily had been. John whirls around and, without hesitating, blasts the young girl's face off with one bullet. A final appearance from the spectacularly rotting corpse of Schweik, drives the terrified couple down a spiral staircase into what should be the hospital basement. But to their utter bewilderment, they find themselves back in the cellar of the Seven Doors Hotel. Following a bright light emanating from a cloud of smoke, they walk through the large hole in the wall, and into a landscape of death depicted the warlock's painting; each horizon offering the same view of dead bodies scattered everywhere among the arid landscape. The porthole behind them closes, and there is no escape! John and Liza are trapped in the Beyond.... apparently for all eternity.Quote from the book of Eibon: "And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein may be explored."

Tags: dark, avant garde, cruelty, gothic, murder, bleak, cult, violence, horror, atmospheric, flashback, insanity, psychedelic, revenge, sadist

Review:
A couple of years back (late 90's), I had the pleasure of experiencing Fulci's The Beyond the way it was meant to be watched...on the big screen at the Angelica Movie Theater in Soho (NYC) at midnight, in all of its uncut glory (thanks to Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder Films).For a couple of hours, I was taken aback to the greatest days of horror!
The Beyond was his greatest Masterpiece, combining a better plot than most of his works, with the high quality level of gore Fulci was and always will be well known for.The Beyond starts with a Warlock being executed in the 1930's by a lynch mob.
The ending is as disturbing as it gets, and the deaths are both unique and horrifying (vintage Fulci).I remember walking to the subway station that night, still thinking about what my eyes had just seen (occasionally looking over my shoulder) - realizing I had been genuinely scared and disturbed by a movie that at the time was about 17 years old.
"E tu vivrai nel terrore - L'aldila" (or "The Beyond", as I fondly remember) is the beguilingly simple story of a cute little hotel in the deep South (Southern Louisiana, that is; NOT Southern Italy!) whose basement has an inconvenient little doorway to hell where undead warlocks, zombies, tarantulas and other creepy crawlies lurk to entomb man in darkness, death, despair and other such "D" words.
I tell you, almost wall-to-wall gore FX permeate this film and the blood-drenched sensibilities of director Lucio Fulci make every scene a nail-biter, gut-wrencher, heart-stopper and probably will involve sundry other parts of your body, as well.
After rushing back home to watch it, I was tortured (literally) with an hour of half of bad acting, bad special effects and an extremely confusing plot-line involving a stupid woman who unknowingly opens a gateway to Hell under the house she has just inherited.
So far, this sounds like a comedy, but I assure you, you will be laughing for all of the wrong reasons!While I don't exactly tune into a Lucio Fulci film for the 'acting', the work displayed in "THE BEYOND" is simply phenomenal.
For example, as always, Lucio Fulci delivers his gore and the first victim gets his face pulled off and one of his eyeballs popped out of its socket in the basement by a 'zombie hand' that thrusts out of a wall.
A man, whose connection with the main characters are never fully explained, goes to the town library to seek out the original construction plans for the house, only to be 'surprised' by a flash of lightning that appears out of nowhere (and for no real reason) that sends him crashing to the floor where he gets parts of his face bitten off by spiders.Some laughable special effects take place in this very scene.
How a horrific scene is supposed to have any effect when cheesy 70's pop music blurts out of nowhere is beyond me.The acting is atrocious, most of actors are Italian and are dubbed over in English, this is all fine and dandy but the shock horror expressions that they pull are hilarious.
Seriously, woman inherits old hotel, said hotel is built over the gateway to hell, lots of random people die for no real reason, the end.The deaths, people just lie there and get eaten or covered in acid or torn apart by zombies without even bothering to move or trying to escape.Common sense, there isn't any.
In one scene she thinks someone is in her living room and she backs into a corner and she screams and shouts...And screams and shouts...And shouts and screams...And so on and so forth for a good 5 minutes, "no, no go away leave me alone" she wails constantly, over and over for 5 solid minutes, it completely did my head in and was totally unnecessary.The scares, there aren't any, there is nothing scary about this film at all, sure, there's a decent amount of gore in the film but none of it is scary or even unnerving.
The music, acting and shoddy camera work see to that.As I said, I love early 80's horror films, The deadly spawn, Phenomena, Demons, I spit on your grave, The burning to name but a few, but The Beyond is a big pile of steaming crap.
Forming a loose trilogy with Fulci's "The Gates of Hell"(1980)and "House by the Cemetery"(1981),this gruesome bloodbath is one of the best horror movies ever made.Set in Louisiana,the film opens with a 1927 prologue featuring a Satanic painter being crucified and melted alive with quicklime in the basement of an old hotel.54 years later,Liza(Catriona MacColl)inherits the hotel and sets about restoring it.Little does she know that a 4000-year old book containing the prophecies of Eibon marks her new home as one of seven gateways to Hell.The atmosphere is so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw,the music by Fabio Frizzi is excellent,the set pieces are great,and the gore effects by Gianetto de Rossi and Germano Natali are really effective.The gore is extreme for example a poor plumber has his eyeball poked out by a zombie,an architect has his face eaten by hungry tarantulas who chew out his tongue,a blind Emily has her throat ripped out by her guide dog(this scene reminds me a similar sequence in Dario Argento's "Suspiria").Anyway if you haven't seen this cult masterpiece don't call yourself a horror buff.10 out of 10-what else?.
I totally disagree with people calling Fulci the King of Italian horror films.
This movie and those of its "ILK" are strictly for those who have an affinity for CULT movies, with BAD ACTING, BAD DIRECTING, NON SENSICAL PLOT and CHEAP GORY SPECIAL EFFECTS...if you like that sort of thing, then this flick is right up your alley, dont get me wrong, I LOVE outright horror and gore...the problem is, while 3/4 of the population ACCEPT the crap that is put out as such, I however remain on my search.
'The Beyond' does have a (Lovecraftian) plot as such - a woman inherits a hotel in Louisiana that contains one of the doorways to Hell - but that is basically an excuse for Fulci to string together a series of fantastic and frequently gory images.
These were clearly over my head, but only add to the greatness of the film.My horror idol Jon Kitley sums it up best: "Fulci isn't interested in a coherent storyline, with all the loose ends tidied up at the end of 90 minutes.
Meanwhile, Emily (Sarah Keller), a blind woman, advises Liza to leave the place as soon as possible."Seven Doors of Death" is a frightening horror movie from the master of the genre Lucio Fulci.
When you consider the other horror films that were coming out in the states around this time, like "Alien" and John Carpenter's "The Thing" it really shames Fulci.
This is the best of Fulci's three great horror films (the others being The House by the Cemetary and the Gates of Hell) which all, coincidentally starred MacColl..
He was a director whose specialty was creating bloody tableaux and constructing memorable set pieces that reeked of death and putrefaction, yet possessed a supernatural vibe that chilled the heart.Some of the greatest horror film music has come from Italy, and Fulci's musical collaborators, including Fabio Frizzi, who scored "The Beyond", have produced some amazing work in their partnership with the director.
Fulci's approach is quite literal in this tale in that he asks us to accept that an old house is an actual doorway through which hell's bloodthirsty minions can pass.The special effects are top notch, as usual, and we get flesh tearing, facial disintegration by acid, limb hacking and assorted grotesquerie involving the living dead.A must see..
I've seen ZOMBI 2 (another film by Fulci)last week and although I thought that film was not a very good one either (to say the least), it was far better than this tasteless and ridiculous tale, which seems awfully similar to INFERNO by Dario Argento from a year earlier.
A few examples of stupidity: a woman's face (bad special effects too, none of the victims seems to be in any pain when being killed) is getting covered with acid, and there are still large bursts of blood coming out of the face; lightning strikes in the basement; a man runs out of bullets, but keeps firing at zombies in the next scene; a woman is standing at the door when being attacked by a zombie, but still manages to get to the other side of the room so that there's no way out anymore; and so on, and so on...
An example of this has got to be when the eyes of some of the characters turn white for no apparent reason other then they have seen some shocking images.however the film has many things going for it, firstly many of the gore effects are very well done and are in fact quite shocking, especially where we see a tarantula bite the victim in the eye turning it into slop.
The Beyond (The UK title for this movie) is by far the best film that Lucio Fulci ever made.
I noticed that everyone there had their legs up on their chairs, scared senseless just like me.I had known of Fulci from Fangoria magazine, but this was the first Fulci film I had actually seen and I had never seen anything like it before (I had missed seeing Zombie because the person who was going to drive me there chickened out).I loved and hated these feelings I was experiencing while watching this movie.
It was a mix of fascination and absolute fright, due to the perfect combination of incredibly creepy atmosphere and outrageously well designed and executed gore effects.I was shaking when I left the theatre and vowed to never see another horror film again.
Fulci makes totally different kinds of films intended primarily for a domestic Italian movie-going audience, with foreign distribution viewed only as an afterthought.
Lucio Fulci redefines the word Zombie in this film about the living dead and the 7 gates of hell.
Lucio Fulci redefines the word Zombie in this film about the living dead and the 7 gates of hell.
The soundtrack really destroys the atmosphere and it as almost as though scenes are edited together just to make the movie long enough to be called a " film" .I think it may be time for the reviewer to give up on the Italian horror film genre.
The film is a part of Fulci's unofficial four part zombie series (the other three being Zombie Flesh-Eaters, City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery), and for my money the best of the lot.
There's things like, well, atmosphere and terror from the Louisiana locations and lighting in those subterranean quarters near the 'gate' of hell, and, of course, the manic gore.What surprised me most of all though after the fact of Fulci more than proving himself as a near-virtuoso with the camera and moments of great suspense (maybe not quite Argento but close enough), was how scary the film turned out to be.
And characteristic for an Itallian "splatter" pic there's gore, lots of it, usually around popping eyeballs or close-ups of gashing flesh- the sepia-toned opening crucifixion is just one such fantastically over-indulgent treat- only with the Beyond Fulci tries out some things that gain their power from the cranked-up "what-the-hell" factor, such as the little girl in the autopsy room walking back away from the flowing pool of blood/whatever.The Beyond isn't for the squeamish, or for the easily frightened.
The film is really gore and I think we have the right to the best special effect of the master : Lucio Fulci The two scenes with the eye are very impressive.
Lucio Fulci is best known for his splatter films, and this movie certainly shows why.
I don't really want to watch that scene again.In the end Lucio did what he did to create one of the deepest darkest haunted house/zombie movies.
Joe's wife and daughter try to claim his corpse, but the mother has her face slowly — "Sempre così lentamente!" I can hear Fulci yell from his director's chair — burned off by acid and her daughter becomes one of the undead (zombies appear, drink three times) until she is shot by a bullet that sends her entire head spraying all over the screen in one of the most shocking scenes in pretty much all of film.
E tu vivrai nel terrore - L'aldila, translated "And You Shall Live In Terror- The Beyond(afterlife)" was released in the USA, with large bits of what little plot the film had, chopped off under the title "The Seven Doors of Death." The box art was compelling, looking like the cover of an issue of "Vault of Horror" from EC Comics and promising(From the looks of it) extreme carnage and violence.This was not so.
On the other hand, the hotel was called the "Seven Doors Hotel" or somesuch, so I guess it couldn't have been all too secret.We learn later that the man was named Sweik, because one woman(a ghost in fact) cries out to him for pity right before she gets her throat ripped out, in an only somewhat-convincing scene(yeah, the director was known for gore, but never really made it look all that real, except for two now-legendary scenes from Gates of Hell, which was something of a 'Part One' to this film).So all in all the plot is not the driving force.
The whole film, while not heavy on character developmet, plot, or even decent dialogue is very heavy on one all-important thing in Italian horror cinema: atmosphere.And Fulci knew *that* area well.
Of Fulci's 'big three'(which consists of this film, "The Gates of Hell aka City of the Living Dead," and "Zombie aka Zombie Flesh Eaters aka Zombie 2") The Beyond is most successful as an entertaining movie.
"Zombie" had nice makeup effects but the main attraction, a scene in which a woman gets a wooden splinter into her eye, is very easy to see through- you can tell exactly how it was done, and that's a bad thing when it comes to gore.
The ending to "The Beyond," however, was well-paced, well shot, the 'scenery' was great and you really couldn't see it coming(or maybe I'm just bad at guessing endings).So what it amounts to is this: If you can watch a movie without being spoonfed all the answers; if you love watching films with atmosphere as much as plotline; if you like violence and can overlook if it looks fake sometimes; if you like nightmare scenarios; and if you'd like to see what is hailed by many to be the best film of who is hailed to be one of the best Italian horror film directors of all time, check out "The Beyond." I'd skip "Seven Doors of Death" if I were you- get it uncut.
He was too dumb to work out that a head-shot might be a good idea.With characters this dumb, plots this pointless, and gore which varies between excellent (a man getting nailed to a wall is a sphincter clincher) and laughable (the worst fake spiders you have ever seen in your life - yes, worse than Jumanji), we turn to Fulci's directorial skills.
****SPOILERS**** Italian film director Lucio Fulci who gave us such diverse classics as "Escape from Sing Sing" and "Sins of Casanova" cleaned up in the box office with his 1979 horror flick "Zombie" that he just had to make a sequel and settled for "The Beyond".
The Beyond, the second film in Fulci 'Gates Of Hell' trilogy (in between City Of The Living Dead and The House By The Cemetery), exceeded all my expectations.
Fulci employs transitions that defy narrative sense, but still invoke an effect akin to taking the Warp Zone in "Super Mario Bros." In between the elaborate gore scenes (including a man whose face is mangled by tarantulas; a literal acid bath; a head blown apart by a gunshot, etc.), it should be noted that Fulci creates an atmosphere of dread with great skillthe suspense built is easily as impressive as the Giannetto de Rossi FX that concludes it.But "The Beyond," like Herk Harvey's "Carnival of Souls"(1962), is most interesting as a meditation on an imagined limbo existing between life and death: both Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) in "Carnival" and Liza are females tormented by a reality that pulls away from them at random intervals.
Fulci was able to create creepy atmosphere like in bad dream; once I watched this film with my friend who is not acclimated to watching horrors and he was really scared within all show.
This is one of my favorite Fulci films next to Gates of Hell/ City of the Living Dead.
I have seen a lot of Fulci's 80's horror like 'Zombi 2' and 'House by the Cematary' and they are brilliant.
I love Horror films, especially Zombie movies because of there tackiness, cheap gore and hardly Oscar award winning acting which just adds character to a film of this sort.
I watched "Zombie Flesh Eaters" about a year ago and since then i have been interested to see more of Lucio Fulci's work and other italian directors famous for horror.
This is a tough film to review.I remember back in 1996 going on the hunt for this movie after hearing about it through various horror/zombie/gore websites on the early days of the internet.
There are many...MANY people here defending the films of Fulci as horror masterpieces.
In the end...some pretty good zombie makeup, an interesting idea for a movie, but poor cinematography (mostly), bad acting, an AWFUL soundtrack, slow pacing, and a total lack of logic create what is essentially a cult-classic for snobbish horror film buffs.
Lucio Fulci's best horror film....
I thought that The Beyond was one of the best of Lucio Fulci's horror films.
I like most of Lucio Fulci's movies but a found this to be one of his best..