The Beyond

If you don't like The Beyond, I don't know if we can be friends. Picking up on the theme of persecution from the first film, our painter and magician Schweick is given one of the wounds of Christ, and then nailed by his wrists to the wall before being horrifically disfigured, in an apparent inversion of Christ's crucifixion. There's an uncomfortable attachment to the history of racism here, as well, since we see the black man at the desk watch the lynch mob enter fearfully, sweat dripping down his face. Meanwhile, a woman reads a book titled Eibon, providing this second film in the trilogy with a direct connection to the weird fiction of Fulci's beloved HP Lovecraft as Dunwich did for the first. The book was invented by Lovecraft's friend Clark Ashton Smith, and therefore featured frequently in his stories as many other elements introduced by Smith did. I think there's a lot to say about the connections to racism supplied by the location of the story and the inclusion of a lynch mob and a terrified black man in the opening sequence, but I don't know that I'm the one to say it. Eyes are obviously important. There's a long history of blindness in the history of Christianity, from those who are struck blind by god, to those who perhaps have been blinded by a religious vision. This is sort of the counterpart to the last film's bleeding eyes, and here it seems to happen because of exposure to supernatural powers. Not quite separately, the potential or real mutilation of the eye is a major theme in this film and the last, providing us with a clear connection to surrealism and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou most of all. But strangely, I think there's also a connection between this and the melting of the face with acid and other substances because of the juxtaposition of the two things in some scenes. In the opening, Schweick's face is melted by the lynch mob at the same time that Emily is about to go blind. Later, the redheaded girl has a premonition of something bad happening to her mother just before rushing in to see her father's mutilated eyes and her mother's face being melted away by acid, and in the next scene we discover she's gone blind after her experience. This constellation of blindness, ocular mutilation, and facial melting is utterly compelling to me, but apparently resists any attempt to discover broad meaning. In fact, Buñuel and Dali's approach in their film was to resist logic absolutely, but in this film, on the contrary, I think these themes coalesce to constitute the basis for an internal logic completely belonging to The Beyond and its use of vision, blindness, and mutilation. I really do think the combination of these three things creates a sort of thematic depth which would have been impossible to achieve by any other means. I think that the mutilations are connected to the malefic influence of the gate to hell here, whereas on the other hand blindness seems to be connected to the influence of the book, a powerful and dark artifact, but one which warns of the gates and seems to have been created in hopes of stopping the end of the world. This is, of course, Schweick's goal at the start of the film, and Emily's goal later on. No need to talk about how poorly it all turned out for Schweick. The symbol of Eibon in the film is, amusingly, clearly the alchemical symbol for tin, but apparently Fulci put it in because his daughter got it tattooed on her arm. Still, it's an occult symbol of some importance in this film. Something I've noticed in this film is the recurring tongue-in-cheek use of various labor issues. The guys leaving at 5 o'clock because of their union job in the first film, and the library employee leaving because of the terms of the recent labor strike in this second film. This is one of the greatest endings to any film ever made. Hell, it may just be my favorite. The demise of reason in an unceasing flood. The final mystery turns out to be aimless desolation. In the hell at the end of the film, there's something of the Plateau of Leng from Lovecraft, I think. Oh, yeah, this goes on my "Leaving Soon!" on Tubi movies I watched list, which has other films with scary books in them. "And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored."