One year after releasing gory comedy-horror gem Re-Animator, b-movie mavens Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna returned to the undulating well of H.P. Lovecraft. They even got the band back together, casting Re-Animator’s Jeffrey Combs in another, more nuanced mad-scientist role and bringing back Barbara Crampton as his psychiatrist and eventual love interest. While Re-Animator came into being when Gordon was introduced to Lovecraft’s source material after musing one night about the surplus of Dracula-inspired films and dearth of Frankenstein-themed movies at the time, From Beyond works as a spiritual sequel, and not just because its antagonist shares a name with the villain in 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein.
From the jump, From Beyond feels more authentically Lovecraftian. Not five minutes pass before Combs’ lab assistant character, Crawford Tillinghast, is flipping the switch on a portal between two worlds and is bitten by a pink eel-like creature writhing in the air. The device, an oversized water-heater-looking contraption called the Resonator, induces vibrations that allow parallel dimensions to overlap and interact with each other by stimulating the pineal gland in humans standing nearby.
The script, adapted from Lovecraft’s story by Re-Animator scribe Dennis Paoli and Yuzna, who also produced both films, leans heavily on the words “pineal gland,” repeated especially frequently by Crampton’s Dr. Katherine McMichaels, who notices the enlargement of that particular piece of anatomy on Tillinghast’s brain scans and cites Descartes theorizing that it is the “third eye.” She’s interested in this development due to her research on schizophrenia, and soon haphazardly posits that the hallucinatory psychosis it creates could stem from the enlarged gland allowing people suffering from schizophrenia to actually see across dimensions.
That’s about as deep as the philosophy and psychology goes in this film that hinges heavily on practical body horror and creature effects. Before long, a former pro football-player cop named Bubba (Ken Foree) is reduced to a pile of bones and festering goo by a swarm of interdimensional insects, and a snake-like pineal gland emerges ― Alien’s chestburster-like ― from Tillinghast’s forehead.
Gordon’s film makes overt iconic horror references often, and also taps into the horror zeitgeist. An opening scene involves the head of Tillinghast’s mentor consumed by one of the creatures conjured by the Resonator. That mad scientist (Ted Sorel), the chief antagonist in the film, is named Dr. Pretorius, a direct reference to the antagonist who played a similar malevolent mentor role in The Bride of Frankenstein. After Dr. McMichaels springs Tillinghast from a mental institution so he can restart the Resonator in order for her to get the chance to see what the machine can do, we’re treated to Pretorius returning in a spirit that anticipates the perverse sensory pleasure/pain of Hellraiser’s Cenobites while tapping into the body horror grotesqueries of Carpenter’s The Thing — also serving as a parallel to Cronenberg’s The Fly, released just two months earlier.
Gordon makes some deft edits, including juxtaposing a scene of otherworldly gore and subsequent puking by Bubba with a cut to a cracked egg glopping into a frying pan. Much like Gordon’s Re-Animator, and Yuzna’s equally icky Society, the practical-effects craft on display allows this flick to transcend typical schlocky midnight-movie standing. Combs is far more interesting here as a voice of conflicted reason, trying to hold back Pretorius’ and Dr. McMichaels’ respective desires to press further into the perverse sensory pleasures that the Resonator offers than he is as the monomaniacal Victor Frankenstein archetype in Re-Animator. Crampton thrives here as well, even if her momentary shift from buttoned-up, bespectacled doctor to lascivious dominatrix comes across as crudely objectifying, as found in other schlock horror of the ‘80s. She gets the last laugh, though. Quite literally, as her frenzied laugher in the final shot recalls the tortured ecstasy of Marilyn Burns’ Sally Hardesty at the conclusion of 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Gordon hit his directorial high-water mark right of gate with Re-Animator, From Beyond and the underrated Dolls all released within a two-year span smack in the middle of the ‘80s. He and Yuzna would both get story-writing credits for Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids a few years later, but Gordon directed little of note beyond that point, even by Streaming Hell standards. After notable work as a producer (including for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), Yuzna would make his late-night cinematic mark with Society, and also directed two Re-Animator sequels in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. He also led later Silent Night, Deadly Night installments and helmed the somewhat audacious but wholly unnecessary Return of the Living Dead III. Re-Animator may get the higher cult-classic status, but From Beyond is the purest distillation of Gordon and Yuzna’s gonzo comedy-horror sensibilities, and perhaps the best roles of Combs’ and Crampton’s careers.
The post From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: From Beyond appeared first on Spectrum Culture.