From Beyond: Gods, Monsters and That Sexual Feeling
‘It’s running itself’
Jeffery Comb playing the poor and unfortunate Crawford Tillinghast channels from the high camp of the horror classics of Hammer, Castle and Whale pedigree as he unleashes a scream of pure terror into Stuart Gordon’s astutely judged close up.
‘Something’s Coming’
Ted Sorrel’s Dr. Pretorius, grins a malicious grin in reply that only a mind warped beyond depravity will sport with such élan amidst the terrifying chaos of The Resonator- a machine that like so many outcomes of a lifetime spent in trying to play God and challenge nature will only wreck havoc on all who knowingly or unknowingly come into contact.
‘To a new world of Gods and Monsters’
Famous words uttered by Ernst Thesiger‘s Dr. Pretorius toasting his collaboration with Colin Clive’s Henry von Frankenstein in James Whale’s 1935 subversive sequel ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ to the original monster classic.
In 1985, Director Stuart Gordon along with friend, frequent writing and producing collaborator and fellow H.P. Lovecraft fiend Brian Yuzna loosely adapted the early 20th century horror master’s short story ‘Herbet West- Re-Animator’ into a vision so startling, debased, violent, controversial, unholy and so fucking godamned original that the film ‘Re-Animator’ belied its independent-no-budget-schlocker roots to become a runaway success not just with the jaded horror fan base but with critics as well, even becoming one of the Cannes Film Festival’s unlikeliest inclusions. ‘Re-Animator’ pushed the boundaries of on-screen violence reaching a perverse zenith as a beheaded zombie holding its own undead rotting head in its hands administers cunnilingus on a nubile blonde. But while the primary aim was most definitely to shock and offend there was a rare and confident intelligence to the film, both behind and in front of the camera. Where a lesser B-movie would have hyperventilated (Planet Terror) Gordon and crew orchestrate the chaos with one finger always on the pulse of the audience. There is a method to the madness- one set in the primer of the black and white gothic greats like the primed-for-pulp dialogue, cheap-but-inspired sets, strange abrupt close-ups, sinister music, eccentrically etched characters and Grand Guignol performances. Even the gross out scenes are brilliant in their execution like Gordon is leading you on a juvenile chorus that goes “1-2-3… grooossssssss!”
With the success of ‘Re-Animator’ landing Gordon and Yuzna a three-picture deal with Empire Pictures, they began pitching various Lovecraftian scenarios to the studio (including ‘Dagon’ which Gordon would finally make in 2001) and ‘From Beyond’ was short-listed as the follow-up.
‘From Beyond’ opens in a typical strange-blinking-lights-and-monitors laboratory and young Crawford Tillinghast has just entered a new program into the system. He switches on the outlandish machine which we later learn, is called the ‘Resonator’ and watches a glass globe fill with electric sparks and one of the attached resonance forks vibrate into a strange field of lurid ultraviolet. A strange eel-like creature makes its appearance floating eerily around the activated fork. Fascinated, the young doctor moves towards it only for the eel to lunge forward and bite a chunk off his cheek. The doctor manages to switch the machine off and heads downstairs to announce to his mentor, the strange Doc Pretorius that the ‘Resonator’ has finally yielded the expected success. They return to the lab where the mad doctor amps the ‘Resonator’ to maximum, overloading the computers and losing control of the machine.
‘It’s running itself’
‘Something’s coming’
Gordon, at first, keeps us in the dark about the horror-of-horrors by cutting away to the woman next door who calls up the law on account of the strange lights and noises next door and orchestrates a tense and witty exposition of the scene as the woman’s poodle escapes into Pretorius’s house and she is forced to follow. The scene ends with the police apprehending a petrified and a fleeing Crawford while the poodle makes a casual snack of the mad doctor’s now headless body lying limp in the laboratory. The start credits with the text in lurid pink begin to roll.
H.P. Lovecraft’s source story, all of seven pages in length was more or less all used in the pre-credit sequence and Gordon and Yuzna along with Dennis Paoli draw from their fertile and debauched imaginations to cover feature length.
Enter genius psychologist and ‘girl wonder’ Dr. Katherine McMichaels. She’s a woman of academic inclinations, prudish in conduct and as Gordon chooses gleefully to etch her- frigid and sterile as the icy Tundras. She has been called upon to examine Crawford who has now been retained in a typically freakish asylum and her controversial methods which supposedly involve conducting experiments on the schizophrenic do not find any favor with the doctor-in-charge Dr. Bloch who prefers the good old tried and tested techniques of caging away patients and applications of high electric voltage to the brain. Gordon delights in the cold vibes and verbal bitch fights between the two and captures the interaction with a wicked attention-to-detail. Meanwhile, Crawford’s scans show an enlarged pineal gland which we learn was the purported affect of the Resonator. The pineal gland has long been an area of speculation in both science and philosophy because of its unique position in human physiology. French Philosopher Rene Descartes called it ‘the seat of the soul’ while science has suspected the pineal gland of having a part to play in sexual stimulation and there are theories that propound that the gland is the so-called ‘sixth sense’. Gordon and Co. twist all fact, theory and speculation into a terrific premise for a no-holds-barred-psychedelic-science-fiction-body-horror.
Dr. McMichaels, fascinated by Crawford’s descriptions of his visions, under the pretext of an investigation gets permission to restage the ‘Resonator’ experiment and poor ol’ Crawford once again finds himself a reluctant participant. Joining them is the funky Mr. Buford ‘Bubba’ Brownlee, one of the best men in the force on strictly nanny duty. They drive to the Pretorius house and Gordon goes in for a fun semiotic overkill. The street is eerily marked Benevolent Street, the house number is a prophetic and metaphoric 666, bizarre S & M videos of Doc Pretorius are discovered. Undeterred, the work on the ‘Resonator’ is soon completed and it is switched on. Just as Dr. McMichaels begins to groove to the ultraviolet dimensional vibes, the mad dead doc makes an entry stark naked and claiming to passed over into the beyond and experience the highest form of pleasure, of pleasure without form, of pleasure absolute as he sheds his human form turning into a terrifying ugly blob that will only turn more gooey and more phallic as the movie proceeds. Just as he is about to exercise his newfound powers on Dr. McMichaels Crawford switches the machine off. But something happened. As Dr. McMichaels puts it “If there’s a statistical co-relation between schizophrenia and an enlarged pineal… “. But it is Bubba who makes a more relevant observation that “what about the the hard-on that I got. Is there a statistical co-relation for that too?”
Lil Miss Frigid Katherine McMichaels while she may talk all procedure and academics, most certainly can’t seem to forget her time in the lab. It seems the ultraviolet dimensional resonance got her straight on her mojo G-spot and the ‘girl wonder’ can’t seem get it out of my mind. She sneaks up to the Resonator and switches it on only to be sexually violated by the deformed phallic masses that seem to arise from Doc Pretorius’s disintegrating lump of a body. It is a vile scene filled with ooze, goo and monstrous lust. The camera dares you to flinch and rest assured, you will. But Miss McMichaels instead of learning her lesson only finds her craving multiplied. In yet another bizarre sequence she dresses herself impromptu in a leather-and-chains bondage outfit and writhes seductively over a limp and grievously injured Crawford. Soon a hive of flesh eating flies break loose and reduce a human body to mere guts and bones square in our sights. Later, eyeballs are plucked in close up. Brains are sucked out. A Human heart is devoured. The violence intensifies. The body count rises. Humans disintegrate into savages. Cannibalism. Terror. Sex. Phallus. Monsters. More Phalluses. Gordon pushes it like there is no limit, no decency. He puts up an absurd theater of flesh and blood and phallus and ooze, a manifestation of inspired degeneracy. A Gross-Out, in the full sense of the title, from beyond.
Let’s just say you’ll think of a severed head performing cunnilingus as some sort of hope.
There is a subtle subtext to ‘From Beyond’s viscera, that of the relationship of repression (McMichael’s frigidity, Pretorius’s impotency) and depravity and excess. The Doc’s clandestine sadomasochist tendencies and the lady’s initial puritanism with the ridiculously large glasses and the exaggerated rigidity of her mannerisms are gentle skews of a society that tries to cloak its repression under the garb of bourgeois decency. But once the flesh starts falling apart and the blood gushing there is neither time nor inclination to pick on subtext. I mean, why spoil the fun? By Gordon’s own admission his only other motive was to include as many phallic motifs in a mis-en-scene as possible.
For his stand-up acting ensemble Gordon relies on most of his principal collaborators on ‘Re-Animator’ and the cast seem to be in on Gordon’s concoction of real yet cartoonish horror and play their characters with an exuberant mix of the straight and the poker. Jeffery Combs who for my money could give the great Bruce Campbell a run for it turns in a terrific performance as the unfortunate young genius Dr. Crawford Tillinghast and makes masala of the plumb dialogue that Gordon hands him, my favorite being the mourning horror of- ” He became what ate him”. Barbara Crampton who was the poor blonde with her vage at the receiving of the weird cunnilingus in ‘Re-Animator’ is violated again but her intelligent and courageous interpretation of the role steals the film from right under Combs. It is a strange role that progresses from ice-maiden to mad scientist to dominatrix to petrified victim and Crampton like the best of performances, doesn’t skip a beat. Ken Foree makes camp fun outta ‘Bubba’ and Gordon’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon flings icicles with her body language as Dr. Bloch. And as Dr. Edward Pretorius, Ted Sorel is absolute slime. Even behind-the-scenes Gordon chose retain his ‘Re-Animator’ collaborators repeating Composer Richard Band who once again conjures up macabre mischief on the soundtrack and cinematographer Mac Ahlberg who substitutes the eerie greens lights of ‘Re-Animator’ with lurid whore pink for ‘From Beyond’. Only Giovanni Natalucci who designed the strange and dirt cheap sets that successfully and sparsely replicate small-town America in an Italian studio would begin his collaboration with Gordon on this film and soon be a regular. FX and Make up departments are top notch and while time has taken its toll, there’s still a raw vitality to the stomach churning disgust and horror.
‘From Beyond’ would be desecrated by the censor board and the spectacle in all its degeneracy could never be released and after prolonged appeal and some major cuts a stunted, tame version of the film was put out at the cinemas in 1986. There was talk about a Director’s Cut but much of the censored footage was thought to have lost until it was stumbled upon by sheer accident and the movie was recut and reconstructed into original filthy glory for the DVD release, famously on 11th September, 2007.
Unlike their genre contemporaries Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, Gordon and Yuzna would always remain true to their no-budget-splatter beginnings and love for the classic horror studios with mixed results and little recognition other than an hardcore cult audience. Their most mainstream endeavor has been collaborating on the script of the delirious Walt Disney family classic ‘Honey, I Shrunk The Kids’. Yuzna would himself turn director with a sequel to ‘Re-Animator’ called what else but ‘Bride of Re-Animator’ and continues to indefatigably churn B-movies while Gordon who would never recapture the high-point of the one-two of ‘Re-Animator’ and ‘From Beyond’ would have an interesting repertoire in which he would dabble in theater adapting David Mamet’s ‘Sexual Perversion in Chicago’. Gordon would also adapt Mamet’s lesser known ‘Edmond’ to the screen to less-than-positive response but his latest ‘Stuck‘ got brief theatrical exposure recently and received positive reviews. IMDB lists ‘House of Re-Animator‘ as the next project for the duo and Gordon occupies the director’s seat. Jeffery Combs returns as the mad Herbert West and in an interesting casting coup William H. Macy is listed as ‘The President of the United States’. And the first lady? Who else but the lovely, ravishing, oh-so-baby-gimme-gimme-more Barbara Crampton…
It’s a nice feeling that somewhere Gordon and Yuzna are raising a toast…
“To a new world….”
(pics and info courtesy:- Toyzine, Impawards, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Emma Carlson, Timeout, lovetoknow, Scientific Illustrator, zzeron, Tribune India, MSN, The Lope, Best Horror Movies, Dead Lantern, Fake Life, Teslasociety, lastek)
Tags: brian yuzna, horror, lovecraft, stuart gordon
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Magical review ..will watch it
you use the best images man.. one of these days i’ll have to read the text too. nice to meet someone who shares an affinity towards grand guignol stuff, which is very rare to come across (especially on PFC). you would downright love the play i’m in. too bad you’re not in the US..
@Striker.. i jus checked out the website of the theater company and swelllll stuff bro.. personally, i’ve never seen a grand guignol on stage and i’d tottally dig to.. the closest i’ve come is of those stuffy Murder Mystery ones where the lame make-up and poor acting will unravel the ending about one fourths into the play.. i was wonderin maybe if you could send over some pics of the play after it is done.. would like to see hows it’s done and what they use for blood and stuff..
The text is gonna stay.. take your own sweet time to go about it.. :-)
sid.. will surely send out the pics once the run is over. i hear you on those murder mysteries man.. have done a couple back in the day myself.. but they’re fun as an actor bc you can make up shit on the spot and it doesn’t have to really make *too much* sense bc the whole point is to confuse the audience.
as for the stage blood, a number of mixtures can be used.. the most common being karo or maple syrup & food coloring. karo gives it the liquidity and the food coloring of course makes it red. for film, sometimes corn starch is also used to make it thicker and gives it more texture to make it believable on camera. this is the most edible blood that can be used on stage, and i say that since theatre does involve actors spurting blood thru their mouth or having to swallow it to be able to gag on it. for blood that needs to get on clothes however, detergent is added in so it maintains the liquidity and is easier to wash off the costumes. also what helps in making the mixture thicker sometimes is heating it all up. little tricks of the trade that i’ve learnt over the past few yrs…
sid, if this isn’t an answer to your question, i dunno what is.. my theatre group just conducted a workshop a couple of days back and it’s been reviewed in the paper with a video.. i think you’ll enjoy this:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/fringe/2008/07/18/video-grand-guignol-bloodfest/