I’ve always wanted to love this movie more than I do.
I know that’s a strange thing to admit about a film where Jeffrey Combs gets his pineal gland stimulated until it pokes through his forehead like a fleshy phallus. It’s got Ken Foree, Barbara Crampton, Stuart Gordon directing, Brian Yuzna producing and H.P. Lovecraft’s name on the box.
This was everything I wanted from a horror film after having watched Re-Animator. And yet. It didn’t quite resonate.
Probably because Re-Animator lit such a long fuse for me, it had the sophomore hobgoblin curse, the expectations were just way too damn high, so it just missed that initial and decisive click. It’s by no means a slight, I love me my eighty-six minutes of sexy interdimensional slime that ate Cronenberg. This obsessive fusion of sexual pleasure and physical transformation is where Brian Yuzna’s particular sensibility definitely started taking shape, though.
I’ve been to enough Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs panels at various cons to get the inside scoop, so I know what shortcuts were necessary to get this made, and to make sure every available Lira was on-screen. Those effects remain some of the most memorably disgusting practical creature work of the decade.
Charles Band’s Empire Pictures produced From Beyond in Rome at Dino De Laurentiis’ old sound stages. Band sunk twenty million into purchasing that studio, hoping to make his movies at a fraction of what it would have cost stateside. And 1986 was Empire’s biggest output year with From Beyond, TerrorVision, Troll, and Eliminators all hitting theatres. From Beyond still cost a few million, but that contained, claustrophobic, everything-in-one-house quality? That’s an indie operation stretching a dollar past the point of exterior shots. A lot was banked on the success of Re-Animator pulling in audiences, but Lovecraft’s name was money.
And by Lovecraft I mean it followed the usual Edgar Allan Poe adaptations pattern. You start with the title, maybe a plot point, maybe a character name. And the rest is new work pebble-dashed over the original idea. The published story is only about seven pages long, so that possessive “apostrophe-S” on the box next to Lovecraft was doing the same fancy footwork Poe’s name did on Corman’s old films. You didn’t need to have read the story, or care how faithful they were because they absolutely weren’t, you just needed to know the name meant something spooky was going to happen – and that was usually enough to jump off the new release shelf.
I’ve owned From Beyond on VHS, on DVD, on Blu-ray, I’ve caught midnight screenings at every opportunity. The unrated director’s cut that finally surfaced on DVD in 2007 gave me yet another excuse to revisit it. I keep coming back. I do love this movie. Or rather, I love all its parts. I think I just wanted it to be greater than the sum of them. And that’s totally on me.
Re-Animator sucker-punched me in 1985, and I stepped in front of From Beyond bracing for the same impact. I think I was so ready to be blown away that I forgot to just enjoy the ride, and that slight, almost imperceptible disappointment has followed me through every rewatch, colouring a film that never did anything wrong except arrive second. -Pop
From Beyond arrived on Home Video back in April of 1987, after an October 24th, 1986 theatrical release.