Event

The Beyond

Second in the Gates of Hell trilogy, The Beyond has become known as Fulci's masterpiece, a seminal work of the horror genre, and contains an ending that changed the perceptions of what horror films could be.

After a lynch mob crucifies the artist Schweick, who they believe to be a warlock, at Louisiana's Seven Doors Hotel in 1927, they open another of the seven doors of hell.

Several decades later, after inheriting the hotel, Liza Merril (Cartriona MacColl)
decides to re-open it, inadvertently unlocking the gateway to the afterlife.

As the halls of the Seven Doors Hotel become filled with living dead, Liza and her real estate agent must track down the mystic Book of Eibon that supposedly contains the answers to the nightmare at hand, while facing face-eating tarantulas, a young girl whose murdered parents become zombies and is herself possessed by undead spirits and Schweick, who has returned as a malevolent, indestructible corpse, apparently in control of the supernatural forces.

A homage to Fulci's idol, the French playwright Antonin Artaud, The Beyond explores Artaud's concepts of a theatre based less on linear plot and instead on "cruel" imagery and symbolism that could shock its audience into action. The result becomes a horrifically poetic imagining of the realms of life, death, and what lies in between.