"From Beyond"

by Sean McTiernan

The sad thing is, From Beyond could only ever have been a disappointment. Re-Animator was such a perfect schlock horror movie, with its mix of creeping dread, savage gore and an incredible hammy villain. And when Jeffrey Combs gets up in that mix, giving one of the greatest displays of anti-heroics ever committed to celluloid, you’ve got yourself a fake-blood barn burner. Director Stuart Gordon’s sophomore horror movie was never going to be able to match up.

Precedent and an impossibly high standard weren’t the only things working against the film. On the face of it, it seems too similar to its predecessor. It is also based on a Lovecraft story about the dangers of science pushing the limits of natural order. It also has Jeffry Combs playing a mad scientist pitted against another mad scientist, both of whom have been intoxicated by their research. Both movies feature weird rubber monsters and complete repulsion for sexual deviancy. But that’s not why it is now mostly forgotten. From Beyond is probably ignored because, even for a horror movie, it’s too creepy and too insane.

The movie opens with two scientists working on a machine that lets humans tap into another dimension using their pineal gland. This is a dimension exists in tandem with ours but the two can only meet when said scientists turn on their “resonator”. Of course, the monsters attack the head scientist, leaving his assistant, Crawford, under suspicion of murder, protesting his innocence to the four walls of his padded cell. A psychiatrist and a cop accompany Crawford to the scene of the crime promising that if he can re-create the experiment they’ll declare him mentally sound. Unfortunately, the experiment works and while Crawford has been suffering from insanity, Doctor Pretorious has been bathing in it… in another dimension.

The film is, above all things, ludicrously pervy. Horror movies usually prey on the anxieties bought on by sex but few are baldly explicit as this one. While everything in Re-Animator was tinged with an appropriately toxic green, scenes in From Beyond are regularly bathed in garish, purplish-pink light. The evil scientist, Dr. Pretorious, is a sadist and heavily into bondage. It’s also implied heavily in the movie that his evil is due to importence. The enlargement of the pineal glad seems to highly increase propensity for sexual deviancy: Crawford is a nervous mess at the start of the movie but once his pineal gland gets severely enlarged he quickly reaches “Jersey Shore” levels of blunt sexual aggression, subtly underlined by his shaved, bluging head, which resembles a giant dick.

Dr. Katherine Michaels, a reserved psychiatrist, gets forcibly stripped and mauled by a horribly mutated Pretorious, whose phallic tendrils significantly increase the already high potential for rapeiness he had in human form. Then later on, the influence of the resonator leads her to don bondage gear and dry hump the sleeping mutated body of Crawford, who by that stage is half way to becoming his final form: a brain-eating, living-dick, zombie-monster.

It is unsettling to see a horror movie so committed to portraying the most disgusted, terrifying view of sex it can possibly manage. Those looking for the fun romp of the Re-Animator will certainly be disappointed with the tense, slimy feeling that prevails throughout From Beyond. But that precise feeling is what makes this film so interesting today. Now that movies like A Serbian Film have clearly shown that truly shocking horror now seems to exist solely in the realm of sexual violence, now that Saw has rendered plain, explicit gore cartoonish, it is great to find a film that attacks sexual anxiety so relentlessly from a more fantastical and strange angle.

As I’ve said, no one plays a maniac like Jeffrey Combs. The grim determination, disregard for humanity and matter-of-fact bad-assery he bought to Herbert West in Re-Animator is most of what makes that movie so iconic. Combs doesn’t just play the role of Creep With Own Agenda well, he carves the perfect method into stone and distributes it from mountain tops. And part of what makes From Beyond so odd is that Combs doesn’t reprise the role he perfected. Sure, he still plays a mad scientist, meddling in things unimaginable and abhorrent to normal people. But this time, it is not ambition and dedication that drives him on, it is fear.

What Combs does with From Beyond is an act of pure bravado. Far from taking a role as far away from Herbert West as possible or giving an identical performance in every other movie, Combs takes an seemingly identical role and plays it so differently it’s almost jarring. And he manages to do this while still retaining his mastery of creeping everyone the fuck out, whether it be subtly stroking the machine or visibly relishing the bizarre twist near the end of the movie. Usually when schlock horror movies are being discussed, cheesy or inexplicable acting choices are relished most by fans. But what Combs does her is prove himself a powerhouse. It takes a special kind of skill to make overblown insanity disquieting believable, especially in a movie as loopy as this one. His character name is Crawford Tillinghast for god’s sake. Any other movie and you’d devote 500 words to unpacking what sort of person would even try to name a character that. Yet every time Jeffrey Combs bellows “I…am…Crawford…Tillinghast !” as his pineal gland bulges out of his head, you just feel like saluting.

There is a nonsensical charge of cloaked white supremicsy that occasionally get leveled at the film in some obscure corners of the internet. It’s completely ridiculous but worth mentioning as an insight to what horror fans get up to when left to their own devices. Ken Foree, who plays the investigating detective, meets a messy end. The catch here is that Ken Foree made history as the first African-American to survive a horror movie in 1972’s Dawn of The Dead (if that’s a spoiler for you, we’re probably not going to be friends). So some have posited, seriously…you’d be surprised what people feel they can posit, that his death here is some sort of act of balance bought about evil white filmmakers. Isn’t that amazing? Sure, white people have done some horrific things (like River Dance or Nu-Metal) but it’s hardly fair to imagine Stuart Gordon was contacted by the Grand Wizard and told exactly who needed their brains eaten and what message this was going to convey. Still, people have said this and been serious about it. Never change, Internet.

From Beyond is flawed. The pacing is erratic, the plot comes and goes as it chooses and the supposedly euphoric experience of seeing through the third eye of the pineal gland is a poor facsimile of a similar effect in Brain Damage. But it has such fine performances, such an atypical concept (although much has been written throughout history on the power of the pineal gland) and is just so damned strange any horror fan would be missing out if they were to dismiss it as a poor cousin to Re-Animator. It’s also, rare for a movie with this style of effects, a complete downer from beginning to end. But still, Jeffrey Combs is in this movie, screaming like a zombie and eating brains. What more do you need?

Sean Mc Tiernan has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone, though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.