![]() And this makes From Beyond a good deal more fucked-up. The sense of humor found in Re-Animator isn't absent, but it's much lessened, and rather than being gleefully cynical, this is more actively bitter. I don't know if this fairly means that From Beyond is thus the "best" of the three - it's a remarkably strong set of films - but it is, I think, the most visceral and grotesque. This was in the air, a bit, in the second half of the 1980s: earlier in 1986, body horror master David Cronenberg explored similar territory in The Fly, though the emphasis there was much less on sex the following year, celebrated horror author Clive Barker made his directorial debut with Hellraiser, which has more emphasis on sex, and less on pure, unmitigated body horror. Not, as in so many slasher films or the legion of Italian zombie and cannibal pictures made in the wake of Dawn of the Dead, that gore and sex are simply set next to each other, each to titillate in their own right the body horror is in and of itself a matter of sexuality. ![]() To put it more bluntly: this is a wildly disgusting exploitation film in which extreme gore and body horror are irresistibly connected to violent sexuality. Still, the film's strengths have nothing to do with Lovecraft and everything to do with the time period it came out: From Beyond is basically an exercise in taking the trends of horror in the 1980s to their natural ends, and seeing if the horror audience is willing to follow. And this, too, did Gordon, Yuzna, and Paoli pretty much just gut and rebuild from the ground up: if we wanted to be extremely generous in ascribing any sort of intention to faithfully adapt the source material, the best I can do is to suggest that the film From Beyond functions more like a sequel to the short story "From Beyond", adapting the source material in its opening scene and then going on from there, and also transferring the name of the story's villain to its unnamed narrator. From Beyond is based on a story written in 1920 and first published in 1934 that is, I think, not likely to show up on too many My Favorite Lovecraft lists (the narrative voice is awfully florid), but is at any rate tidier, more effective, and more characteristic than "Herbert West": it is a short little vignette in which Lovecraft indulges in his bone-shaking terror of everything that modern science tells us of the cosmos (it comes from his fascination with the idea that most "solid" matter is actually made up of the empty space between molecules), with more of a suggestion of a plot than an actual story. Re-Animator junks most of the 1921 serial "Herbert West-Reanimator", which nobody much likes, so nobody much minds. ![]() Now, I have chosen my words - "Lovecraft-derived", "based on Lovecraft" - judiciously, because it's a fair argument that neither of the two films in question are actually particularly honest or true adaptations. 1970's The Dunwich Horror or (God help us) 1965's Die, Monster, Die! The first of these, 1985's Re-Animator, is so obviously the consensus pick for the all-time best film based on Lovecraft that I hardly feel that I need to say more on the matter the second of these, 1986's From Beyond is maybe a bit less obvious, but I don't suppose anybody would much mind if I claimed without doing anything to back it up that it has a better reputation than e.g. So it's maybe more inevitable than surprising that the two best Lovecraft-derived films come from precisely the same filmmaking team: director Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, co-writer Dennis Paoli, working under the aegis of Charles Band's Empire Pictures, with a score by Band's brother Richard, cinematography by Mac Ahlberg, editing by Lee Percy, and starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton in the lead roles. Lovecraft are, all things considered, pretty rare good adaptations of H.P.
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