THE BEYOND   1981
(E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà)
Directed by Lucio Fulci
87 minutes
In Italian with English subtitles

In the late 1970s Italian cinema went through a huge transformation. The best of the old-school directors either ran off to other countries (Bertolucci) or were simply pushed to the background (Fellini) or outright killed (Pasolini). The new younger crop of filmmakers didn't pick up the torch and continue along the same lines, but instead knocked out some of the most outlandish horror movies ever made. Among the principal craftspeople of the emerging genre were Dario Argento, and the director of this film Lucio Fulci.

Of all the movies Luchio Fulci made, this one is the most mind-boggling. And that's saying a lot, since he made some damn crazy films. This flick is a Southern Gothic horror film set in modern Louisiana, which takes some stabs at America's dodgy history. You know, things like slavery, witchcraft, puritanism, genocide of the native population, and mob justice. The story concerns a woman who buys a house, and after some weird events, discovers the house is built upon one of the seven gates to hell. There is a story complete with wild twists and turns, but in the end this flick is more of a fever dream. It has a kind of dream logic, and will suddenly shift into areas you would never expect. That lack of logical procession, by the way, is one of its strong points. Fuci refuses to be nailed down by the template of normal cinema and wants to knock the doors wide open.

Beyond the mind-boggling narratives, another enduring aspect in Fulci's works are the soundtracks by Fabio Frizzi. His compositions can range from melodic piano sonatas to thudding deadbeat prog-rock. Or blistering explosions of haunted voices - a deranged cacophony of lost souls that are discordant, ambient, eerie. He can also whip out a synthesizer and knock out some bizzare experimental passages at the drop of a hat. Although largely unrecognized, in 2016 Rolling Stone magazine ranked Frizzi's score for The Beyond as the 11th-best horror film score of all time.

In the end, the imagination of this movie is unlimited—once you feel you have a handle on it, it knocks you out cold by kicking things to yet another level. The effect it has is a kind of reality-crash, where everything tumbles into free fall.

This will be a high-definition projection.