The Beyond: Fulci's Gates of Hell and the Logic of Nightmares

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Try to follow the plot of The Beyond and you will fail, and the failure is the film working exactly as designed. A woman inherits a decrepit hotel in rural Louisiana. The hotel, it emerges, was built over one of the seven gateways to hell, described in an ancient forbidden book. People begin to die in ways that do not obey cause and effect, and the dead do not stay dead, and the geography of the film comes apart until the living and the damned are wandering the same corridors. Lucio Fulci’s 1981 picture is not a broken horror film that fails to make sense. It is a horror film that has deliberately unscrewed the joints of narrative to reach something older and worse — the logic of a nightmare, where things happen because the dream requires them, not because they follow.

Lucio Fulci: The Poet of Gore

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

The nickname arrived as an insult and became a verdict. “The Godfather of Gore,” the fanzines called Lucio Fulci, and for years that was the whole reputation — a man who filmed eyeballs being punctured and maggots raining from ceilings, a schlockmeister trading in the wet and the vile. Look closer and a stranger artist appears: a former medical student and film critic, prickly and depressive, who at his best made horror films that abandon plot the way dreams do and run instead on pure associative dread. The gore is real and it is extreme. It is also, in the four or five films that matter, the surface of something closer to poetry.

Lucio Fulci - vo.rs

The Beyond: Fulci's Gates of Hell and the Logic of Nightmares

Lucio Fulci: The Poet of Gore