After the success of Re-Animator (1985), Stuart Gordon sought to direct a second adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Choosing to recast the same two lead actors (Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton) and shooting in Italy under a budget of “two and a half million dollars” (Gallagher, 98), Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna created From Beyond (1986), based on the 7-page Lovecraft short story of the same name. From Beyond serves as a perfect example of many theories of the horror genre; it displays classic examples of category violation, it compares well to past films and its contemporaries, and it offers a complex look at the feminist perspectives of horror films (or, as some critics would have one believe, lack thereof). By analyzing the ways that From Beyond works as an effective horror film, one can learn about the genre itself.
To briefly summarize the film, From Beyond is the tale of two scientists, Dr. Edward Pretorius and Dr. Crawford Tillinghast, who work together to build a device called the Resonator. The Resonator’s purpose is to stimulate the pineal gland, supposedly activating a sixth sense, which allows those within its field to witness creatures from another dimension. In the opening scene, Crawford deems the Resonator fully operational and Dr. Pretorius is excited to see it in action. Ignoring all precautions, Dr. Pretorius pushes it to full power, causing his own death and causing Crawford to go mad. Later, a well-meaning psychiatrist, Dr. Katherine McMichaels, rescues Crawford from a hospital and brings him back to the scene of the crime to recreate his experiments and find out the truth. With her, she brings Detective Bubba Brownlee to assure Crawford’s compliance. Upon recreating the experiment and seeing into the parallel dimension, Dr. Pretorius appears, having shed his human body and become something new in the other dimension. The powers of the Resonator prove to be seductive, both intellectually and sexually. The stimulation and growth of the pineal gland results in increased sex drive, though Dr. McMichaels believes this to only be the beginning. She reveals that her father was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and died in a hospital, and she believes the Resonator may hold a cure for schizophrenia. This drives Dr. McMichaels’ curiosity even further than before, and the results are bad for everybody involved. By the end of the film, Bubba has been eaten by bugs, Crawford has been turned into a brain-eating monster, and Dr. McMichaels has only narrowly avoided death but likely succumbed to insanity.
When discussing genre theory, it is perhaps best to start at the beginning. From Beyond not only taps into universal constants of horror theory, but provides excellent commentary on its predecessors through means of comparison. Dr. Pretorius, whose name is an invention of the film and a chief difference from the short story, is clearly a reference to the identically named Dr. Pretorius of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935). This name serves to link From Beyond to the Frankenstein story, both thematically and referentially. Dr. Pretorius is, as he is in Bride of Frankenstein, somewhat of a mad scientist, desiring to push boundaries as far as he can. In Bride of Frankenstein, the character of Pretorius seeks to push the boundaries of life and death. In From Beyond, this new incarnation of Pretorius is focused on pushing rather different boundaries: sex, the human mind, and comprehension of parallel dimensions. However, even this modern Pretorius breaks the boundaries of life and death, though accidentally. This is one of the many ways the film plays with the horror concept of category violation. Sex and violence, life and death, human and inhuman, and fantasy and reality are concepts which are normally perceived as opposites. Horror films play on the assumption of opposition and throw that into chaos by breaking the boundaries between the two. The examples listed above are all present in From Beyond, and Dr. Pretorius himself perfectly illustrates all of these categorical violations. Before the machine has even been activated, he is shown to inflict sadistic torture onto possibly unwilling women in his sex life, violating the boundaries of sex and violence. He then dies, according to his assistant and the police, yet he reemerges once the Resonator has been reactivated. During one of his attacks on his fellow scientists, he utters a line that would go on to be the film’s tagline on many posters; “Humans are such easy prey”. If his horrific transformation from man to monster weren’t enough, this one line breaks every boundary of his lost humanity and proves that even he himself no longer identifies as human.
From Beyond falls into the subgenre of “body-horror”. Body-horror is generally categorized as any horror film dealing with transformations to the human body, especially wherein the “monster” or villain is actually the loss of one’s functions and autonomy. Philip Brophy coined the term “body-horror” in his 1989 article “Horrality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film”. In another article in the same issue of the same paper, Pete Boss describes the trend in horror as “the contemporary horror film's unquestionable obsession with the physical constitution and destruction of the human body” (Boss, 15). From Beyond’s contemporaries include The Thing (1982), Videodrome (1983), and Society (1989). Body-horror films are often known for extravagant visual effects, and From Beyond is no exception. Gordon and Yuzna’s first collaboration, Re-Animator, may have had less extravagant effects but it shares a key feature with From Beyond: the use of humor. This use of humor is noted by Phillip Brophy; he writes “Still, it is humour that remains one of the major features of the contemporary Horror film, especially if used as an undercutting agent to counter-balance its more horrific moments.” (Brophy, 12). The most extreme use of humor in From Beyond appears within the first 10 minutes of the film. After Dr. Pretorius and Dr. Tillinghast use the Resonator successfully at full power, the film cuts to a concerned neighbor (played by Bunny Summers) on the phone with the police to complain about the light and noise caused by the experiment. The performance comes across as campy, and understandably so. After her dog escapes and runs into the Pretorius house, the scene culminates with the image of the dog licking the neck of Dr. Pretorius’ decapitated corpse. That closing image by itself is quite scary, but the lead-up of the ridiculous behavior of the neighbor softens the blow considerably. The neighbor character appears again in the film’s final moments, though her second appearance is remarkably different in tone. She is the one who approaches the beaten yet triumphant Dr. McMichaels. Her performance is, again, campy. However, the audience is conditioned not to laugh because of the considerable pain that Dr. McMichaels is shown to be in. Indeed, Katherine McMichaels is the character that undoubtedly endures the most throughout the film. Her character arc alone touches on another aspect of the horror genre: the portrayal of women.
Barbara Crampton’s role in From Beyond is complex, as any female character in a horror film is bound to be. Dr. Katherine McMichaels drives most of the film’s plot, experiences most of the film’s torture, and is the only main character to survive. She often gets herself out of dangerous situations without the help of a man and even defeats a man by first kneeing him in the crotch and then biting the phallic object controlling his mind off of his head. The man in question is Dr. Crawford Tillinghast, a character who is otherwise presented as her love interest. This scene alone proves that she is not so blinded by love as to be stopped from fighting against his sexual and violent advances. She is also responsible for destroying the Resonator, a task that neither of her male colleagues could complete. Dr. Katherine McMichaels is one of the few characters given a backstory longer than a sentence: along with being a young prodigy in the psychological field, she chooses to specifically study schizophrenia because her father was a schizophrenic. She holds a distinct disdain for the hospital system and Dr. Bloch (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) in particular because her father died in a hospital after going through painful and unhelpful procedures. Despite all these positive aspects, it is also possible to read her characterization as quite sexist. The violence she experiences at the hands (and tentacles) of Dr. Pretorius is distinctly sexual in nature. Film critic William Wolf writes, “Once again, we’re back to the old sado-masochistic treatment of women, done partly as spoof, it must be admitted, but not funny enough to get over the exploitation”. Alongside this distinctly sexualized violence, she is the only character visibly affected by the increased libido from the Resonator’s stimulation of her pineal gland. Bubba mentions in passing that he has had a “hard-on” since the first time he was in the field of the activated Resonator. However, we don’t see any sign of his or Crawford’s increased sexual feelings beyond a few longing glances from Crawford to Katherine. Meanwhile, an entire scene is devoted to Katherine trying on a leather dominatrix outfit she finds in Dr. Pretorius’ bedroom. The scene culminates with Bubba shaming her and forcing her to look at herself in a mirror to snap her out of her sexual trance. As for the ending of the film, it is true that Dr. McMichaels is the only character of the four leads to survive. However, in order to survive, she had to give up her goal of studying schizophrenia, her love of Crawford, and ultimately her sanity. As the film ends, her tears turn to laughter while she lies on the ground with a grisly broken knee. Her victory is pyrrhic in nature; she has won at the cost of her entire life. Because of these multiple ways of viewing the character of Dr. McMichaels, it can be hard to claim her as a feminist icon or as a sexist caricature. However, when examining how her agency ties into her vulnerability, there is the third possibility that her character itself serves as a further mode of category violation. While she is an analytical professional, she is also highly susceptible to the temptations of the possibilities of the Resonator. Though she has a remarkable amount of agency, she faces the extreme peril of nearly losing her agency multiple times. Because of these examples and the film’s broader themes of the vulnerability of the human mind, it is clear that her characterization is purposeful and undeniable and that she is never reduced to purely a stereotype.
From Beyond, by virtue of being a horror film, must deal with theories that scholars have applied to the horror genre. Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, given their experiences, were undoubtedly aware of this. They crafted a film that manages to not only improve upon their film-making style displayed in Re-Animator, but also serves as a complex addition to and commentary on horror tropes and trends. The film knowingly references the Frankenstein series in both theme and character naming, while updating the story for a woman to be the ultimate hero who succeeds. From Beyond is worthy of its place in the broader dialogue of horror film, and worth being viewed by any horror scholar who wishes for a well-crafted film that covers a variety of horror topics.
Works Cited:
Boss, Pete. “Vile Bodies and Bad Medicine” Screen 27.1 (1986): 14-25
Bride of Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Universal Pictures, 1935.
Brophy, Phillip. “Horrality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film” Screen 27.1 (1986): 2-13
From Beyond. Dir. Stuart Gordon. Empire Pictures, 1986.
Gallagher, John Andrew. "Stuart Gordon", Film directors on directing, Volume 1989, Part 2, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1989.
Re-Animator. Dir. Stuart Gordon. Empire International Pictures, 1985.
Thing, The. Dir. John Carpenter. Universal Pictures, 1982.
Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. Universal Pictures, 1983.
Wolf, William (1986-11-02). “Horror takeoff has more gore than gag” San Bernardino County Sun. Retrieved 2018-04-24 – via Newspapers.com