The Beyond

Fulci's masterpiece, and the plot does not work at all.

A Louisiana hotel sits on one of the seven gates of Hell. A woman inherits it. After that the film abandons cause and effect: geography stops connecting, characters walk into rooms that cannot be there, a blind woman has a dog, a hospital has no exit. Critics called it incoherent for twenty years and the defence that has won out is that incoherence is the technique.

Watch it as a nightmare rather than a story and the structure is precise. Every sequence escalates the same feeling and none of them resolve. The last shot is one of the bleakest images in horror and it does not explain itself either.

Fabio Frizzi's score is doing a great deal of the work. So is Sergio Salvati's photography, which is the best-looking thing in Fulci's filmography.

Released in the US as Seven Doors of Death, cut, rescored and reordered into something that made more sense and worked far less.