Beyond the Darkness (1984)

Joe D'Amato is regarded as a rather greedy hack by most people acquainted with horror. Now that's not too far from the truth. But before D'Amato started cranking out movies with an inverse relation between quantity and quality, he made this startling horror movie. Startling in the sense that it's actually GOOD! Don't get me wrong. Just because it's good doesn't mean it's not exploitation. It has truly gory scenes such as a taxidermy which doesn't leave much to the imagination, nails being ripped off, some implied necrophilia and a particular scene of a "stew" being munched on with an extreme close-up which made my stomach do a somersault. Well done Joe for that! However, these gore scenes are spread out and in between them, there is some attempt to build suspense. There is some good acting particularly by the very creepy but oddly sexy Franca Stoppi(RIP) who plays the caretaker from hell, Iris. The cinematography (by Joe himself) is gorgeous in spite of all the carnage around. It doesn't seem like a cheap B-movie. The music by Goblin is as expected, superb.That said, the movie is not perfect. It stagnates from time to time. There is absolutely no humour (except some unintentional stuff but you will be too busy gagging to notice) to lighten the relentlessly downbeat tone. Also, the lead actor can be too over-the-top sometimes.That said, I am shocked that this is a film by Joe D'Amato. It would seem he actually had talent. It's tragic that he was so caught up in making money that he didn't fulfill it. The horror aficionado missed out on a few more quality horror movies.

Through the course of more than three decades of horror fandom, I've ravenously consumed hundreds upon hundreds of films that cover ever hash-mark on the genre spectrum. Dark and violent cinema has enthralled and entertained me since I was a wee lad, and as such it takes an awful lot to truly shock and unsettle me. However, even if you've been weened on all things blood and guts, every now and then you'll come across a film which strikes an unnerving chord and challenges your notions of exactly how much on-screen ghoulishness you're capable of immersing yourself in without feeling like you need to take a shower afterwards. Beyond The Darkness is one of those rare offerings, and while I am sincerely impressed with the potency of its grotesque machinations and the stark effectiveness of its dreary, pitch-black aesthetic, I'm still forced to conclude that this is some really sick stuff, dude.The plot alone would be enough to make most viewers squeamish even without the graphic depictions of depravity and butchery on display here, but since almost every unsavory element is shown in clinical, unflinching detail, this excursion will only appeal to a select subset of horror fans who relish in viscerally disturbing and unapologetically fiendish fare. If you consider yourself part of that group, then Beyond The Darkness is absolutely a must see and will probably become one of the barometers that you measure other similarly gruesome films against. However, if torture, cannibalism, and necrophilia aren't in your wheelhouse, then you should most definitely sit this one out and watch one of the Scream movies instead.The tale is basically about a disturbed young man named Frank who becomes even more unhinged when his lovely girlfriend Anna succumbs to an undisclosed illness and passes away. Determined not to let the inconvenience of death shatter their blissful romantic entanglement, he opts to dig up Anna's corpse and perform an impressively thorough embalming procedure on her. After Frank tenderly places her preserved cadaver in a bed right beside his, their loving courtship continues on almost as it was before, the only notable difference being that now she's, you know, dead.Ah, but there's trouble in paradise. You see, the repugnantly resourceful Romeo lives with a possessive, overbearing caretaker named Iris. Iris has a bizarre habit of soothing our spunky psychopath when he's upset by breastfeeding him, which is doubly odd considering that she's not his mother and he's well into his 20's. She also assists him in a variety of household chores, including dismembering bodies, dissolving severed limbs in a tub of acid, and scooping up stray bits of viscera with a dustpan. As it becomes more and more apparent that she'll always take the back seat to Frank's deceased main squeeze, the barely restrained madness Iris is harboring morphs into the "hell hath no fury" variety, and the film erupts into a bloody and savage climax.Along the way, a couple of unlucky ladies stumble across Frank's ersatz trophy wife, both of whom meet their ends in terrible and explicit ways. The most squirm-inducing portion of these murder sequences arrives when Frank uses a pair of pliers to gleefully yank out an intrusive and annoying hitchhiker's fingernails one at a time. Needless to say, this flick probably isn't a good choice for a date night.Though most films of this vintage utilized their bloodshed in a tongue in cheek way that rendered the splatter mere gross escapist fun, no such approach is taken here. The plentiful violence on hand in Beyond The Darkness is repulsive and deadly serious, and anyone expecting to be treated to the buoying giggles that accompany a solid gore gag will have another thing coming when they see what unfolds on the screen here.It's hard to pinpoint the most ghastly part in the movie with so many options to choose from, but although the close-up of Iris's mouth as she messily masticates bite after bite of her homemade pungent yellow human mincemeat stew made me extremely glad I wasn't eating anything while watching this, I still cast my vote for the lengthy embalming sequence. My love of zombie movies ensures that I've seen plenty of intestines in my day, but the meticulous attention paid to every messy step of the postmortem process here cements my decision to be cremated when my time comes.The finale is twisted enough to put a fitting punctuation mark on Beyond The Darkness, but I did find myself perplexed by one aspect of the conclusion. When Anna's sister unexpectedly shows up for a visit, Anna's spirit seems to suddenly find the ability to manifest itself as a spectral voice, which warns her sibling to flee the house before it's too late. I just found it odd that Anna's ghost, if indeed that's what we're dealing with at the end, never found its way back from the other side while Frank was engaged in his heinous handiwork to say, "Hey, sweetie, don't kill any more people, and please stop having sex with my dead body." That bit of silliness aside, this film is a richly harrowing journey, so if you're in the mood to take a glimpse into the abyssal corners of humanity and looking for something that simultaneously challenges the bounds of good taste and your stomach, try Beyond The Darkness on for size. I can't promise you'll enjoy what you see here, but I can assure you that you'll never forget it.

D'Amato's notorious horror film is a glorious amalgam of Poe (The Premature Burial), Franju's Les yeux sans visage, Hitchock's Psycho and the furthest reaches of Freudian psychology, with the Oedipus complex finding its climax in an act of castration by the mother imago. It's a compelling and repellent film, an astonishing feat of visual storytelling and an overwhelming mesh of stunning cinematography, fierce editing and driving disco-infused score courtesy of The Goblin. D'Amato manages to both create one of the most punishing nasties in the horror cannon whilst at the same time leaving us with some truly visionary images of twisted love, obsession, death and decay.The story, unlikely to the rational mind but with the clarity of a dream, tells of a young orphaned heir to a fortune, living in a mansion and spending his time at his favourite pursuit, taxidermy. His insane governess/surrogate mother colludes with an occultist to put the voodoo on the heir's fiancée, causing the beautiful girl's death, which coincides with a kiss he gives her on her hospital bed. Breastfeeding by his governess does little to console our hero, so he disinters his beloved's corpse, brings it home and stuffs it as he has been stuffing various animals. Yet, as so often in drama, one crime leads to another and another, as various young women have to be dispatched after they stumble on his secret. But this state of affairs can't continue, and society in the shape of a greedy mortician who witnessed the body stealing gradually catches up with him, but normality is only restored by the death of our hero and his mad "mother"; her last act is to castrate her errant son.The heir's predicament is visceral and in some ways universal. He wants rationality and normality but is thwarted by the governess, who represents dark forces and old magical ways (there's a touch of Medea about her). Her spell prevents him from being with his perfect love, but she aids and abets him in maintaining the embalmed corpse of that dream, at the same time as protecting him from the outside world. One extraordinary scene has the heir bringing a young woman into his bedroom and making love to her in the bed next to the stuffed cadaver of his betrothed – he ruts on top of the new girl whilst staying fixated on the old, and when the new girl notices the corpse in the bed, she screams and meets her end by being ravaged, bitten and partially devoured by the crazed young man.The taxidermy sequence is stomach-churning in its explicitness, and was notorious at the time of release because of rumours D'Amato had used read corpses in the filming. Cuts are explicitly studied by the camera, entrails are unravelled from the stomach, the heart is removed, kissed and bitten into by the love-sick male. To love somebody is to love their body, but the implications of this when the body is deceased is a horrific extension of the loving instinct, and what gives the film its power. The film concentrates on the fate of the body after death, with burials, cremations, dismemberments, taxidermy, rendering in acid all shown in lurid detail. The film is partially about the sea changes that these processes wreak on the body. The most striking of these is the acid bath, where the fleshy corpse of a victim is submerged only for the head to rise again, just a pair of eyes in and a ragged mop on a grinning skull, the death's head. The rendered remains are finally poured into the garden, to disappear into the ground of an unconcerned nature. The film confronts the most terrible truths about death, the body, desire and warped human relationships, and shows us no way out other than death.Eventually, the dead fiancée's sister shows up at the mansion and things come to a head. The heir seems to realise that the living thing is better than the dead, but the governess won't allow this, emblematic guardian against life that she is, and she runs at the heir with a knife looking exactly like Norman Bates dressed as his mother. The knife cuts into the young man's sex, the fruition of that castration anxiety which Freud posited as a deep-seated fear in boys and young men. He and the crazy faux-mother rip and bite each other, bringing both of them to their doom. The mortician finds what he takes to be the stolen corpse, and returns it to its coffin, but it's the living sister (mortified into a state of paralytic shock), and she finally bursts from the grave, maddened with horror.That crazed lady escaping from the jaws of death, reborn from the coffin, is the visual paradigm of the audience at the end of this stunning film – a movie which truly takes us beyond the darkness and brings to light the rotten, the warped, the weird and the dissolutions which we'd prefer not to be confronted with, except in the genre of horror, of which this is surely a masterpiece.

Aristide Massaccesi better known as Joe D'Amato is an interesting director whose work crossed genres from XXX pictures to horror. A few films even mixed the two like "Erotic Nights of the Living Dead" and "Porno Holocaust" but today we are watching "Buio Omega" which many people consider his best horror piece (others insist on it being "Anthropophagus").A young man mourns the death of his lover but a taxidermist by trade he isn't ready to say goodbye just yet. Stealing her body and preserving it with careful attention to detail he is unable to part from his love. Little does he know his maid is the reason behind his loss and madness it seems she has had her eyes on him from the start. Dealing with his twisted feelings and pain his thoughts turn to rage and anyone that stands of the way between him and his beloved are murdered. The maid helps him cover up these atrocities but not before long a woman comes between them once more his dead lover's sister comes to visit and shes's the spitting image of his lost love.This film is atmospheric and disturbing with graphic scenes of torture and the now legendary scene of embalming which spares no detail (it was once rumored that an actual cadaver was used). Recommending this film to the average viewer would be hard to do but for the seeker of grisly Italian horror this is one that you might consider watching.