Fulci's *The Beyond* on Thursday at Temple Cinematheque

Temple University Cinematheque's Gorehound Contingent
presents

The Beyond
dir. Lucio Fulci, 1981, 87 mins, color

A woman inherits and unwisely decides to renovate a Louisiana hotel that may or may not be built on the site of one of the seven gates of Hell! A splatter masterpiece!

Michael Grant, formerly Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at The University of Kent, writes in Films Studies Winter 2004 that The Beyond exhibits "an order of self-interrogation" similar to the post-symbolist strand of literary modernism. "What this kind of experience gives onto is the true horror, the horror of the uncanny and the fantastic. It is the return of being in negation, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation. It appears to us in the obsessions and insomnias of the night, and it is the fear of being, not fear for being, the fear of death. It is the experience of living death. ... Seen in this light, the film is nothing other than a catalog of notations of its own aesthetic... The degradation of the world represented in Fulci’s film is in effect a degradation marking the reversal by which reality is removed, and replaced by the shadow of the image. All darkens into the shadow of the beyond, and this peculiar death of the shadow serves in Fulci’s hands to undo the narrative from within, inverting it into what is at once an image of death and a dead image." Plus, a guy's face gets eaten off by spiders.

Hosted by Minister of Fear Michael Benedict

Thursday, April 23, 5:30PM
Tuttleman Learning Center - Room 101
13th between Montgomery and Berks
Free admission

This screening will be presented on DVD projected onto a big screen.