It’s a Lovecraft Halloween! From Beyond (1986)

Not quite as highly regarded as his adaptation of Herbert West, Re-Animator, Gordon’s next Lovecraft work is still pretty solid. The fact is, it’s still pretty damned good!

Gordon and his team took a reasonably representative short work by HPL, fleshed it out (so to speak), and updated it to the 1980s to stunning effect. Along with his producing partner Brian Yuzna and screenplay writer Dennis Paoli, Gordon gives us a directly unsettling, funny, and occasionally gross story.

Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) is second banana in the lab to Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel having a field day hamming it up!) as opposed to being the primary and sole investigator/scientist. That’s a cast expansion of the source material right off the bat (and the first cheeky character name). Crawford is assisting Pretorius in an experiment to expand the capacity of the pineal gland to expand the mind and sensory possibilities. Of course, this being Lovecraft-based, this has to go tits up, but quick. And does it!

Pretorius and Tillinghast built the Resonator and Tillinghast sees an eel like creature floating around one of the machine’s forks that quickly materializes in our world and bites him on the cheek. Not totally in love with more of this, Crawford shuts the Resonator off, the critter vanishes and he retrieves Pretorius to report his findings. 

Apparently, Pretorius knew the Resonator worked and they both return to the lab in the attic to power the contraption up again. This time, the effects are more harrowing as another interdimensional being appears and decapitates Pretorius. 

It doesn’t help when the noise from the process disturbs your corpulent next door neighbor who calls the police and whose dog runs off and directly into your house and leads her right to the upstairs door to see a headless body. Things are off to quite a start, is what I’m saying.

As with any Lovecraft adaptation, chances are good that the authorities are not going to understand reasonable explanations like interdimensionable beings that are brought into our world, grab a snack, and leave. So, Tillinghast is sent to the Miskatonic sanitarium to await psychiatric evaluation. The presiding psychiatrist, Dr. Roberta Bloch (ding-ding-ding! Nom du homage dieux! And played by Mrs. Stuart Gordon, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) is pretty convinced that Tillinghast is where he belongs and is not competent to stand trial, but another expert is called in; Dr. Katherine McMIchaels, played by the ever-wonderful Barbara Crampton. 

After talking to Crawford and hearing more about the experiment, McMIchaels is able to persuade the police commissioner to release Tillinghast into her custody. They’re to be overseen by Sgt. Bubba Brownlee (the ever game and supremely affable Ken Foree), to return to the house at 666 Benevolent Street and look into recreating the experiment to help Tililinghast face his fears and clear his name. Oh, boy. He tried to tell her this was a bad idea…

There is little here in a recap that anyone would find surprising. Of course, the machine is rebooted and Pretorius returns in a manssive, grotesque form. Of course, our three stalwarts are brought low, and of course, the good doctor (McMichales) realizes the Resonator has to be destroyed. But the magic is in the journey. 

And what magic! We learn through the magic of a VHS tape that Pretorius was a dom in BDSM, that exposure to the Resonator can lead to hypertrophy of the pineal gland such that it protubes like E. T.’s finger from the middle of your skull. Before that happens, though, after the first pass with Dr. McMIchaels and Sgt. Brownlee present exposure begins to awaken other things in the investigators, not the least of which seems to be urges between physicist and psychiatrist. 

After Bubba is bashed around and bitten, and Katherine and Crawford have shaken offf their stupors, Dr. McMIchaels has the bright idea to go back and try again. Bubba shuts that idea down conclusively and Crawford seems to be fine with that idea. 

But then, in one of those magic of editing moments where time seems to dilate for one set of characters and shrink for others, McMIchaels discovers some bondage gear of Pretorius’s, dons it, and proceeds to give our unconscious Tillinghast a handy. She begins to mount him (he’s under the covers, by the way), when Bubba comes in and snaps her out of her fugue state. I also didn’t mention that by this point, Crawford had been almost consumed bodily by a giant being in the cellar when he went to shut the Resonator down from the fuse box.Bubba was able to save him, but he is found in a dire state, hairless and drained.

The Resonator starts up again, of its own volition and refuses to shut down. This time, Crawford, Katherine, and Bubba are attacked by bee-like creatures (this is before Nic Cage could scream “BEEEEEES!”) and Bubba is devoured by them, left as a gooey corpse. Pretorius is there with his slimy self and grand pronouncement of merging minds being the most sensual thing you can do (this guy…so one-tracked)) while he attempts to achieve said congress with Katherine. Crawford is able to free her, and she stumbles upon using a fire extinguisher to neutralize the Resonator and send Pretorius back to his side of the dimensional wall.

A dead cop is a dead cop and McMIchaels and Tillinghast are returned to the clinic for evaluations. Dr. Bloch prescribes EST for McMichaels since she’s convinced Katherine is schizophrenic and because, let’s be honest, she really doesn’t like her. We had seen Bloch fingering the hole in Crawford’s head and being repulsed when the pineal finger came out. Oddly, instead of getting to work documenting this, she seems more annoyed and gets called away. She then makes her assessment of Katherine and this allows Crawford to get up, extremely groggy and hungry. Turns out, food doesn’t do the trick, but brains do! He’s found by Bloch in a research area eating a brain saved for experiments, no doubt and asks what’s becoming of him. 

Bloch attempts to assuage him and he goes straight for her left eye and sucks her gray matter out from there. I’m assuming that’s what he does, we don’t really see any brain in his mouth. 

The sadist (there’s more than one) who was getting ready to put the zap to Katherine is distracted and she lays him out with thunk on the head with an operation light fixture. She frees herself, grabs a van and heads back to Benevolent Street to destroy the Resonator. Crawford, still peckish, finishes off a couple of EMTs and takes off in an ambulance.

Not quite sure where Dr. McMIchaels learned how to rig a bomb with C-4 and a timer, but she shows up to the Resonator and sets it running.  Crawford shows up and sets to earthing her brain but she bites his pineal penis and he comes to his senses. Pretorius returns and decapitates Crawford and looks to get with Katherine again, who by this time has been shackled but manages to free herself by cajoling those little eel beings to chomping through the restraints. 

Crawford materializes within the mutated mass that is Pretorius and Katherine, realizing the bomb’s about to blow jumps through the window, landing as the explosion tears through the upper part of the house. By the time the next door neighbor comes out of the crowd, all Katherine can say is “it ate him” before she dissolves into laughter and tears. And holy shit, Crampton sells it.

Throughout the film, the strongest elements are what Combs, Crampton, and Foree bring to their roles. Stuff like this just cannot work without relatable characters and it’s truly a great canvas for Combs (who I often feel is underrated) and Crampton. The character development isn’t really there in the script. Gordon started that he trusts his actors to know what to do and it’s his theater instincts that very often make these moves succeed. 

I’m on the fence about Gordon as a film director; he’s come close to Carpenter level greatness, but I find that there’s a kind of cinematic garishness to his work that doesn’t always serve the material well (Edmund comes to mind). But I think he’s usually spot-on when it comes to letting the dynamic between cast members develop organically.

There’s plenty of humor throughout From Beyond, which puts a lot of purists off, but those of us who are movie fans know that leavening horror with a wry smile or an occasional guffaw can work wonders in ratcheting up tension and suspense elsewhere.

Combs exudes a sensitivity and vulnerability that actually rather renders him the “damsel in distress”; this is likely intentional and it makes McMIchaels’ more the hero. This is a swell conceit that turns Lovecraft on his head. 

Additionally, HPL was likely spinning with the third main lead being a Black man. It’s difficult not to applaud what Gordon did here from that perspective alone. 

Mac Ahlberg’s lensing is efficient and astute and buttressed by Richard Band’s atmospheric score. But it’s those wonderful practical effects and puppetry (and karo sauce) that sell the gruesomeness of the flick and in many ways, help visualize a little better what Lovecraft described in his works.

John Carl Buechler and John Naulin are the wizards behind the effects curtain and went on to do more work with Gordon among others.

As a Lovecraft adaptation, it’s up there. Gordon pointed the way by which future adaptations could follow and I think it’s a sound template. As a successor to Re-Animator, it may not be as inventive or clever, but From Beyond still stands above many of the other stabs taken at the source material.