Stuart Gordon's 1986 H.P Lovecraft Adaptation From Beyond is a Masterpiece of Body Horror on Par with David Cronenberg's Best Work
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I vividly remember a meeting at The Onion towards the bitter end when one of my coworkers asked one of the folks who ran the business side whether part of the The A.V. Club’s worth lie in its archives.
With characteristic tone-deafness he brusquely replied that no, the site’s value did not come in any real way from the work that we had been doing for over a decade at that point.
He responded that the site’s value came from sponsorship and advertising but that from an economic standpoint, the value of the archive was negligible.
I could see my coworker die inside at the man’s words because the value that he was talking about was only partially about money. The value my coworker spoke of was also emotional and creative. After all, the archives were a complete history of who we were, what we’d done and what we believed in, as individuals and as a site.
For the executive to say that our archives had no value felt like he was saying that our work also had no value, that all that mattered to our bosses was the money that we were making them now and the money that we would make them in the future.
When I started my own website I vowed to value and honor its archive and its history as something utterly essential and important regardless of whether I’m able to monetize it successfully.
The nice thing is that I HAVE been able to successfully monetize this site’s archive, most notably through The Weird Accordion to Al and its extended edition, which sold several thousand copies.
That only happened because “Weird Al” Yankovic promoted my book about his greatness and he is VERY popular. Particularly among “Weird Al” Yankovic fans.
I’ve been less successful with every other element of the site’s archive. I recently finished writing about every episode of Batman Beyond for a very kind, very appreciated patron.
Did I enjoy my deep dive into the cult Batman cartoon? I did! It was great. Did I learn a lot? Yes. Were the pieces consistently the least read piece on the site on any given week? The answer to that is also yes.
My Batman Beyond journey had a value unrelated to its popularity or lack thereof. A big part of that value came from the pleasure I experienced watching and writing about the show.
Now that I have finished that journey I can officially embark on one that promises to be better-read than my trip through Batman Beyond but still the most niche of niche endeavors: a journey through the complete filmography of legendary fright-master Stuart Gordon.
I am fucking psyched! I’ve always felt a deep connection to Gordon. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where decades earlier Gordon established himself as the king of transgressive, experimental theater.
But Gordon is also a Chicago guy like myself who eventually left Madison to establish himself as a force to be reckoned with in Chicago theater with the premiere of plays like David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
So when Gordon made one of the great horror debuts with 1985’s The Re-Animator he was a veteran storyteller and director who was only a neophyte when it came to film.
Gordon mastered the art of film with his stunning debut but its 1986 follow-up, another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation entitled From Beyond, might be even better.
Jeffrey Combs follows up his career-making and career-defining turn as mad scientist Dr. Herbert West in The Re-Animator with an equally iconic turn as Dr. Crawford Tillinghast, a scientist assisting his boss Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel) in the creation of The Resonator.
The Resonator simulates the Pineal Gland in a way that allows anyone within range to see beyond the dreary limits of reality and into a horrifying dimension full of monsters and shape-shifting evil.
From Beyond does not start at the beginning. It doesn’t even start at the middle. Rather, Gordon’s delirious head film begins somewhere far closer to the end.
We open in a state of pure delirium, with Dr. Pretorius horrifyingly close to realizing all of his wicked, wicked dreams for the Resonator.
Imagine Dr. Frankenstein with the hungers and compulsions of Jeffrey Epstein and you have a sense of Pretorius’ nastiness. He’s so utterly, deliciously and completely unhinged that he makes a wild-eyed maniac played by Jeffrey Combs seem like the very image of sanity by comparison.
When Pretorius ends up headless and seemingly dead his assistant is arrested for his murder and ends up in a psychiatric institution. He’s visited by Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), a psychiatrist who doesn’t want to cure the paranoid scientist so much as she wants him to plunge deeper into pure madness with her by his side.
Dr. Tillinghast, Dr. McMichaels and Dr. Pretorius are so smart that their preternatural brilliance becomes a form of severe mental illness. Nobody should be this smart. That level of intelligence is dangerous because it opens doors that should be shut forever in the name of all that is good and holy.
Nobody plays half-mad geniuses like Combs. Nobody possesses his combination of pummeling intensity, intimidating intelligence and underlying seriousness.
He’s a character actor who is WAY too intense for lead roles, which makes him the perfect anti-hero for Gordon, a transgressive auteur who makes a point of going too far.
Dr. Tillinghast takes Dr. McMichaels back to Pretorius’ home with Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead), a towering former professional athlete turned cop investigating Pretorius’ death.
Like Pretorius, McMichaels can’t resist the danger of forbidden knowledge and forbidden pleasures. Five senses weren’t enough for a sick fuck like Pretorius. So, in violent defiance of God’s will, the mad scientist sought a sick sixth sense through The Resonator and experimenting on the Pineal gland.
Pretorius reappears as a monster, a horrifying mutation intent on fucking and killing and eating its way into a higher state of being. From Beyond astonishingly cost a mere two and a half million dollars to make yet boasts Academy Award-worthy special effects.
When it comes to body horror, From Beyond might just be the best David Cronenberg movie David Cronenberg never made. The insanely imaginative practical effects are stomach-churning and made me want to puke throughout. I mean that as the highest possible praise.
The filmmakers shot in Italy to save money. That turned out to be a smart move. The interiors here are deliberately bare. There are only a few people in the cast. That allows the filmmakers to spend seemingly ALL of their money where it counts: making the movie as creatively disgusting as humanly possible.
The Resonator transforms Preotorius into something more and less than human. As a child I was struck by the image of the Pretorius’ mutated head in a state of agony, his skin pulled so taut that he looks like a wall of flesh more than a human being.
The mad scientist’s hideous device transforms his colleagues into inhuman monsters with over-active Pineal glands. It also makes everyone incredibly horny, particularly Dr. McMichaels, who becomes an insatiable sensual explorer in skimpy dominatrix gear.
Crampton is great here. Everybody is. As a theater guy, Gordon dug the idea of working with the same actors and craftsmen in film after film. That pays huge dividends here. Combs and Crampton are absolutely fearless. Gordon never stops taking them to blisteringly dark places. They never flinch.
Combs is best known for his work with Gordon and for playing myriad space aliens in various Star Trek shows. That makes sense, since he’s so otherworldly.
Dr. Tillinghast is transformed by his experiences with the Resonator and the sinister machinations of the worst, creepiest boss in the world. He becomes something alien and otherworldly, a fiend with monstrous urges and appetites.
From Beyond adapts an H.P. Lovecraft short story that runs a mere seven pages yet it captures the creepy fright-master’s essence on a profound level. There’s plenty of gore but the horror comes from colors and sounds and vibes as well. The whole grand gestalt is unbelievably creepy and distinctive.
I was excited to watch and write about all of Gordon’s movies before I watched From Beyond. Now I am fucking pumped. This is going to be a wild ride. Buckle up!
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