Beyond the Darkness (film)

Since his parents died in a car accident nine years ago, Francesco Koch, an affluent and good-looking 25-year-old (English version: 22-year-old), has been living alone with his wet nurse and housekeeper Iris in a villa at the outskirts of a South Tyrolian town. His fiancé, 21-year-old Anna Völkl, suffers from an illness and lies at the local hospital. Iris, who wants to marry Francesco and become the new lady of the house, hires a local witch who curses Anna by sticking needles into a voodoo doll. When Anna's condition subsequently deteriorates and Francesco learns of it, he hurries to the hospital. There Anna tells him she wants to make love with him at least once before she dies. As he kisses her on the hospital bed, her heart ceases to beat and she dies. Later that day back at the villa, Francesco mourns his loss by looking at the picture of his mother. Iris enters and breastfeeds Francesco, calling him her "little baby boy".

At the morgue, Francesco injects Anna's body with preservative so that he can dig her body up and be with her forever. Unbeknownst to Francesco, the mortician sees him making the injection. The funeral is attended only by Francesco, Anna's parents and her sister Teodora, who studies at a school in the region.

At night, Francesco drives to the cemetery and digs up Anna's body. While Francesco has to change a blown tire on the ride home, an American (in the English version: British) tourist hitchhiker enters the car, and due to the presence of a police patrol car, Francesco is forced to take her with him. After smoking a joint, she falls asleep in the car, and upon reaching the villa, Francesco unloads Anna's body and starts disemboweling it in his workshop. In the process, he bites into her heart and installs glass eyes into the sockets. When the hitchhiker wakes up and spots Anna's corpse, she panics. A struggle ensues, in which she scratches him on the neck and Francesco in turn rips off some of her fingernails with a pair of pliers. He then chokes her to death.

Iris and Francesco dress up Anna's body and put her on one side of a double bed. Assisted by Francesco, Iris chops up the hitchhiker's corpse and dissolves the pieces in a bathtub filled with acid, then disposes of the liquid in a hole in the garden. Right after, she eats a dish of tripe in a disgusting way that reminds Francesco of the dissolved body and makes him vomit, which makes her laugh. Later, as Francesco sits at the bedside looking at Anna's corpse, Iris approaches him and masturbates him.

A few days later, a jogger twists her ankle around Francesco's home, and he invites her in. They have sex on his bed, until Francesco reveals Anna's corpse right next to them. Once more, a fight ensues. Francesco bites her neck and eats a huge chunk of her flesh. He and Iris burn her corpse in the furnace downstairs. When Iris threatens to dispose of Anna's body, Francesco gives in and offers to marry her and make her mistress of the house.

Iris invites her old, eccentric relatives to dinner and announces her engagement to Francesco. Yet Francesco leaves her humiliated. The following day, while Iris is drunk and Francesco is out for a jog, the mortician enters Francesco's home to investigate, where he discovers Anna's body, takes a picture of it and leaves. That night, Francesco picks up a woman at a disco. Fortunately for her, Francesco just sends her off due to the arrival of Anna's twin sister Teodora. When alone in a room, darkness suddenly falls in and she can hear her sister's ghostly voice warning her of a curse on the house. As she walks down the stairs, she spots Anna's corpse sitting on a chair in the hall. Iris, who fears Francesco will marry Teodora instead of her, opens the door holding a knife, a silhouette that makes Teodora faint. As Iris is about to stab her, Francesco intervenes. In the ensuing fight, Iris stabs him on his hand and near his groin. He in turn wrestles her to the floor and bites a cheek off, she gouges out his left eye, and he finally stabs her in the heart, killing her. While Teodora remains unconscious, Francesco listens to her heartbeat, then carries her downstairs, incinerates Anna's body in the furnace and dresses and makes up Teodora just like her twin sister's corpse.

When the mortician returns, he finds Iris' corpse and Francesco badly injured near the furnace burning with human remains. As Francesco collapses and dies, the mortician takes Teodora, whom he thinks to be Anna's corpse, returns to the cemetery and places her in a coffin for burial. While he and his assistant are about to nail down the lid, Teodora pushes the coffin open and lets out a bloodcurdling scream.

Beyond the Darkness was a remake of the 1966 film The Third Eye, which had Franco Nero as its protagonist.[3] Its director Mino Guerrini was friends with D'Amato, and they had devised a number of unfilmed stories together. For the new screenplay, Ottavio Fabbri is credited.[4]

The film was shot in two weeks in South Tyrol province, in the towns of Brixen and Sand in Taufers, in late June and early July 1979.[4] On working with D'Amato, actress Franca Stoppi recalled him saying on set that "We're making a movie to make people throw up. We must make 'em vomit!"[4] D'Amato said in an interview "I personally opted for the most unrestrained gore, since I don't consider myself very skillful at creating suspense....It's my most successful horror movie, and still stands out today above many others of its kind. It did very well commercially."[5][6]

The special effects for the gore scenes in the film were made by using animal intestines, pig skin and a sheep's heart which were provided by an abattoir.[4] D'Amato said "In all four (of my) horror films....we created the splatter effects by using butcher's scraps. There was no real special effects expert....At that time, censorship was fairly mild".[6] D'Amato said the Italian prints were edited a bit, mainly shortening "the embalming scene and the one of the girl who gets cut to pieces in the bath...."[6]

The film's score was by Goblin, who were hired by producer Marco Rossetti, and included music that would later be re-used in The Other Hell and Hell of the Living Dead.[7]

Beyond the Darkness was distributed theatrically in Italy by Eurocopfilms on 15 November 1979.[2] The film grossed a total of 153.7 million Italian lire domestically.[2] Italian film historian Roberto Curti stated that Beyond the Darkness performed "rather poorly at the Italian box office".[8] The film has been released in a myriad of titles abroad, the most well-known being Beyond the Darkness.[8] A version of the film was released in the United States titled Buried Alive in 1985 by ThrillerVideo.[8][9] This version of the film has anglicized the names of the characters and is missing parts of the Italian theatrical version.[8]

In the United States, the film had a cinematic release under the title Buried Alive through Aquarius Releasing in 1984.[10]

In Italy, the film was re-released in 1987 as In quella casa Buio omega in an attempt to pass the film off as being related to the American films The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II which were released in Italy as La casa and La casa 2.[8] In Spain, the film was marketed as being a sequel in the House franchise as House 6: El terror continua and in Mexico as part of the Zombi series of film as Zombi 10.[8]

From retrospective reviews, in his 2001 book reviewing gory horror films from the decade, Scott Aaron Stine declared that Beyond the Darkness was D'Amato's "strongest contributions to the [horror] genre", while still finding the film to be "cheap Italian trash [...] but it approaches the subject with a certain amount of flair not found in similar productions."[9] Danny Shipka, who in 2011 authored a book on exploitation films from Italy, France and Spain commented on the film, referring to it as "one sick puppy" and noting it "doesn't purport to offer any deep insight other than revulsion, and if the test of good Eurocult is to make the viewer wish he had a bath after watching one of its films, than [sic] Buio omega would be a classic."[11]

• Beyond the Darkness at IMDb
• Beyond the Darkness at AllMovie
• Beyond the Darkness at Variety Distribution