31 Days of Horror Reviews: Beyond The Door

Day 11: Beyond the Door (1974), dir. Ovidio G. Assonitis

Streaming Availability: Shudder

The Exorcist was a big deal in the early Seventies - I think I've mentioned this before. Of course were official sequels, but devil fever was so high in this era that every B-movie producer wanted to be in on the trend. A few were more shameless than others. The most shameless would be Seytan, a Turkish film that is a direct plagiarism of Friedkin's movie, stealing the script scene for scene. In 1975, a movie calling itself The Return of the Exorcist beat The Exorcist II to there market. There was a blacksploitation version, Abby. And of course, there was a movie called The Sexorcist released in 1974, because somebody had to do it. 

However, only one of these movies actually merited legal action from Warner Bros., with a lawsuit ultimately settled in the Bros.' favor in 1979. That would be the Italian horror movie, Beyond the Door (also known as Devil Within Her). And yeah, they probably do have a case. Beyond the Door does steal most its scares from The Exorcist. This story is "what if The Exorcist slammed into Rosemary's Baby?", so now the mother is possessed, and the baby might be the antichrist. ...or maybe he isn't, this movie is very Italian. Still, I cannot claim justice is happening here. This is the story of a major studio punching down at its tiny foreign competition. And Beyond the Door is a worthy movie to exist, IP laws are ridiculous.

I admit this every year whenever it comes time to cover movies from Italy on Spooky Month: I love Italian food, I love Italian westerns, I don't like Italian horror. Beyond the Door is one of the most lucid movies I've seen from that country. For example, the plot largely makes sense and stays focused on one single idea. There is none of the signature dream logic that makes these movies so strange. It does not end with a random helicopter crashing through the roof or random zombies devouring the cast.

The weirdness does not end on a script level, there's also a big issue of translation. Italian horror tried very hard to appeal to America tastes (which were and still are the largest horror market). More than that, they tried to look American. They would shoot in American cities, they would cast English-speaking actors, their directors would go by more Anglo-sounding pseudonyms. Ovidio G. Assonitis is credited as "Oliver Hellman" on the poster. But this makes it more inexplicable, which sometimes makes for a unique charm, and sometimes is just alienating. Italian crews did not record sound on set, choosing instead to dub over every line. Sometimes that works, in Beyond the Door, it makes everything awkward. Juliet Mills' performance in the voice booth is terrible in this movie. She does not know how to perform this way, or the Italian director failed her.

Beyond the Door is making incredibly odd choices even before the horror sets in. We open on this San Francisco family, the Barrets, driving around in their (very pretty) Buick convertible. The daughter, Gail (Barbara Fiorini) has this foul-mouthed jive way of speaking. "I'll tell you something, man, there are times when bringing up parents is a real pain. When Dad tries to get all sexy and with-it, that's a real bad scene." She also is carrying about fifteen copies of the novel Love Story for some reason. Meanwhile, the son, Ken (David Colin Jr.) is drinking Campbell's soup with a straw. He litters it on Lombard Street but then in a continuity error, he's holding that same can in the next shot. It continues on this way. Why are the kids baking their own birthday cake? Why is the doctor constantly taking out Altoids from a jar?? What does that mean?? What information are you trying to convey with this, movie??

I started furrowing my brow around five minutes in and never stopped.

We open on Satan (Edward L. Montoro), lamenting that modern sensibilities have forced him out of the spotlight. (Well, don't worry, Lucifer, the world is changing, you will not need to hide for long.) Satan, as a plot construct is here to fill in exposition that the movie itself fails to. He's largely the reason why Beyond the Door is more coherent than most Italian horror films I've seen. Satan is constantly mocking a man named Dimitri (Richard Johnson), a sallow man in a nice suit. Dimitri made some kind of deal with Satan to live for another ten years, which is all wrapped up in a complicated plot involving timey-whimey limbo pausing the moment of Dmitri's death. Basically the man is to implant Dimitri's soul inside an unborn child that is growing inside Jessica Barret (Mills).

Or maybe not. This really be the Devil's grand revenge on Dimitri. In which case, Jessica gets the worst of it.

Pregnancy as body horror is something we've seen before. Unlike Rosemary's Baby, Beyond the Door is from the perspective of the family around Jessica. I think that costs the movie a lot of intimacy and humanity, but also this is just a worse-made movie than its American competition. Her condition diminishes from growing increasingly distant and cruel to her children, to finally becoming a full Exorcist witch monster in a straight-jacket. The look is complete with green contacts, slime puke stains, and a nasty smile. All the great gags from The Exorcist are back, such as head spinning, floating off the bed, throwing people around the room. No masturbation scene though, that was a line too far. So Beyond the Door is, in fact, a less extreme Italian rip-off. That's very rare. Also there are no casualties besides Dimitri, who is already dead

There is an interesting conflict where Jessica brings up the issue of abortion. Her pregnancy is described as a "biological absurdity". The baby is developing at terrifying speed, seemingly three-months along only weeks after Jessica's first missed period. Roe v Wade only passed in 1973, and governor Ronald Reagan, of all people, signed a law in 1967 making abortion legal in cases of medical need. So abortion was a huge new thing in this period, a key part of the social changes that made women's gains in the second half of the 20th century. And in this film (and reality) it is absolutely not a tool for evil, as a certain Christian audience might assume. Ultimately, Beyond the Door solves its crisis by killing the fetus, which was a very bold maneuver in 1974 and probably only bolder today. The world is worse in many ways than it was fifty years ago.

As a movie, Beyond the Door is not my favorite. It does a bad job with social commentary about America because it was not made by Americans. The final twist makes all the events of the movie seem pointless and more confusing.

On a positive note, I like how many San Francisco glamour shots we get, practically every dialog scene is framed with a bright sunny Bay tableau in the background. There's a great scene of Poltergeist-esque horror where the two kids are trapped in their bedroom as dark forces swirl. The filmmakers put the kids on a rig to make the entire set bounce up and down while shining lights through the floorboards, it's a great effect. The scares that aren't cribbed from The Exorcist are better than the ones that were. Maybe that lawsuit could have been avoided.

There would be two sequels to Beyond the Door, neither of which I'm curious about. Italian sequels often are in-name-only, no interest in continuity in terms of story or production. They might not even involve Satan. Assonitis, however, would return to demonic schemes in 1979, when he produced The Visitor. That's a movie we have to cover.

Next Time! Let's see if Satan has more follow-through with his next child-rearing scheme, The Omen.