From Beyond
Director: Stuart Gordon

Vestron 1986

By ignore staff

Unless you owned a used VHS of Re-Animator, by the same director, From Beyond is only remembered for its prototypical yet timelessly perplexing cover villain. Those who frequented a video store in the ‘80s or early ‘90s no doubt passed it countless times, guessing that it was either a possessed Sphinx or a half-man-half-cobra phantasm. Whatever you lazily imagined browsing past those couple inches of aisle space was far less shitty and cheaper than renting the video.

Anyhow, it’s finally set for a DVD release this September, so we went and rented it on VHS. Apparently its stare lives on in that original, antiquated format. And that nearly rules—slightly less so than seeing a sit-down Pac-Man in a Pizza Hut—but still.

As expected of a film released by Vestron (whoa-holy-Eighties-company), video purgatory is a well-prescribed destiny. This is a feral brain cell scrambler of merit, mirth and altered states that your nephews do not deserve seeing restored to an alien gleam. Maybe its nostalgia fucking with us, but bad tracking lends invaluable mood points to the flick and a fittingly surreal detachment.

From Beyond is a competent, warped, time-tripping slice of cheddar, linearly sandwiched between the techno new-flesh subject matter of 1983’s superior-duh Videodrome and the grab-your-console-gun “3-D” effects of 1991’s humanity-shaming Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. The movie’s true reference points back to the early 20th century. Its based on a story by pulp-Jungian horror writer/weirdo H.P. Lovecraft. Let’s hear it for the nerds.

Set in the then-present, hallucinogenic realities are quickly unleashed by a pedestrian science experiment that taps into the mind’s “sixth sense”: a psychotic state induced by stimulating the human brain’s pineal gland (next to the pituitary, ahem). To tone this bullshit down, after flipping a switch on a scientist’s device (think a vacuum at a DIY car wash), the room goes disco in pinks and purples. You obtain the ability to see predatory leeches and jellyfishes loitering in the air. And if you get their attention, they strike. But otherwise, it’s your regular boring afternoon, with a giant symbiote swimming down in the breaker room.

This new sense is a proverbial glory hole. The spellbound not only crave human brains but—and this is where David Cronenberg deserved a credited footnote—cheekily recreate Skinemax a la aforementioned Videodrome and grow a bloodthirsty body parts a la Rabid. This is the next step in evolution, according to the Cobra Sphinx. And the apex of this ascension is that you become the cover guy. So, winning the galaxy’s big fuck-you lottery to humanity means that one becomes a semi-transparent, dick-less Jabba the Hut that resides in an attic, staving off an insatiable appetite for brains with two or three people who annually flip a switch. The more you know.

If, come September, you finally rent From Beyond on DVD, those 11 years of grimacing lamely from a plastic box might have finally paid off.

This discourse of From Beyond is written by the staff of ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.