Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
Some movies have a plot and some movies are Italian-style horror. Of national horror cinemas, Italian is, in my opinion, the most overrated. As I have said many a time before, a lot of Italian horror films appear to have been created by someone coming up with a couple of scenes (like the stained glass hanging scene and the barbed wire room in Suspiria) and then loosely tying them together with scenes that may or may not have an actual plot connected to them. With Beyond the Darkness (or Buio Omega if you prefer), there’s not really even that. There’s more an idea of what a couple of characters could be like as a starting point and then, well, that’s it.
I mean this pretty much literally seems to be the case with this film. Someone had an idea for a couple of characters (almost certainly not more than two of them), and then just…built something around them. Rich dude Frank (Kieran Canter, and the character was Francesco in the original Italian) lives a life of wealth and privilege, one he inherited after the death of his parents when he was young. He lives with his wet nurse Iris (Franca Stoppi), who clearly wants more than a nursing relationship with Frank, since he’s young, wealthy, and attractive. Frank, however, wants to marry Anna (Cinzia Monreale). Desperate to prevent this, Iris hires a witch to kill Anna with a voodoo doll, and it works.
But hey, this movie isn’t going to be about Iris trying to manipulate Frank into marriage, at least not entirely. No, this is about Frank’s very unhealthy obsession with his late paramour. At the morgue, Frank injects her body with some kind of preservative, and after the funeral, he goes back to the cemetery and digs up the body, taking it home. On the way, a blown tire allows a hitchhiker (Lucia D’Elia) to hop into his vehicle. She falls asleep, and once back to his place, Frank gives the audience a taste of his hobby—taxidermy. Yes, he’s going to taxidermy Anna and keep her in his bed.
But hey, we’ve got to have more than this, right? So when the hitchhiker wakes up and wanders into Frank’s taxidermy area, he figures he needs to kill her, and Iris helps him dispose of the body by chopping it up, dissolving it in acid, and flushing what’s left down the drainpipe. Later, apropos of nothing, Iris eats some sort of noxious stew in what is absolutely the most disturbing moment of the film.
And this is going to lather, rinse, repeat. Frank will encounter a young woman, bring her back to his house, she’ll find the corpse in his bed, and he’ll kill her. Eventually, Iris demands that he marry her, because that’s the only way she’ll let him keep Anna’s body. And, just when you think this damned thing is going to end, Anna’s twin sister shows up, which throws a wrench into Frank’s disturbed world. This is in addition to the wrench of the mortician (Sam Kale), who does a little snooping, finds Anna’s body, and determines to get her back to the graveyard when he can get into the house undetected.
As it happens, there probably was a shot in Joe D’Amato’s mind when he came up with Beyond the Darkness, the last shot of the film, which I will not reveal here. It’s kind of an expected shot, but it honestly works better than most of the rest of the film.
I didn’t enjoy this film that much. There’s a lot of full-frontal nudity here, and almost all of it is of the corpse variety. Without being actively about necrophilia, this is very much a movie about necrophilia, and despite this, Iris eating stew is the most horrifying moment of the entire affair.
I don’t know what it would take to convince me that Beyond the Darkness came from a place that wasn’t specifically the desire to focus a movie around a guy with necrophilic tendencies and a disturbing nurse who is obsessed with him. The movie is almost entirely non-plot driven in the sense that it’s really just isolated incidents (he murders a hitch hiker and they dissolve the body; he murders a jogger and they burn the body) until the twin sister shows back up when there’s maybe 20 minutes left in the film. It’s all build up to something that doesn’t really build up to anything.
Beyond the Darkness feels pointless, like a weird character study of a character no one would really want to know.
Why to watch Beyond the Darkness: Goblin did the soundtrack.
Why not to watch: Full-frontal corpse nudity and necrophilia aren’t the most disturbing part of this film.
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