The Beyond (cert. 18) is OUT NOW on DVD (£19.99) and Blu-ray (£24.99) by Arrow Video

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Lucio Fulci got scant regard while he was alive, his films being consigned to banned lists, kicked around by distributors armed with celluloid butchering scissors and generally treated like the work of any number of other Italio-hacks churning out cheap knock-offs of Hollywood successes.

Fulci’s work is so much more than that. Yes, there’s plenty of hokey splatter (particularly in later offerings) and a willingness to cash in on prevailing trends, a habit he shared with many of his contempories, but for cinema lovers, Fulci’s films have a few more layers than the average Spaghetti gutmuncher or sleazy Eurotrash offering.

Personally, Fulci stands out as the first director outside of the mainstream that I really became aware of. As a teenage horror geek among a peer group raised on 80s blockbusters and American Werewolf in London, I was well aware of Spielberg’s forays into big screen pulp, Lucas’ Space Westerns and John Landis, who was a bit of hero because of the jaw dropping Werewolf transformation he helped to create and his work on Thriller.

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But Lucio Fulci was different. Here was a disreputable pusher of extreme violence that I could really get my teeth into. Later on, I’d discover the full breadth of his work, but in those early days, it was the eyeball piercing extremity of Zombie Flesheaters, the buried alive terror of City of the Living Dead and the mechanical spider metaphysical weirdness of The Beyond that fired my imagination.

Here were films devoid of the MTV Horror-lite of 80s Teen-Comedy fright flicks. Here were movies that didn’t follow the logical progression of Reaganomic Slasher movies, with their strangely right wing morality and linear slayings of wayward young people tempted by premartial sex or a sneaky joint. Fulci’s movies took me down a darker path, to a place where Slasher films weren’t throwaway hokum but disturbing forays into edgy sleaze like New York Ripper. Zombies became pawns in an increasingly bizarre series of movies which twisted and distorted the rules of horror cinema with The Beyond being perhaps Fulci’s most outlandish statement. A savage but dislocated nightmare that follows the rules of dream logic rather than a conventional narrative.

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The standard tools available to a horror director – A creaking old house, stumbling corpses, creepy kids, unsettling mystics and loving attention payed to close up dismemberment – are used to create a kind of gore drenched cinematic poetry as opposed to a comforting blend of familiar genre tricks.

The Beyond remains, alongside Murder Rock (for less praiseworthy reasons), my favourite film in Fulci’s filmography and, while it’s certainly been a long time coming, the new Arrow Video edition of the film finally means the UK has a release of this vital piece of horror history that does the film justice.

Get full details on the upcoming new edition HERE