With From Beyond, H.P. Lovecraft firmly joined Edgar Allen Poe in the canon of horror writers whose cosmic meditations on the limits of sight proved finally unadaptable to cinema. Or, at least, not adaptable directly. Quite amazingly, From Beyond is even less connected to its Lovecraftian source material than its immediate cinematic predecessor, 1985’s Re-Animator. With Lovecraft, at least, this is thoroughly unsurprising. The moonless prophet of the incalculable and unseeable would, presumably, struggle to find any light in cinema, one of the more naturally representational of all mediums. How, of course, does one visualize the limits of visualization?

Thankfully, writer-director Stuart Gordon and writer-producer Brian Yuzna seem to have responded by running in the opposite thematic direction. While the narrative content of From Beyond superficially explores the limits of human vision and the consequences of potentially megalomaniacal attempts to overcome those limits – “five senses weren’t enough for him,” one character remarks on the ostensible antagonist– the style of the thing is saturated with cinema’s capacity to visualize. Like many great horror films, From Beyond is essentially about the ability of humans to comprehend the totality of having been forced into a film world, which plays the role of a diviner, creating a catastrophic shadow play that doubles as, and threatens to become, a genuinely dark art. Rather than asking whether cinema can see, as many Lovecraft films would likely be inclined, Gordon’s film asks what cinema shouldn’t see but will anyway, and what the consequences of its vision might be for the souls trapped in it.

It does, at least, begin with a fairly straightforward riff on the Lovecraft short story of the same name, a very early 20^th century meditation on the awful zeal of science tampering in the domain of the transcendent. Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorrel) and Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) are testing their newly invented Resonator device, which, in good Lovecraftian fashion, allows them to discern the contours of another world. Or, rather to glimpse another plane of our world, the physical manifestation of which is a gaggle of priapic undulating eels who swim around in the air. Pretorius, who shares a name with the equally monomaniacal and self-amused mad scientist from Bride of Frankenstein, is either devoured or warped into another plane of existence by them, and Tillinghast is declared insane. When he shares his story with Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), she doesn’t really believe him, but she does think that the psychological effects of the story is worthwhile, and along with resident skeptic-detective Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree), they return to the experimental abode in search of their own various permutations of truth.

Gordon and co-writer Dennis Paoli stages the script, even more than Re-Animator, as a classical bottle-story, a study in various imaginative postures toward the unfathomable. Combs is, admirably, playing in an entirely different direction from Herbert West, a straight-laced would-be functionary transmuted into a Nietzschean Übermensch, while Crampton is given a vastly more complex portrait than Re-Animator afforded her, moving from intrigue to autoerotic excitement to genuine terror at the penetrative acts breached by the film. Foree is abrasive and astringent but the most consistently humane, and Sorrell, who is – expectedly – not gone for nearly as long as you expect, is breathtakingly and frighteningly sadistic as a beacon of scientific curiosity warped into an avatar of untrampled hubris, a cruel and fascistic negative channeling of Emerson’s all-seeing eyeball. Of course, the film’s thorniness is that he may also signal a genuinely heroic impulse. He alone recognizes the atmospheric complexity all around us that we so often pretend isn’t there, until, in acknowledging and refusing to deny it, we become a threat and must be killed.

From Beyond is simply giddy with cinema’s capacity to manipulate humans, to tease out their inner receptivity and pliability. The film turns characters into moldable clay pocked and prodded with the limits of their capacity to reason with the constructions they’ve unleashed upon the world. This is a curdled, genuinely malevolent film about humanity’s unquenchable capacity for self-destruction. Gordon and his sorcerer’s apprentices have more than a little interest in punishing us (and themselves) for it. Mac Ahlberg’s cinematography encases us in a womb of welcoming color before they curdle into shades of phallic, menacingly warm pink worthy of Kenneth Anger. And, of course, the real unholyseedis John Carl Buechler, whose creatures seem uncannily capable of molecularly reorganizing themselves, visions of a world more amenable. Even more than, say, Clive Barker’s icy Hellraiser, Gordon’s offspring is keyed in to a cruel cinematic erotics with a decidedly, deeply sinister sexual undercurrent. While it also begs obvious comparisons to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, it ultimately echoes David Lynch’s Blue Velvet from the same year, with its capacious rumination on the necrotic underbelly that doesn’t invade but emerges out of the placid domesticity it only seems antithetical to. A propensity for cruelty and violence is not humanity’s other, the film proposes, but its shadow.

Of course, Charles Band’s Empire Pictures played to the masses. But B-cinema, even if only because it wants to appeal to the masses on a relatively small (and thus comparatively unsupervised) budget, constitutes its own parallel dimension of the consciousness, a pocket dimension brutally and distressingly close to our own mundane world. And Band’s vision of commercial success, his own desire to meld with his audiences’ interests, was conditionally coterminous with Gordon’s interest in viciously skewering their desires. Most of the films produced by Charles Band’s company don’t even make it to their respective credits before we forget them. Most of Gordon’s later films, meanwhile, struggle to rise above an itch. Yet, in Gordon, Band found his greatest interpreter, and in Band, Gordon found a phenomenal excuse. Together, they conjured a beautifully sobering, wonderfully disgusting thing.

Score: 8/10