Bounding Into Halloween: ‘Terrified’ And ‘The Beyond’ Open The Gates Of Hell On Night 28
Submitted for your approval are two different stories from two different countries, and they come from two different centuries. What do they have in common? Both of them are located at a rift between our world, and the dark dimensions beyond.
Tonight, you will see what happens when that rift becomes weaker, and the beings from the other side make a surprise visit to a select few unfortunate souls who quickly find out that they’ve signed a mortgage that will keep them bound for all eternity in…The Freaky Zone!
Terrified (2017)
These first tales from the vault of horror cinema revolve around a residential street in Buenos Aires that’s experiencing some pretty freaky paranormal activity. A married couple hears voices in their sink before the wife is attacked by an unseen entity that violently slams her into the wall until she dies from her injuries.
Then a grown man meets the boogeyman under his bed, and a recently deceased little boy crawls out of his grave to avoid being late for breakfast at home.
These incidents compel the police commissioner (Maximiliano Ghione) to assemble a crack team of paranormal investigators to solve the case. They each take a house for the night, and then they each start dying horrific deaths by the hands of some monstrous beings.
The ones still alive deduce that the creatures are from another dimension, and the neighborhood is where their dark world intersects with ours, but that information does little to save anyone.
This is one of the best horror films in the past decade. It’s dark, it’s disturbing, and it has several effective jump scare moments. The three stories are told separately before they converge for the investigation, and it leads to an ending that will satisfy anyone who scoffs when they all live happily ever after.
Terrified is available on Prime, but I hope you like subtitles. Aquí está el tráiler de la pinche película:
The Beyond (1981)
The next feature on our haunted agenda is E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà (aka The Beyond) from Italian horror legend, Lucio Fulci (Don’t Torture a Duckling, Zombi 2, The House by the Cemetery), and it’s the second entry in his “Gates Of Hell” trilogy.
It takes place in Louisiana, and the story begins in 1927. Schweick (Antoine Saint-John) is a painter, and a warlock who protects one of the seven gates leading to Satan’s kingdom, or at least he did before getting killed by an angry mob of God-fearing folk in fancy fedoras.
Fast-foward to 1981, and the hotel is inhereted by Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl). She hires laborers to renovate the building, but then they start falling off scaffolds after seeing a ghost, or getting their eyeballs popped out by demonic zombies in the basement.
To make things weirder, Liza meets a mysterious blind woman named Emily (Cinzia Monreale) who has a seeing-eye Shepherd named Dickie, and she knows a little too much about the hotel’s history.
If you’re looking for something with a coherent plot, turn back now. Italian Horror films haven’t made sense ever since the rise of Maio Bava. They’re more like fever dreams with excessive gore, and extremely thick English voice dubbing.
This movie is Lucio Fulci’s finest work, and he even makes an uncredited cameo as a librarian that gets mauled by a gang of murderous tarantulas in a sequence that goes on for four long minutes.
The Beyond is streaming on TUBI, and the trailer is below:
