Forty years after its 1986 release, From Beyond is still a Halloween-ready body-horror oddity. Stuart Gordon followed Re-Animator with a loose H. P. Lovecraft adaptation about scientists using a device called the Resonator to stimulate the pineal gland, with the unforeseen result of their perceiving creatures. The production story behind all that slime is just as strange as what happens on screen.
The eyeball-sucking victim was the director’s wife
Stuart Gordon had a habit of casting the people around him. His then-wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon played small roles in many of his films, and in From Beyond she is Dr. Bloch, the subject of the notorious eyeball-sucking scene.
Italy kept the budget near $2.5 million
From Beyond was shot in Italy with an Italian crew in order to save money. Gordon said the film would have cost fifteen million dollars to make in the United States, whereas the foreign production enabled him to hold costs to approximately two and a half million dollars.
It shot on a seized Dino DeLaurentiis stage
The soundstage was Dinocitta, just outside Rome. Dino DeLaurentiis originally constructed it, but it was seized by the government for nonpayment of taxes and then sold to Empire Studios; From Beyond was one of the first films shot there during Empire’s ownership. Gordon shot Dolls at the same time, and it was released the following year.
Re-Animator’s company came back for more Lovecraft
Gordon had previously worked with Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton on Re-Animator, and cast them partly because he was used to working with a company of actors in theater. He wanted a Lovecraft series with the same cast, like Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Gordon, Combs, and Crampton would work together on Castle Freak in 1995; Gordon later directed Dagon in 2001 and the second episode of Masters of Horror, H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House, in 2005.
Many of the Re-Animator production staff also returned, including screenwriter Dennis Paoli, producer Brian Yuzna, executive producer Charles Band, director of photography Mac Ahlberg, and special effects artists John Carl Buechler and John Naulin. Albert Band, the production manager, also makes an uncredited appearance as a wino.
Even the medical details were checked
As with Re-Animator, Gordon made use of medical advisors on From Beyond. They made sure the actions taken by the doctors and nurses of the film followed proper medical procedures.
Four effects teams ran out of money
Four separate special effects teams worked on the effects for From Beyond. According to producer Brian Yuzna, the production ran out of money before the effects on the finale could be finished.
The unrated cut finally arrived in 2007
Securing an “R” rating from the MPAA was a challenging ordeal. The film had previously only been released in its original R-rated form. MGM later released an unrated cut containing the footage deleted to get the rating; the longer director’s cut aired on the Monsters HD Channel and was released on DVD by MGM on September 11, 2007. On March 26, 2013, Scream Factory released a Collector’s Edition on a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack.
That tension between ambition and budget is exactly why the film still works. Which piece of From Beyond production trivia do you return to most?
Facts from Wikipedia: From Beyond (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.