This surprisingly popular mid-‘70s Italian ripoff of THE EXORCIST has somehow remained on the radar of cult aficionados over the years—not necessarily for being a quality film, but for its unintentional camp value.
It opens with a voiceover narration by the devil over images of a candlelit seance and a naked woman with a face transforming into various characters from the film. Satan’s narration politely requests the attention of the audience, and proceeds to ramble on. “Ladies and gentlemen, soon you will be caught up in the events taking place on the screen…but don’t forget that that stranger sitting in the seat next to you could be me!”
As in many Italian horror films of that era, BEYOND THE DOOR’s scenes seem haphazardly strung together with more attention played to individual effect than a coherent narrative. The bizarre demonic prologue leads to a cliffside car accident involving the mysterious Dimitri (British actor Richard Johnson). But the devil spares his life in order for him to spy on his ex-girlfriend Jessica Barrett (Juliet Mills), a San Francisco-based housewife. This segues into a family drive across the Golden Gate Bridge with Jessica and her two children, intercut with, apropos of nothing, soul singers in a recording studio run by Julia’s husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia, who later went on to appear in Dario Argento’s DEEP RED and INFERNO).
After this clunky extended prologue, it soon becomes apparent that Jessica is pregnant with the devil’s spawn, which affects her in the ways genre fans have come to expect: pea-soup projectile vomiting, shouting obscenities in a freaky voice that is not her own and spinning her head 360 degrees like Linda Blair. She takes to levitating around the apartment, doorways and furniture start gaining minds of their own and the eyes of her children’s dolls start to glow. Her long-suffering husband, who is advised by his wife’s doctor to avoid calling a psychiatrist (since it might upset her), finds himself stalked through the streets by Dimitri, who eerily intones, over and over again, “The child must be born!”
For a movie generally considered to be incoherent trash, BEYOND THE DOOR has been given first-class DVD treatment by Code Red, which here presents the European cut of the film that includes a number of additional scenes and transitions. This brand new 1.85:1 transfer sports a clean image without any grain or noticeable scratches, and the mono sound is also completely clear, with delicate weaving between dialogue, sound FX and music. Immediately preceding the film is a brief introduction by Code Red honcho Lee Christian and Mills, although there are noticeable jump cuts as Mills describes how well the film holds up despite similarities to THE OMEN—leading to some awkwardness as Christian corrects her and says the controversy was over comparisons to THE EXORCIST.
A feature-length commentary finds Mills and Christian accompanied by HOSTEL producer Scott Spiegel and film scholar Darren Gross, and at first the genial, very proper British actress has a difficult time recalling individual scenes (during the shot where she plants a lingering kiss on her son’s lips, she laughs, “Oh dear! I don’t remember this!”) or even the post-dubbing of her dialogue (“I suppose I must have done it…”). Still, she remains cheerful and refreshingly unashamed of her participation in a schlock shocker, taking the character and her situation seriously. There are some prolonged silences as the participants get wrapped up in watching the film, but Mills is at her best when discussing her beliefs about acting—particularly her lack of vanity when it comes to playing a demented character “with warts on her nose and snot dripping out.” The other participants share anecdotes about the film’s history, most of which are better covered in the second commentary with the film’s director, Ovidio G. Assonitis, a.k.a. Oliver Hellman.
Assonitis is as succinct and formal as a businessman discussing an investment, or laying out the terms of a contract—though moderators Christian and Eurohorror historian Nathaniel Thompson do their enthusiastic best to draw him out. Assonitis’ recollections of making the picture are practical, involving the on-location shooting in both Italy and, for establishing exteriors, San Francisco, the nature of Italian post-dubbing (which adds to the dreamlike quality of the country’s horror films) and the efficiency of the actors. He swears up and down that he never saw THE EXORCIST before making BEYOND THE DOOR, though he did read the book—and that he didn’t use pea soup. “It was a mixture of many things, including honey—very tasty!”
As for whether or not Assonitis lifted from William Friedkin’s classic fright film, he continually evades the question, while hinting that his possessed-dolls sequence was stolen by POLTERGEIST. During the BEYOND THE DOOR: 35 Years Later featurette, he even goes so far as to state that if he took elements from THE EXORCIST, then that film must have ripped off ROSEMARY’S BABY, which borrowed from all the horror flicks that came before. “We both used the same pea soup,” jokes co-screenwriter Alex Rebar (who must not have heard the commentary), shrugging off any other similar elements—but while watching the movie, it’s tough not to draw comparisons. (That said, Warner Bros. lost its lawsuit against BEYOND THE DOOR and won against the blaxpoitation knockoff ABBY, which explains why that film remains near-impossible to find).
One of the most enjoyable anecdotes in the 35 Years Later documentary recalls the production team hiring actors to stand around outside theaters where BEYOND THE DOOR was screening, pretending to emerge and having heart attacks. Also, one of the sequences cut out of the American version involves an actual street performer Assonitis discovered who played classical music on the flute through his nostrils; this bizarre character is seen skulking down the street in hot pursuit of Jessica’s stressed-out husband. “San Francisco has a bohemian quality,” the director recalls, “and we tried to use it in an ironic way.”
A 10-minute interview with actor Richard Johnson, An Englishman in Italy, goes into his experiences making fright features in the foreign land. He is garrulous and tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing; “It was [often] hard to keep a straight face about it,” he says, specifically referring to getting killed off by aquatic mutants in ISLE OF THE FISHMEN. Although he describes the films as being fun to make, with a lack of hierarchy that never put the actors on pedestals (a grip would occasionally walk up to him and offer advice on how to play the scene), he bellyaches about how he never made any money on these low-to-no-budget projects. He also remains bemused about rewriting his own dialogue, since the Italian screenwriters often had a poor command of English, while hastening to add that he never received any credit for that work.
