2025
A few nights ago in a Facebook chat, the man who was extremely formative in my weird upbringing recommended From Beyond, after sharing his disbelief that I’d never seen Reanimator before. Decades earlier, he’d been my mom’s boyfriend, the guy who showed my sister and I Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, gifted me an Aleister Crowley Thoth tarot deck and Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages when I was 11, and always kept a standing credit the the used bookstore he worked at for me to pick out the most lurid horror paperbacks. These memories and experiences feel like a weird, wonderful cultural inheritance, a way of understanding the world through its strangest, most unsettling stories. To sum up, he is the major answer to WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS, SARAH and From Beyond shot to the top of my list.
Being on a bit of Jeffrey Combs kicks, I was all in. Here, he plays Crawford Tillinghast, a twitchy scientist working with the monumentally creepy Dr. Pretorius on the Resonator, a machine that reveals creatures normally invisible to humans. One experimental session goes horrifically wrong, with Pretorius getting decapitated and Tillinghast landing in a psychiatric ward. Enter Barbara Crampton’s Dr. Katherine McMichaels, who springs Tillinghast to investigate the machine, accompanied by Ken Foree as Detective Bubba Brownlee.
The Resonator emits a kind of perverse, horny energy, unleashing extremely inappropriate behaviors in these serious people of science with a whole bunch of gross, grandiose talk about the exquisite sensuality of the mind and so on and so forth …although actually the late Dr. Pretorius was quite the degenerate lech before the machine got ahold of him, with a whole closet full of leather and a collection of sleazy home video tapes, and worst of all an uncapped tube of red lipstick that Dr. McMichaels finds and paints her mouth with. Out of all the disgusting things in the movie, I think that old-uncapped-and-open-to-the-elements lippie is what I found most stomach-churning.
The practical effects are a grotesque carnival of gloppy, slimy transformations (I read that the slime was edible?!) Combs goes from twitchy scientist to a brain-munching nightmare, all wild-eyed and unhinged. Crampton’s transformation is even more ridiculous, from buttoned-up no-nonsense psychiatrist to a scarlet-lipped leather lady, reveling in depravity. All in all, it was a blast, a specific strain of gonzo horror existing at the intersection of Lovecraftian imagination and cinematic audacity. Give me more!
Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day Twenty One 2024 | Day Twenty One 2023 | Day Twenty One 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!
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