Reviews of “From Beyond” (1934) and related work
- Adaptation: From Beyond (1986)
“From Beyond” (1934
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H. P. Lovecraft (writer).
This is the logical next step away from “The Horror of the Heights” (1913), which in turn develops “The Damned Thing” (1894). In the earlier stories, the naturalism rings false: it simply doesn’t make enough sense that near-invisible apex predators should be unknown, even if they are made to retreat to the upper atmosphere or a cave system etc. Lovecraft puts them where they belong: just slightly out of phase, all around and within us, appropriately contextualizing and magnifying “What Was It? A Mystery” (1859).
References here: Detwiller’s mathematical Mythos, “Wink of an Eye” (1968), “The Pegasus” (1994).
‣ From Beyond (1986
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This film is three good things: A Ken Foree vehicle, cinema’s most explicit comment on the dumbest idea in the philosophy of René Descartes, and an attempt to fuse an adaptation of Lovecraft’s work to that dumb idea, because Lovecraft really was reacting to the legacy of Descartes in much of his writing.
While empiricism in comparative anatomy was still testing its legs, Descartes thought that only humans have a pineal gland. He wanted to believe that only humans have souls, so he guessed that the pineal gland is the interface between the body and the soul. In reality, some other animals do have a pineal gland, and nobody has a soul. When Lovecraft was writing horror stories about other dimensions, he was in part playing with Cartesian ideas, uncovering the creepy disharmony of that physical relationship between fundamental substances that Descartes believed in. A body-horror film about that, with wild effects, is fine, but it does depart from the original short story. I feel that Stuart Gordon would have been able to make a better film with the satirical Cartesian motif appended to Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) instead.