I’d first like to highlight how much I’ve enjoyed the films of Stuart Gordon over the years. He coats an obvious love of Lovecraft with a lurid and viscous slime of 80s sleaze which is at once a parody, a paradox, and a delight. Especially those films with Jeffrey Combs, the most notable of which is Re-animator, where Combs plays the now iconic Herbert West, perhaps my favorite take on the Mad Scientist.
From Beyond flips Combs into the sympathetic character, the unwitting accomplice to the mad scientist, and this really shows his range as an actor. These two films are overflowing with camp, but they manage to also remain good films with impressive performances by all involved. A rare feat.
The primary trope in From Beyond which I will tackle here is that of the Disbelieved Delusion.
Crawford Tillinghast (Combs) is locked in a mental institution because he can only account for the decapitation of the sadistic Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) with wild tales of extradimensional monsters who access our world through the Resonator created by Pretorius with Crawford’s help.
The mental institution diagnoses Crawford schizophrenic, and this draws the attention of psychiatrist Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), who specializes in schizophrenia, and thinks maybe Crawford is telling the truth.
She believes at least some of her other patients might also be experiencing, through their mental illness, the presence and influence of extradimensional beings. She is accompanied by cop Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree) back to the house where the experiment first took place, to recreate it and verify once and for all what really happened.
My first goal was to draw your attention to this classic film. Having accomplished this, I now turn to one of the great purposes of Horror to Culture: to demonstrate how the genre influences the culture and vice versa!
This idea of what we now call mental illness being attributable to the influence of otherworldly forces is by no means a new one. From the Shamanic Vision Quest to the Sybilline Oracles to the Ecstasies of Saints and Prophets, it’s pretty much the basis of most religions, eh?
H.P. Lovecraft, in his works, taps into this in the most horrifying way. What if the gods, especially the most ancient and powerful gods, are purely malignant?
Well, why in literal Hell wouldn’t they be?
Entities like Cthulhu and Dagon don’t seem to have been the creators of humanity. If you’re stuck on the Abrahamic interpretation, the Bible grants this by mentioning other races of being which are inhuman, but more powerful or drastically different from humanity, which pre-existed us. The Nephilim, for instance; or the gods of the other peoples, which the Bible never says do not exist. Islamic tradition has the Djinn. The old poly, pan, and panentheistic religions are replete with such creatures.
The only real distinction between these mythological interpretations of nature seems to be the explanation of the place and purpose these entities have in relation to the greater scheme of things.
In all these myths we have the indication that these entities are at best indifferent to us, or they hate us and are disposed to inflict pain if they encounter us, or, worst of all, they have a vested interest in manipulating us for their own ends. We can deal with them, exorcise or control them, or avoid them through the protection of those deities particularly concerned with the welfare of humanity, which, again depending on what one believes, are not always so kind themselves.
All those Lovecraft stories about the Elder Gods reaching into the minds of humans to meld with them and use them as agents of their otherworldly will in our three-dimensional reality aren’t so far from these Abrahamic myths, or those of other cultures.
Lovecraft, who was predisposed to accept psychiatric and neurological explanations for insanity in real life, nevertheless used scientific skepticism as a foil to thwart his protagonist’s attempts to convince others of the reality of the Elder Gods and their cults in his fiction. Often, the protagonist is unwilling to believe it himself; but the evidence of his senses, especially the ever awakening sixth, defies his attempts to ward off the pernicious influence of the Ancient Ones.
This is used to great effect by Gordon and company in From Beyond.
Yet ultimately both religion and science are only offering explanations for phenomena we still don’t understand. If an exorcism seems to work in real life where psychiatric intervention fails, the psychiatrist might remark that it was a psychosomatic result. Might a priest remark in the reverse case that a benevolent God, concerned more with helping his creation, chose to work his will through the psychiatrist rather than the priest?
Ideologues don’t like to admit such things, of course, because then who will buy what they’re selling? I offer it here as a hypothetical, though not a likely, occurrence.
We can identify in some cases what part of the brain lights up when we experience certain phenomena, from emotions to hallucinations. We’ve identified and named some of the distinct chemicals that interface inside us to create our respective moods. But this tells us nothing of why we should be so constituted as to experience such things in the first place.
If a primitive inhuman animal comes across the remnants of an extinct humanity, and discovers how to operate a car, and then discovers through further investigation how the car functions, this doesn’t tell it anything about why the car was built or by who. In this posthuman future, such a one could only guess, as we do about our ancestors and other former inhabitants of the earth, based on what we can find and measure and decipher.
The theory that the current human animal is a long-term result of a biological evolutionary process is demonstrable, but this does not validate the notion that phenomena experienced by one human mind is negligible and mere delusion only because it does not conform with the majority of human experience.
Philosophically, this leaves open the question of the influence of discarnate, ethereal, preterhuman, or extradimensional beings, and it is a fair question as to why scientific enquiry tends to scoff at such avenues of investigation out of hand.
A question that I leave for you to explore on your own, dear reader. I’ve got some suspicions, but I still strongly advise you to seek that help for your maladies which most resonate with your current needs. Though there is a lot of chicanery out there when it comes to those with vested financial interests, there are also a lot of people earnestly working to diminish the suffering of others. I sincerely hope you find what’s right for you!
After all, like the ill-fated experiments described in From Beyond, resonance may indeed be the key, though we must hope that our harmonies will create more harmony, as opposed to inviting eldritch horrors to have us for dinner!
