Exploitation Nation

Beyond the Door aka Chi Sei? aka The Devil Inside Her (on screen title) (1974)
D. Ovidio Assonitis
Code Red DVD
1.85

I dunno about you guys but I’m a sucker for a good possession movie. Just like any other horror fan worth their salt I was scared shitless by The Exorcist at a very impressionable age, throw into that stew being raised Catholic and you get a perfect recipe to be frightened by these morality plays with the devil. After The ExorcistBeyond The Door was such a hit the rest of the world flew into high gear making rip-offs of it, with Spain and Italy being the hot beds of production. is probably the one that has become the most successful and well known over the years. It played neighborhood drive in theaters on double and triple bills well into the early eighties and spawned two in name only sequels (which are actually Mario Bava’s Shock which was named Beyond the Door 2, and Amok Train which was retitled Beyond the Door 3). While it is not the best of The Exorcist knock offs (that prize goes to The Antichrist aka The Tempter) it is still a solid and creepy as hell little movie with some imagery that is hard to shake off. I had many years ago caught the very end of the movie on our local independent UHF TV station at about four am and it creeped me out. I still found it kind of haunting.

The movie opens with a strange, almost non-sequitor scene of a woman on a florescent light pentagram with many faces replacing her own. A man leaves and gets in his car. He loses control and goes off a cliff but it stops mid air and a voice that we have already been told is Satan tells him that he can have his life back if he finds a woman who is about to give birth. Then The story continues with  a woman named Jessica played by Juliet Mills, who is married with two very precocious kids. She discovers she is pregnant again. Her pregnancy is developing at an alarming rate skipping ahead months at a time in just weeks. She also begins to show signs of demonic possession such as spinning head, puking, swearing, kissing her young son on the mouth and apparently biting him while he sleeps. There also seems to be ghosts in the house to as in one very creepy scene the kids piss off the spirits sending their whole room into a frenzy of fling toys, smashing furniture etc. But the creepiest moments are the most quiet such as the rocking chair rocking all by its self as the little boy talks to it. Or when Jessica awakes and looks all around the room with one eye while the other stares ahead perfectly still. Her obligatory head spin is handled really well as her daughter runs in to tell her about the ghosts, and her head slowly spinds to reveal a terrifying rictus grin. The levitation scenes are eerie and effective too.

The problem with Beyond the Door is that int he last third it all becomes pretty muddled and very confusing. The character we saw go off the cliff is a dude named Demitri who apparently sold his soul to the devil and used to date Jessica. He shows up to makes sure the baby is born, but its unclear if he is going to kill it to save himself from dying, or is going to make sure it lives or what. It ultimately seems the devil is just fucking with him anyway you slice it.

The movie has a really strange editing pattern to it as well that adds to the confusion. Sometimes scenes will include quick flashes of things we have already scene in the middle of them for little reasons, or other scenes will play out without dialogue, even though people are speaking. The weirdest though is a scene early on in which the bathroom is shown catching on fire but nothing ever comes of it. we see it catch on fire, but no one ever notices, it is never mentioned, no fire trucks come, and at the end of the movie someone goes into that bathroom and it is fine. Really, really weird.

Outside of the strange editing, the movie is actually pretty well directed. It isn’t super stylish like say an early Argento or Fulci film, but it is solid, with a lot of moving camera that never lets things get boring. The effects are all handled well and convincing too. It is easy to see why this movie held up over the years and remained a drive in favorite.

The new Code Red DVD is great. The print is in nice shape, though the colors are a bit muted, btu I suspect that has a lot to do with the original color palette of the film. There are boatloads of extras with two featurettes, two commentaries, that awesome and scary trailer that used to scare the pants off people, plus the other Code Red trailers. The first 200 of these came with a collectible O card with different artwork.

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