Shameless Screen Entertainment faces the "sea of darkness" with their region free Blu-ray of Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND.

New Yorker Liza (Catriona MacColl, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD) inherits the Seven Doors Hotel outside New Orleans but little does she know that it was built upon one of the seven gateways to hell. Fifty-years before, locals had crucified eccentric painter Schweik (Antoine Saint-John, THE KILLER MUST KILL AGAIN) as a warlock, and the discovery of his walled-up body – and the eye-gouging death of a Joe the plumber (Tonino Pulci, MANHATTAN BABY) – has opened the gates and unleashed unnatural forces that strike out at anyone connected to the hotel. Mysterious blind girl Emily (Sarah Keller, aka Cinzea Monreale of Joe D'Amato's BUIO OMEGA/BEYOND THE DARKNESS) - who lives in the old house by the train tracks where Louis Malle's PRETTY BABY was shot - warns Liza to leave the hotel, but she is determined to turn it into a success with the help of creepy mother and son housekeepers Martha (Veronica Lazar, INFERNO) and Arthur (Gianpaolo Saccarola, TENEBRE). Meanwhile, the corpses of Joe the plumber and Schweik – whose mummified corpse a morgue technician (Al Cliver, ZOMBIE) has inexplicably been hooked up to a brainwave monitor – start to cause mayhem at the local hospital. Visions of Schweik's crucified corpse haunt Liza and people around her start suffering protracted and gory deaths (usually involving fatal injuries to the eye). Liza and rugged Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck, THE BLACK CAT) meet cute over the ailing body of another of the hotel's victims, and John spends most of the film looking for a logical explanation until the beyond has to spit forth a shuffling army of the living dead for Liza and John to take the hint that there is no more room left in hell.

After a memorable quartet of giallo film (PERVERSION STORY, A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, and THE PSYCHIC), Lucio Fulci hit international gold with ZOMBI 2, an in-name-only sequel to George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (released in Italy as ZOMBI). He followed ZOMBI 2 with a trio of Lovecraftian Gothic horror films - with zombies usually lurking on the periphery - CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE BEYOND, and HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. While CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD was financed by Dania Film whose theatrical product around the period was starting to look no different than their television product and had a dusty Savannah, Georgia substituting for the fictional New England town of Dunwich, THE BEYOND saw the return of Fulci's ZOMBI 2 producer Fabrizio de Angelis and make-up effects man Giannetto de Rossi (HIGH TENSION). Combined with other Fulci mainstays cinematographer Sergio Salvati (THE BLACK CAT) and composer Fabio Frizzi (CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD) and was an overall more sumptuous looking and adventurous production with beautiful locations, De Paolis, stand-out gore set-pieces and a number of wonderful atmospheric sequences culminating in a pessimistic-yet-eerily-beautiful vision of the titular beyond. It marked the second of three Fulci collaborations with MacColl and the first of two with Warbeck, who share a nice chemistry in underwritten roles (their chemistry extended to one of the most amusing horror movie commentary tracks prior to Warbeck's early death). The supporting cast and the crew featured a handful of Fulci regulars (Fulci himself has a speaking part as a librarian). Salvati's scope framing and lighting combined with Frizzi's choral/orchestral/electronic score, Studio Sound's typically exaggerated sound effects (including screeching tarantulas), and De Rossi's prosthetics form the apex of Fulci's horror work (with HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and THE BLACK CAT equally atmospheric but less gory and not-quite-so apocalyptic). Fulci's mid-to-late eighties and early nineties suffered from TV-style production values (and gauzy photography) and halfhearted rehashes of his gore set-pieces, while illogical elements of the narratives felt more like lazy scripting than metaphysical haze.

Released theatrically in 1983 by Terry Levene's Aquarius Releasing in a cut R-rated version titled 7 DOORS OF DEATH (with a replacement synthesizer score by Roberta Findlay regular Walter Sear), THE BEYOND languished on home video in that version with a 1986 big box Thriller Video release (one of a number of gorier titles Elvira opted not to host) and a 1991 LD Video reissue featuring an image of Charles Gray from THE DEVIL RIDES OUT on the cover. The uncut, English-language, letterboxed version surfaced first as a 1986 Japanese VHS and laserdisc import from Daiei followed by a 1997 German NTSC laserdisc from EC Entertainment that was also in English which became even more accessible as a non-anamorphic NTSC DVD from the company (which was also the source for Diamond Entertainment's unauthorized 2000 DVD retitled SEVEN DOORS OF DEATH); however, this was quickly followed by Anchor Bay Entertainment's anamorphic and stacked special edition DVD utilizing the Salvati-approved source originally intended for Grindhouse Releasing's aborted laserdisc release while a different PAL anamorphic master made the rounds in Europe starting with EC Entertainment's anamorphic reissue and NoShame Entertainment's Italian special edition. Arrow Video in the UK beat Grindhouse Releasing to the Blu-ray format, however the first pressing of their new transfer featured an incorrect black and white prologue which they tried to fix with their repressing with digitally tinting. The newer HD master was brighter, revealing some additional detail but also sapping many shots of mood and had a yellowish tinge over the whole of the film that desaturated some of the colors. Grindhouse Releasing's 2015 Blu-ray tweaked the existing HD master to mostly look like their older transfer apart from some bits that still looked more like the Arrow, and the new extras made it the preferable version despite some Arrow exclusives.

More recently, Artus Films commissioned a 2K scan of the film for their Blu-ray/DVD combo which was not English-friendly. While Shameless have been cagey about whether their 2K scan is the same one or not (they originally announced their Blu-ray as only featuring a new scan of the prologue), the shared extras suggest that it is the same master whether some additional tweaking to the picture has been performed or not. The timing looks somewhere between the Grindhouse and Arrow, as sharp as the former but slightly brighter and lacking the yellow cast over the entire image of the latter transfer. The audio options are a bit problematic, although encoded as DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0, the Italian and English tracks have echo and phasing issues (which have been reported as exacerbating the issues by spreading the audio out to four channels on 5.1 systems without any actual "surround activity"). Optional English subtitles are provided for the Italian track. The Shameless disc also uses seamless branching to include four different options for the prologue which was shot in color by Salvati and then treated to sepia. The black and white option is totally unnecessary since it was a mistake of the earlier master and never released like that elsewhere while the "standard sepia" is also unnecessary as it the workaround of tinting the black and white version. The color version looks better than it did as a bonus on other releases while the notes on the disc suggest that the sepia on color is Shameless' innovation but was actually Salvati's in the first place; it is more of a recreation of his efforts and looks quite nice. The end result has its flaws but is much-improved over the Arrow edition, and may be the go-to edition in terms of picture quality (if not audio), while fans may want to hold onto the earlier editions for their extras.

Ported over from the earlier American and British releases is the chatty audio commentary by Warbeck and McColl in which they discuss Fulci's disposition (particularly towards actresses), their fellow cast members including Warbeck's A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE co-star Saint-John who kept running away because of the make-up he had to wear, Cliver trying to escape being ravished by Dagmar Lassander (HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY), Warbeck's script for a sequel, and their reactions to the film's gore set-pieces. A nice addition is the translation of the Salvati commentary track recorded for the NoShame DVD, here with English subtitles, in which Salvati discusses the sepia tinting of the prologue (in contrast to the tinting done for Fulci's earlier western SILVER SADDLE), making post-production adjustments to flare light sources deliberately during the prologue, and some more about Saint-John's difficulties on the set. Salvati also discusses Louisiana State Film Commission liaison Larry Ray (billed as "Anthony Flees") who plays Larry the painter, whose unit provided the scaffolding for the exterior scene and the air mattress he was to fall into since they thought it would be safer than what the Italian unit could rig up.