Seen for the first time in December 2012.
In 1981, "The Beyond" must have represented a huge advancement in the realm of cinematic gore, or at the very least, an apotheosis; the accomplishment that purveyors of gore had been working toward since the days of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the mid 60's. I'm tempted to say that the gore in "The Beyond" is not gratuitous, but that would be absurd. Of course the gore is gratuitous, but it is also necessary. Gore is the raison d'etre of this film, after all. And a sense of relish and excitement pervades the work. The same sort of excitement that occurs when new ground is being broken.
Beyond the gore, "The Beyond" does everything a horror film is supposed to do. It frightens and startles. It has creepy moments and suspenseful ones. It does not merely depict frightened people being tortured and mutilated creating a backdrop against which we might assume a studied pose. It affects the audience in these traditional horror ways, and the gore complements the film rather than stands in for it, like so many films of the gore-fest and torture porn variety do today.
The gore by today's standards is probably cheap. Certainly filmakers since Fulci with bigger budgets have achieved a higher verisimilitude of human offal. But the gore is as real as it needs to be for the purposes of this film. And its made up for by Fulci's lingering camera which never misses a moment nor cuts away too quickly from any of the violence, producing a movie more unsettling and disturbing than most of today's sadistic magic shows. This movie really is something special. Grade A.
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