Re-Resonator: Looking Back at From Beyond

Crawford, what did you see?

Bit off his head.

- I just love you've what you've done with this room.

You may be a scientist, but right now,

you're acting like a junkie.

Just take him and leave.

- What the hell is that? - Dr. Edward pretorious.

Well, we learned what we came for.

He ain't crazy and that... It... ate pretorious' head.

They're gonna think we're crazy.

All right, come and get me, eunuch!

This time, I'm not running away.

- Yes, the greatest sensual pleasure there is

is to know the desires of another mind.

I know your desires, you impotent pig.

When I met Stuart Gordon,

I was introduced by a friend of mine,

of ours, back in the day, named Bob Greenberg.

Bring a friend to me.

- Bob Greenberg told me I should go meet Stuart Gordon,

who, for 10 years, had been the artistic director

of the organic theater in Chicago.

We got along real well and I really, I saw his plays,

and saw how he took questions from the audience,

and I thought, "wow, this guy, I have confidence here."

'Cause I didn't know what I was doing.

And I said, "well, let's make a movie,

and I wanna make a horror movie."

And he said he had a couple ideas,

and one of them was re-animator.

Now, I'd read some lovecraft

and I knew the name lovecraft,

but I was never a fan of the stories.

He doesn't write in images like

us modern people like to read images, he wrote words.

And it seemed like at the end,

when the real horror was coming,

the protagonist would like... pass out.

- Well, like tolkien, lovecraft created a mythos,

a backstory if you will, of this place.

Or maybe not so much a backstory,

that they're there, they're still there.

And I think it was kind of a manifestation, in a vague way,

of his own fear of germs.

He was writing at a time when germs

were kind of a new concept.

You know, biotics and antibiotics

and all of this sort of stuff.

The fact that something we couldn't see could kill you.

- You know, he had this idea that there were things

in the air in a paralleled universe,

like germophobia,

kind of like... he didn't like fish.

He didn't like fish, fish were creepy to him.

So he made it kind of, you know,

these half fish, weird, gooey people.

Cthulhu, this whole idea of this subterranean,

ancient old ones that were still rumbling down there,

and there were certain places on earth

where they could come up and still get you.

You know, that's a mythos that's created

and everybody goes, "yeah."

And they've stolen from him right and left.

But then Stuart mentioned re-animator,

and they already... he and Dennis, and William Norris,

had already written a script for a pilot for a TV show.

It was half the length

of a feature film script

and it was for broadcast television.

I read the story, the re-animator

was actually six stories,

and they're not really lovecraftian.

They are more like "monkey's paw" type stories,

people crawling out of the grave,

those sort of ec comics type of thing,

and that appealed to me.

October of '85, re-animator comes out.

It makes a bit of a splash,

not the thing that everybody seems to remember.

- Pauline Kale had a very nice writeup about the movie

and she said some very nice things about me,

and I thought, "okay, I've arrived.

My career is finally gonna take off."

And then I was talking to my agent, saying,

"ooh, all these roles are gonna come my way."

And he said, "yeah, but it was a horror movie,

and it was really over the top,

and it was kind of really out there,

and really gory and silly."

- Everything was kind of a mixed bag, actually.

You loved it or you hated it.

Then I think it came out on vhs

and it was a full-fledged phenom there

in this vhs new world.

Charlie band made a three-picture deal,

I think with Stuart and Brian, to make some movies.

Charlie had started empire studios in Rome, outside of Rome.

So let's do a follow up, another lovecraft project

follow up, and using the same team.

I was always sorry that Bruce abbott

was never a part of any of that.

So Barbara and I, and Brian and Stuart, of course,

and of course, Mac ahlberg, who was the cinematographer

and a dear friend, and such a talent.

I honestly think Stuart was surprised

at the humor in re-animator

and he wanted to do his follow up and not have that flavor.

He wanted to do a straight-ahead, serious lovecraft piece.

I have to say that I think of any lovecraft movie

that has been made, that from beyond comes the closest

to the mythos, the vibe, the otherworldly

kind of parallel universe

that lovecraft tried to convey.

The color scheme that Mac ahlberg came up with,

the palette, it was fantastic.

Nothing like re-animator.

Re-animator had none of that lovecraft mythos in it.

It's not a story that lovecraft himself

even thought was worthy of him.

It was a gig that he did for money, whereas from beyond

was probably something much closer to...

His imagination.

- They're at it again with the colored lights

and the weird sounds.

From beyond, the pre-credit sequence

is almost the entire story,

almost the entirety of the lovecraft story.

After that, it's all of our work.

It's... Stuart gets story credit and he helped develop

the story itself, the story elements,

and then I did the screenplay.

In lovecraft, you are getting the dread of the unknown.

You see the terrible in the story you see

the terrible consequences of having built the resonator,

and having delved into the

unseen dimensions

of creatures that are around us all the time.

However, you see the consequences of it,

but you are left to dread the reality of it.

We, especially Stuart and Brian, were very dedicated

to putting as much of that reality onto screen as possible.

- It was said to us, "this movie is not funny,

so don't play it funny."

So yes, it was a conscious choice from Stuart

not to make it funny, but I also think, to Stuart's credit,

he didn't want to do something that he had done before.

He wanted to do something different.

He wanted to show that he could do different tones

and make different kinds of movies,

and a lot of his stuff is very different.

We loved all kinds of stories.

We especially loved making people laugh.

It's the first stuff we did.

We had a satire comedy group in high school

and we actually played the coffee house circuit

in Chicago back in the day, back in the '60s.

- And we talked about doing other lovecraft movies,

and that's what I thought a sequel would be,

because I was basing my ideas

on the Roger corman Edgar Allen poe movies from the '60s,

where the sequel was a new story by Edgar Allen poe.

You went from "house of Usher" to "pit and the pendulum,"

to "premature burial," to "tales of terror,"

and that, to me, was what a sequel was.

But I didn't understand then what I do now,

which is that a sequel is really just

a celebration of the original movie,

and people want to see those characters.

They really don't want a new thing.

They want to elongate what they enjoyed before.

Back then, everybody's doing a three picture-deal

on a napkin at cannes, so we did a three-picture deal

on a napkin, three pictures that we would decide.

And so the first one was dolls,

which was a script that already existed

by ed naja.

We did that, we were gonna do that one first,

and then we were gonna do a lovecraft one.

And so I looked at all the lovecraft stuff

that was available to us and came up with two

that I thought would be good.

One was "dreams in the witch house,"

and the other was "from beyond."

And so we discussed it and we decided

that from beyond had that metal machine,

so it added a kind of a Sci-Fi element to it,

which seemed maybe safer in the marketplace.

And so then, the third one was gonna be robot jox,

and for dolls and from beyond,

we went to Rome, Italy, to shoot it.

So in September of 1985,

I moved my family to Rome

and we shot dolls up to the Christmas break,

and then after the break, we transformed the set.

We built one big house set,

we redid it to shoot from beyond,

and then we edited them both after.

So dolls was actually shot first,

although it was released second.

It's running itself!