First released in 1973 and also known as The Hanging Woman, Beyond The Living Dead is a Spanish horror film that is just incoherent enough to be intriguing.
Having inherited the estate of his uncle, Serge Chekhov (Stelvio Rosi) arrives in the town of Skopje and is stunned to discover that, even though it’s only 6:00 in the evening, there’s no one in the streets. Everyone has retired to their homes. Even after Serge stumbles across a woman hanging in the cemetery, no one is willing to open their doors when he pounds on them. Serge finally finds his uncle’s place, where he discovers that the hanging woman was the daughter of his uncle’s widow, Countess Nadia Minalji (Maria Pia Conte). While Serge speaks to the police (who seem to view Serge as being the most likely suspect), Nadia retreats to her room, performs a black magic ceremony, and sends out a mental summons to Igor (Spanish horror great Paul Nashcy), a gravedigger who is also a necrophile and who has a huge collection of photographs of naked corpses in his shack.
Once Serge is finally able to convince the police that he’s not a murderer, he helps them when they chase Igor around the village. Later, Serge returns home and is promptly seduced by Nadia. The next morning, Nadia’s servant, Doris (Dyanik Zurakowska), begs Serge not to fire her and her father, Prof. Droila (Gerard Tischy). It turns out that Prof. Droila has a laboratory in the house’s basement where he’s been doing experiment on how to reanimate the dead. Serge has Doris undress for him and then, once she’s crying, he tells her that he already talked to the professor and agreed to allow him and his daughter to remain. WHAT THE HELL, SERGE!?
Got all that? I hope so because the film only gets stranger from there, with multiple murders occurring and Serge falling in love with Doris just as quickly as he fell in love with Nadia. As Igor stumbles around the village and peeps through people’s windows, Nadia holds a séance and eventually, a few decaying zombies show up. The plot is nearly impossible to follow, which is actually something that I tend to find to be true with a lot of Spanish horror films that were released during the Franco era. Making movies full of murder and nudity under a puritanical regime leads to a certain narrative incoherence. That said, the film plays out at such a strange pace and contains so many bizarre red herrings that it does achieve the feel of a particularly vivid dream.
Today, Beyond The Living Dead is best-remembered for Paul Naschy’s memorably weird performance as Igor. Naschy originally turned down the role, thinking that it was too small. The director allowed Naschy to rewrite the script to make Igor more interesting and it was Naschy who came up with the idea of making Igor not just a grave robber but also a necrophile. For English-speaking audiences, it can be hard for us to judge Naschy as an actor because we usually only see him in poorly dubbed films. (The English-language version of Beyond The Living Dead was apparently dubbed by a group of cockney voice actors.) But Naschy definitely had an imposing physical presence and this film makes good use of it.
Full of atmospheric visuals and surprisingly effective gore effects, Beyond The Living Dead does capture the viewer’s imagination, as long as one is content to not worry too much about trying to make much sense of it!
Through the Shattered Lens 