The recent death of Stuart Gordon, the director of The Re-Animator and other horror and science fiction films all with a comic theatrical stance, reminds us that he had a notoriously erotic passage in one of his films, From Beyond, one of those “reckless science” cautionary horrors. 

Gordon had a background in Chicago avant-garde theater and he brought that needling sensibility to his films, where he explored crazy ideas with a mix of seriousness and sarcasm. 

As with The Re-Animator, From Beyond is based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, and portrays the Lovecraftian Country of mere human beings existing in parallel with foreboding creations who live in a “beyond” of mutual blindness to each other – until the Frankenstein-sounding Dr. Edward Pretorious (Ted Sorel) comes along, and with his assistant Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) develops a “Pineal Stimulator” . When they turn on this elaborate gizmo with Its tube of gunk and matching set of huge tuning forks, they release … the horror. 

Tillinghast ends up in an insane asylum, where he can’t convince conventional thinkers that it was not he who killed, ate, and beheaded Dr. P but something … from beyond their ken.

Young progressive psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Katherine McMichaels  (Barbara Crampton) finds that she does believe him, and with the help of the police Tillinghast is released into her custody, and, under the supervision of detective Bubba Brownlee (cult favorite Ken Forée, from Dawn of the Dead), they return to the house of science where the stimulator resides in the attic, a journey that Tillinghast does not want to make (like Ripley in Aliens). 

Katherine, you see, believes that stimulating the pineal gland could possibly cure schizophrenia, from which her father suffered, and she urges Tillinghast to re-charge the device. Unfortunately, this leads to the return of Dr. P., who, by the way, we learned earlier operated a BDSM dungeon with all the requisite paraphernalia and costumery and with a video camera to commemorate his sexual adventures. Now back on the scene, Pretorious is hornier than ever, especially when he takes in Katherine. 

Turns out that the heightened pineal gland in human beings makes them more sexual, and soon Katherine is gazing at the wrist shackles and binding bars and leather corsets in the dungeon with carnal, masturbatory bliss. 

Thus is set up the sequence when Katherine dons the leather top and stockings and high heels of a Domme and tries to seduce a stricken Tillinghast, who has been sleeping in the dungeon, apparently because it was the only spare room. 

This is a thoroughly erotic sequence and unless the viewer is clued in by spoilers (such as this column), it comes out of nowhere, for Gordon indulged in no such antics in any other of his films. Like many of the great directors – Welles, Spielberg among many – his work is usually sexless. 

Not so is the output of his colleagues on this film. The overall producer is the king of straight-to-video erotic sci-fi Brian Yuzna, and helping him out are the Brothers Band, Charles (Puppet Master and scores of other films he has directed), and Richard, the composer, whose tense melodies here evoke the great scores that Les Baxter wrote for Roger Corman’s sequence of Edgar Alan Poe adaptations. All this under the aegis of their producer father, the late Albert Band.

But though influenced by predecessors, From Beyond also influenced successors. 

For example Jonathan Demme borrowed the manner in which Katherine is introduced for his Oscar-winner The Silence of the Lambs which is a walk down a long hallway of incarcerated patients, one of whom is even masturbating. In a later scene, Tillinghast is shown eating the eye of another doctor in the manner of Lektor’s dietary habits.

Conventional viewers back in 1986 were probably prepared to scoff at From Beyond for what they perceived as bad acting and over-the-top special effects, unable to see the humor in the gooey excesses of the stuff, or the subtle visual wit of many of its moments, such as when Katherine surveys the laboratory for the first time and the camera lingers on the chalk outline where Dr. P. was discover and which is notable for the lack of a circle where the head is supposed to be. In addition, all the actors are in fact quite good. They go for it. Combs is particularly nice in his intense subtlety, so to speak. The ensemble acting here challenges one’s knee-jerk views on performance. 

Finally, there is Barbara Crampton. Here she is done up as one of those Hitchcock blondes with glasses and an elaborately coiled hair style, ready to be untangled when the Stimulator unleashes her sexuality. A long take where she passes from a hand cuff to a bar to the other cuff, fingering them and thinking, and then bumps into the wardrobe, where she nearly swoons as her passions are aroused by the leather gear is brilliantly, beautifully acted (it’s harder than it looks to “do” thinking in movies). She then convincingly “becomes” a crimsoned lip-licking Domme looking for prey. The actress herself is obviously a “game girl,” ready to take on the role with a sense of humor and an urge to explore the character’s possibilities. Thanks to this character, Ms. Crampton is one of those one-shot-Domme actresses, such as the late Dyanne Thorne from Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, so closely identified with one part she cannot escape it. But Barbara doesn’t feel that way. She loves going to the comic conventions and interacting with the film’s fans, helping to keep alive the legacy of Stuart Gordon.