Admiration for Fulci can be traced in a distribution move that brought The Beyond back to cinemas and broadened its audience.
A recommendation turned into a re-release
The most concrete link between Quentin Tarantino and Lucio Fulci can be found in The Beyond, first released in 1981. Rolling Thunder Pictures, the label associated with Tarantino, took part alongside Grindhouse Releasing in bringing it back to the US public. The researcher Paola Brembilla places that re-release in 1998 in her study of the film’s international circulation, published on 26 August 2019. This support can be documented without inventing a ranking of Fulci’s favourite films.
The difference between praising and distributing is important. A statement may spark curiosity; a re-release creates the material possibility of seeing a film in new conditions. Prints, cinemas, publicity and a title circulating again all come into play. The name of a well-known filmmaker may draw in viewers who would not previously have sought out that work, but the final experience depends on what they find when they sit in front of the screen.
The history of the versions also matters here. Brembilla’s study recalls that the film had circulated in the United States as 7 Doors of Death, with changes to the edit and the music. The late-1990s restoration made it possible to access a version without those cuts. This was not simply a matter of changing a work’s reputation with a prestigious phrase: the actual object the audience had a chance to know could also change.
The hotel and a nightmare logic
The Beyond follows a woman who inherits a hotel in Louisiana, where a history of violence and a supernatural threat alter the experience of space. The film does not arrange all its episodes as an investigation that promises to answer every question. Connections can feel unstable and places stop offering the security they ought to provide. That instability is part of its effect, even if not every viewer values it in the same way.
The hotel is especially effective as a starting point because it combines familiarity and unfamiliarity. It is a building meant to house people, yet it contains rooms, basements and corridors whose history the protagonist does not control. Receiving it as property does not mean understanding it. The story exploits that difference between owning a place and being able to inhabit it safely, until architecture itself becomes a threat that exceeds the decisions of the person trying to run it.
Fulci also works with the body’s vulnerability. Physical assaults do more than tell us that someone has died: they interrupt the continuity of the world and make looking difficult. The focus on eyes and faces is especially affecting in a film where perception is already insecure. Seeing can provide information, but it does not guarantee protection. Knowledge arrives too late, or does not allow intervention in the expected way.
The atmosphere also depends on how the episodes relate to one another. A sequence may begin with a recognisable task and shift towards a situation that does not answer to the previous rules. The viewer loses the comfort of anticipating which spaces will be safe and which characters will retain control. The film builds up that distrust until the idea of returning to a stable normality seems increasingly unworkable.
What it means to reappraise Fulci
Defending The Beyond does not require denying its discontinuities or turning them all into intentions explained by the director. A critical reading can recognise that its strength lies more in associations, atmospheres and moments of intensity than in transparent causality. Another may find that organisation insufficient. Disagreement is productive when it concerns what the film does, rather than measuring it solely against the expectations of a conventional mystery thriller.
Tarantino’s involvement in the re-release offers a context for reception, not an automatic explanation for every shot. Nor does it authorise attributing to him the promotional texts that others write about Fulci. The New Beverly programme reminds us of the restoration and re-release, but an institutional synopsis and a signed review are different documents. Demonstrable admiration lies in supporting the work’s circulation; its precise reasons should be tied to identifiable statements when they are reproduced.
That support connects with grindhouse culture and exploitation cinemas, where many films found intensely interested audiences without occupying the centre of critical legitimacy. Recovering them makes it possible to revisit what was left out of the more usual accounts of film history. It does not automatically turn every marginal title into a masterpiece, but it gives viewers back the chance to judge it.
To approach Fulci through this relationship, The Beyond is a better-documented choice than a generic list of his whole filmography. It is worth identifying the version being watched and paying attention to the way its spaces and bodies lose stability. The interest of the 1998 re-release lies in having made that encounter possible. The film retains its power to provoke admiration, rejection or bewilderment without needing Tarantino’s prestige to stand in for it.
See the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.