Buio Omega [Beyond the Darkness] (1979)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) I’m not always a giallo fan, and Beyond the Darkness is another example of why. Director Joe D’Amato here energetically takes up the inherent goriness of the genre and wraps it up in revulsive eroticism, voodoo curses, wild plotting, sadistic characters and other fixtures of the form. It’s all meant to be upsetting to viewers, but you have to wonder who D’Amato is playing for — fans of the subgenre will get what they’re looking for, while anyone unhappy at the ridiculous escalation of gore will simply shrug, stop watching and tell themselves that it’s all the same. There’s plenty of gratuitous violence (the vast majority of it against women, one notes without subtlety), and the amount of sexual content seems higher than usual. But then again, D’Amato did have a solid footing both in horror and pornography. The audiovisual aspect of the production is typically extreme, with vivid colours (usually red), better-than-average visual style and a soundtrack from Goblin all begging for association with better-known work from Argento. I usually prefer giallo when it features supernatural narrative elements, but the ones in Beyond the Darkness are perfunctory at best — it remains, at its core, about humans going terrible things to each other and there’s a hard limit to how much of that I can enjoy. While there’s some occasional dynamism to how D’Amato executes his humdrum script, I found myself more bored than interested by the result. But then again, I’m not always impressed by giallo — Beyond the Darkness is no exception.