Beyond the Door (1974)

On the face of it, Beyond the Door (1974) would seem to belong to that sub-genre of horror films that equates pregnancy with demonic possession.  These films play on male fears of pregnant women - the misguided belief that the unborn child, even if theirs, represents some form of rival for their attention, changing the behaviour of their partner and even rendering them, eventually, uninterested and incapable of physical sexual relations.  But the film simply isn't that straightforward, its confusing scenario and tangled script seemingly pulling in several directions at once.  Which shouldn't be surprising.  Although often dismissed as an Italian knock off of The Exorcist (1973), (indeed, Warner Brothers successfully sued the US distributors of the film for copyright infringement), in truth, Beyond the Door draws equal inspiration from Rosemary's Baby (1968), with both movies depicting an 'ordinary' woman being chosen to bear demonic off spring.  Beyond the Door, however, confuses the issue somewhat by having its heroine having previously, before her marriage, involved in witchcraft and Satanism by her former partner.  What it takes from The Exorcist is the juxtaposition of science and the spiritual, arguing that the former is incapable of dealing with the latter.  Interestingly, though, it has no equivalent to either of the priest characters from the 1973 film, the closest being the husband's doctor friend -whose scientific approach, of course, fails - and the mysterious Dimitri, a Satanist who, it seems, is having his faith in the dark side tested.  Also imported from The Exorcist are a gallery of supernatural accompaniments to the devilish pregnancy, including the vomiting of blood and bile, head spinning, levitation and poltergeist activity.

But if, superficially, Beyond the Door seems to be a film about its heroine, Jessica, being chosen as the receptacle for the Antichrist, (perhaps as a punishment for turning her back on Satan in the prologue, and the subsequent impact of this upon her apparently perfect life with her record executive husband and their two young children, in reality, it is Dimitri who is the central character.  As the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that Dimitri, who is Jessica's former Satanist lover, is the one being tested by his master.  Having, early in the film, died in a car accident, (his car is seen flying off of a cliff, into the sea), he has been granted several additional years of life by Satan, in exchange for his soul.  Now, he is charged with seeing that Jessica's pregnancy goes to term, with the promise of immortality as a reward.  Consequently, without revealing his true identity, Dimitri manages to convince Jessica's husband that only he can help with freeing her from demonic possession and thereby infiltrates the family home.  Before that, the forces of evil have ensured Jessica's increased isolation not just through her violent rejection of her husband, but also through the removal of her children to a friend's house for safety after they are terrified by a bout of poltergeist activity in their bedroom.  

This leaves the stage set for a final confrontation, not between the devil and the forces of the Catholic church, as in The Exorcist, but instead between the devil and one of his own acolytes, who has been wavering in his devotion to the cause.  Dimitri, rather like Father Merrin in The Exorcist, finds himself taunted by the devil possessing Jessica, eventually being told that this whole demonic pregnancy has merely been for his own amusement, that Dimitri was never going to be given immortality, he had simply been a plaything for the devil and his time was now up.  Dimitri vanishes -we're given a replay of that car crash - his soul consigned to Hell, the child is still born and Jessica is freed from her demonic possession.  There follows a coda which seems to have confused some viewers of the film, with others simply dismissing it as a cheap attempt at a 'twist' ending.  In reality, it is key to the whole movie, set up in the opening narration and referenced several more times throughout the film.  In this coda, we see family life for Jessica apparently returned to normal, as she, her husband and the two children are seen enjoying a trip on the ferry across San Francisco Bay.  The little boy unwraps a parcel, inside is a toy car that looks like the one driven off the cliff by Dimitri earlier in the film.  Smiling, the boy throws the car overboard, so that it arcs toward the sea in a manner that recalls that followed by Dimitri's car as  it plunges toward the water.  He then turns toward the camera and his eyes seem to glow as he smiles.

Far from being cynically tacked on for shock value, or simply being an afterthought, this scene has been prefigured throughout the film.  Since we first saw the boy, he has been carrying around that gift wrapped parcel, (it is wrapped in black paper), he even has it in bed with him when he suffers a an unexplained bout of illness prior to the poltergeist activity that afflicts him and his sister.  In fact, he seems at the centre of this activity, even speaking to an invisible friend just beforehand.  Most significant, though, is that aforementioned pre-title sequence where, against a black screen, the devil himself, voiced by what sounds like an uncredited Edmond Purdom, lamenting how he is so rarely portrayed in physical form in modern media, despite being ever present in our lives.  He makes the point that, despite his presence, we wouldn't necessarily recognise him if we saw him - he could be that person sitting next to you in the theatre, right now.  Directly prefiguring the film we are about to see, he references the little girl's reassurance to her brother, that 'what you can't see, can't hurt you', pointing out how wrong she is - evil isn't recognised until it is too late.  Moreover, throughout the film the possessed Jessica asks various people 'Who are you?', (the film's original Italian title Chi Sei?).  All of which leads to that final sequence - the devil's final joke is that Jessica has already given birth to the Antichrist, in the form of the little boy, who has, all along, bee the one creating the supernatural occurrences.  Part of the game has been the devil's continuing challenging of the other protagonists to correctly identify who he really is.

All of which means that Beyond the Door builds toward what, in dramatic terms, is a somewhat underwhelming climax.  Evil isn't defeated through the noble self sacrifice of a priest struggling with a crisis of faith,gambling that his soul will be saved from purgatory because his God will recognise that his committing a mortal sin (suicide) is in service of saving another soul from possession and will therefore be merciful.   Instead, an acolyte of evil is condemned to Hell because his faith in evil wasn't sufficiently strong and motivated only by selfish interests, by a devil who is actually already triumphant.  The whole confrontation between Dimitri and the devil seems inconsequential and the revelation that everything has been some kind of diabolical joke anti-climactic.  Which, undoubtedly, is why, for many viewers, the coda with the boy felt cheap and flippant.  But even before this underwhelming climax, the film has been less than satisfactory, with its various story strands pulling in different directions, leaving audiences unsure as to whether it is a film about Jessica's demonic possession and the birth of the Antichrist, or Dimitri's pact with the devil.  The plot keeps taking characters off on detours in order to find out things which, although already known to the audience, are still treated as if they are major plot revelations.  The multiple plot strands prevent the film maintaining any real pace or building any suspense.  Some individual sequences are quite effective - the poltergeist attack and  Jessica's sleep levitation, for instance - but never seem fully integrated into the plot as a whole.

Perhaps the plethora of credited and uncredited writers who worked on the script, not to mention having two credited directors (although Ovidio G Assonitis - credited as 'O Hellman' - has always maintained that he was the sole director and that Roberto Piazzoli was only a co-writer and cinematographer), contributed to the film's lack of focus and meandering feel.  Nonetheless, the film does look good, with the nicely photographed and sunny San Francisco exteriors  contrasting effectively with the dark subject matter, while the Rome studio-shot interiors feel 'peak seventies' in their decor.  Some of the performances, too, aren't bad.  Juliet Mills does a decent job as Jessica while Richard Johnson (who, in the seventies and eighties became something of a regular in Italian exploitation films), brings a suitable air of seediness and desperation to the role of Dimitri, a man who knows that his clock is ticking down and that he faces damnation when it does.  Beyond the Door might not be anywhere near as good as any of its inspirations but, despite its many faults, is still worth seeing.  For many years, though, it seemed difficult to see in English, despite the fact that it was actually a considerable box office success on its release.  In recent years, though, it has enjoyed a revival, with DVD and Blu-Ray releases and, during the pandemic, a re-release to streaming services.  This version seems to be the slightly longer UK release version, which originally carried the title The Devil Within Her.  (Confusingly, this was used for the US release title of UK demonic baby movie I Don't Want to be Born (1976), a dire warning to women of the consequences of rejecting advances from dwarves).  If nothing else, Beyond the Door is a stylish (in seventies terms) addition to the ranks of Satanic cinema.

(The film spawned two fake sequels: Beyond the Door II (1977) was a US retitling of Mario Bava's Shock, while Beyond the Door III (1989) was shot, under the title The Train, in Serbia and was produced by Ovidio G Assonitis.  They are only thematically connected with the original, with both concerning possessions - by the dead in the first and the demonic possession of a train in the latter).