Image by gail des jardin via Flickr

Love makes people do crazy things, but even crazy has a line that should not be crossed. “Beyond the Darkness” crosses that line quickly and often. Made in 1979 in Italy, Joe D’Amato, the director of the film, successfully took the desire to be with someone to a point of insanity that touches upon cannibalism and necrophilia.
The movie follows the main character Francesco, played by Kieran Canter, who cannot get over the fact that his fiancée died in a hospital bed right after making out with him. There’s a short moment where he actually made out with a dead woman, but the actions that happen afterwards make this seem innocent. Francesco, whose life’s calling was to become a taxidermist, decides to upgrade from stuffing dead animals to stuffing his dead fiancée. In order to stuff his dead fiancée, Francesco pays a visit to her grave after the funeral and digs her up. The rest of the movie revolves around Francesco torturing and killing random women, avoiding the suspicions of the police, and keeping a dead corpse of his fiancée in bed next to him. He does all of this to keep her around as long as he lives. His inability to let go of a dead woman is the premise of this entire movie.
“Beyond the Darkness” does have some moments that make you think. Francesco’s housekeeper Iris, played by Franca Stoppi, obsesses over Francesco throughout the movie, going as far as to help him dispose of the bodies (and by dispose, I mean either burning them or chopping up and placing the bodies in acid) and gives him physical attention (and by that I mean breast feeding him and massaging his procreation tool). The characters in “Beyond the Darkness” are demented enough to make anyone question what they are viewing. The psychotic journey that Francesco undergoes throughout the movie also gives off a sense of uneasiness because there are no clear moments that can be classified as the moment where Francesco snaps. After watching the entire movie, I believe that he was always psychotic, and that his fiancée was the only thing keeping him from going on a murderous rampage. Francesco’s habitual method of biting off and eating the flesh of his victims makes Mike Tyson’s infamous ear biting incident seem like nothing.
Every brutal and unnecessary murder that occurred in the movie was over the fact that an innocent women Francesco brought back to his villa for sex happened to notice a corpse in the bed next to them. For some reason, seeing a dead corpse made all of his victims scream in terror and randomly attack Francesco in an attempt to preserve their own lives. This movie reeks with a strange aura that makes me not even believe anything that I’m watching. This movie barely has any elements that can be realistic, aside from the fact that a twenty-two year old cannot get over his fiancée’s death. Even that scene is destroyed by the fact that he suckles on his housekeeper’s nipple the same day he kisses his fiancée for the last time. Any chance of possibly seeing this actually happening in real life is thrown out the window after the opening scenes of the movie.
“Beyond the Darkness” is extremely graphic, almost to a point of pointlessness. I doubt any viewer needs to see Francesco kill women brutally and get away with it better than O.J. Simpson did. If you’re the type of viewer that enjoys necrophilia, cannibalism, and graphic murders that would traumatize children, not only do I suggest this movie to you, but I also suggest that you speak to a peer counselor as soon as possible. This movie is not for people who cannot stand to see gore, violence, and bad movies.