Certainly, From Beyond has all the things that one expects of a Stuart Gordon film – monsters, slime, bare breasts, OTT splatter effects and tongue virtually super-glued into the cheek – but while there is smoke, the pyrotechnics fail to ignite a second time over. Unlike Re-Animator, From Beyond had great potential to be a film of atmosphere – and there are moments where it is, particularly at the beginning and in the eerie initial reappearance of Ted Sorel. Here Stuart Gordon succeeds somewhat in creating a genuinely Lovecraftian atmosphere of menaces lying beyond ordinary ken. (It should also be noted that these opening minutes in fact contain the whole of the original 1920 H.P. Lovecraft story – in fact, all the aspects of the short story are over before the bulk of the film begins). The rest of From Beyond degenerates into much running about the house, pink-suffused lighting and slime effects.

The effects were the major highlight of Re-Animator. Stuart Gordon and co aim for something more ambitious with From Beyond but this clearly seems to be beyond the resources of the film. Despite reigning in four different effects houses, what Stuart Gordon ends up with seem like a host of tatty rejects from The Thing (1982). Bar the emergence of one creature at the climax, a blubbery mass of rubber with Jeffrey Combs and Ted Sorel in the midst manifesting multiple limbs as they wrestle one another, the creatures tend to only look like people encased in rubber. Both the brief flying transformation and the third eye point-of-view optical effects look cheap.

Where From Beyond succeeds somewhat is in some of the more tongue-in-cheek elements. There are genre in-jokes like the doctor named Roberta Bloch, after horror author Robert Bloch best known for Psycho (1960), and a scientist called Dr Pretorious, named after Ernest Thesiger’s mad scientist in Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The one joy of the film is Barbara Crampton in bondage gear, discovering the pleasures of S&M – she gives the type of performance that one knows from the moment that she enters with ramrod efficiency and hair tightly bound up that both she and hair are going to be let out and with aces to spare. However, as a whole, From Beyond never achieves the hilarious blackness with which Stuart Gordon conducted Re-Animator.

A better version of From Beyond, which adheres much more closely to the H.P. Lovecraft story and plays it straight, is the 1999 short film made by Vancouver-based director Bob Fugger – see The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival – North (1999) for review.

Subsequently, Stuart Gordon went onto make Dolls (1987), the live-action Transformers film Robot Jox (1990), the vampire tv movie Daughter of Darkness (1990), the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), the future prison film Fortress (1993), Castle Freak (1995), Space Truckers (1996), the Ray Bradbury adaptation The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998), a further H.P. Lovecraft adaptation with Dagon (2001), the amazing non-genre David Mamet adaptation Edmond (2005) and Stuck (2007).

Other films based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft include:- The Haunted Palace (1963), Die, Monster, Die/Monster of Terror (1965), The Shuttered Room (1966) and The Dunwich Horror (1969). The big success in the modern era was Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, which popularised Lovecraft on film, which led to a host of B-budget Lovecraft adaptations, The Curse (1987), The Unnameable (1988), The Resurrected (1992), Necronomicon (1993), The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993), Lurking Fear (1994), Stuart Gordon’s Dagon (2001), and other works such as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (2003), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2006), Cool Air (2006), Chill (2007), Cthulu (2007), The Tomb (2007), Colour from the Dark (2008), The Dunwich Horror (2009), Pickman’s Muse (2010) and The Whisperer in Darkness (2011). Also of interest is Cast a Deadly Spell (tv movie, 1991), a tv movie set in an alternate world where magic works and where the central character is a detective named H.P. Lovecraft; Juan Piquer Simon’s cheap and loosely inspired Cthulu Mansion (1992); John Carpenter’s Lovecraft homage In the Mouth of Madness (1995); and the fanboy comedy The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulu (2009). Lovecraft’s key work of demonic lore The Necronomicon also makes appearances in films such as Equinox (1970), The Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992), and was also borrowed as an alternate retitling for Jesus Franco’s surreal and otherwise unrelated Succubus/Necronomicon (1969) about a BDSM dancer.