I sat up at 2 a.m., the VHS whirring, while tarantulas crawled across a grainy screen and my neighbor knocked on the wall. The living room felt smaller after that scene; the air tasted like stale popcorn and something older. That’s when I learned that some films don’t want rescuing.
I’m not here to play cult purist, but I am here to argue a point you already suspected: The world does not need a reboot of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. You value your time, and I value cinematic lineage. I want you to understand why repackaging this particular kind of terror risks erasing the very strangeness that made it survive.
At midnight screenings the audience held its breath. The original film is a specific animal.
Fulci’s The Beyond arrives like a memory that keeps misplacing its edges: muddy New Orleans humidity, surreal edits, and gore that reads like an act of obstinate devotion to shock. Its textures — the music, the dubbing, the way a doorway can mean annihilation — are not production choices so much as a dialect. You can study that dialect on Criterion or in Severin Films’ restorations, but you cannot simply translate it without losing consonants and vowels.
Is there going to be a remake of The Beyond?
Yes and no. Severin Films and Hangtime International Pictures have announced plans to secure remake rights and to “reimagine” the title for theatrical, streaming, and physical media release. Fred Murray of Hangtime framed the opportunity as a way to push Fulci’s cultural significance forward, and Severin’s David Gregory leaned on the company’s two-decade history of restorations as a reason to trust them with the work.
At film festivals you can feel which projects have oxygen and which are resuscitated. Remakes are often a market decision.
I’ve watched distributors and labels treat catalog titles like harvestable crops: there’s history, there’s an audience, and there’s a return on investment. Severin knows physical media — Blu-ray restorations, specialty packaging, niche streaming windows — and Hangtime is chasing theatrical and streaming revenue. That business logic explains the announcement, but it doesn’t justify the artistic choice.
Who is behind the new Beyond remake?
Severin Films, co-founded and led by David Gregory, partnered with Hangtime International Pictures, co-CEO Fred Murray cited the Gates of Hell universe and sequel potential. There’s no director attached yet. The hope, for fans and collectors, is that the team will lean on platforms and partners who treat cult films like archival artifacts — think Criterion-level curation or Shudder-style programming — rather than a mainstream studio rewrite designed for broad algorithms and trending playlists.
At home you can replay the spider scene and feel an exact, private dread. The emotional logic of the original is fragile.
I remember watching Catriona MacColl navigate that collapsing hotel and realizing the movie’s power comes from its willingness to be ugly, mysterious, and occasionally incoherent. A remake that polishes every corner risks smoothing away the very shocks that lodge in your memory. The Beyond thrives on imprecision; tightening it up could be like cleaning an antique coin until you’ve erased the mint mark.
The film’s grotesqueries — the book of evil, the ghouls, the tarantula sequence — are signifiers of a specific fear: the sense that the world can tilt and reveal a different set of physical laws. Those moments are not cheap scares; they are permutations of mood and form. A contemporary director might apply lenses, drones, or hyperreal makeup, but those tools are not substitutes for the peculiar alchemy Fulci achieved with limited resources and maximal imagination.
Can a remake match Fulci’s original?
A remake could mimic beats, replicate set pieces, and hire a retro synth composer, but matching the original’s atmosphere requires more than craft. It requires permission: permission to let logic slip, to accept tonal ruptures, to use sound and editing as emotional saboteurs. If the new team treats The Beyond like a franchise IP instead of a haunted artifact, the result will feel clinically modern and spiritually empty.
I don’t pretend every remake is malpractice. Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria proved that a director can reinterpret a classic and still offer provocative ideas, even if many of us preferred Argento’s 1977 version. That experiment shows two things: a remake can be artistically interesting, and it can also highlight how certain originals are tethered to moments that can’t be recaptured without losing something essential.
If you want fewer bad remakes and more meaningful reappraisals, the simplest act is to watch the source material on credible restorations — buy the Severin or Criterion releases, stream on specialty platforms, and participate in physical-media fandom that funds restorations rather than franchise extraction. These channels are the oxygen that keeps odd cinema alive; they are not as glamorous as box office numbers, but they matter.
I will watch the casting announcements and press releases with an open, wary eye. If the remake respects the weirdness, subverts expectations, and treats Fulci’s film as an object of study rather than a slug of IP, I’ll be curious. If it becomes another glossy rebranding aimed at clicks and algorithms, I’ll buy the next restored Blu-ray instead and sit in the dark with the original.
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The Beyond is like a carnival mirror — it distorts and doubles your fears; and a remake could be like a burned Polaroid: you can try to re-develop the image, but the scorch marks remain. Are you ready to trade those scorch marks for a cleaner, forgettable image?