Ed Steck




The House by the Cemetery /
Beyond the Door









Duality of the afterimage renders the visual

always “beyond the door” or outside of the

frame, outside of the frame, outside of the

frame shifts in perception from The Beyond

to the present—a doorway to extra-banality

of supernatural, something cosmic to atone

for, like the sudden materialization of death

stalking the corners of a long liminal corridor

tucked away in those shadiest failed attempts to

recall submerged faces from demographic data—

where something is alive in the basement.
Beyond the Door. Directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis (as O. Hellman), and Roberto Piazzoli (as R. Barrett) A Erre Cinematografica, and Montoro Productions Ltd., 1974.






In the alchemy of uncoordinated night, my face

wrinkles at its openings—nose hair, nostrils, ear

canal, eyeballs: each orifice a chance of entering

my body by burrowing into the liminal chasms

of the system inside, bludgeoned juicy cherry red

constant birth of opposing sentences—the eye

is a door beyond the frame, it copies as it records

to rehash what is real to the other side. Lost in

atmospherics of the copy, puke practical effects

bridge replica trauma to here, to imaginal exposure:

where something is alive in the basement.
The House by the Cemetery. Directed by Lucio Fulci, Fulvia Film and Medusa Distribuzione, 1981.





A lack of coherence in atmosphere concretizes

total aesthetic awareness of a world hodgepodge

obfuscated by regionalism trapped in cosmic horror.

Stripped away of the home, the family, the unit:

the drift of the liminal overtakes accepted knowns

until the unseen slips into the majority, when the

floating sheet appears on rollcall, when the burial

site is in the hallway, when the new home is a door

to interdimensional unclassifiable collapsed zones

beyond distinguishable token motifs of recognizable

worlds where knowns are defined: something else.



Fulci Lives: no name for the conceivable placement,

instead advanced knowledge of decaying obscurity

as withdrawn original prints vinegar and peel, bleed,

bubble and ooze goo upon the printed remnants of

Fulci’s world visualized/the crudeness of Fulci opens

the doors of inconceivable horror into our world—its

materialization found in molasses, plastic tubes, prop

knives, budget blood; signs pointing to how thin our

world is, that store-bought ingredients form practical

magic scraping flesh from muscle until skinless shapes

are defined knowns. Everything else is something else.








Ed Steck, a writer in Pittsburgh, is author of The Garden, An Interface for a Fractal Landscape, David Horvitz: Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film, and others.