Under the Influence of the Vibrations: From Beyond (Stuart Gordon, 1986)

Infanticidal theology comic Be Not Afraid makes its triumphant return to comic stores January 28, 2026. You can get the full preview over here, via Boom!

DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, my third book of non-fiction, is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon and your local bookstore via Bookshop.org. Not many books have a smell, let alone a good one, but this one does, courtesy of our fine friends at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.

But all of this is as nothing, compared to this, our latest NEW PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT: Dead Teenagers, a slasher about nostalgia and the never-ending horror of high school, will be out in March of 2026 with art by Caitlin Yarsky. Come read the announcement here, and await the preview, which is soon to come.

From Beyond is far too fun to weigh down with a lot of analysis. It’s a Lovecraftian body horror picture from the team of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, who brought you the cult favorite Re-Animator and the legendarily disgusting Society. Two-thirds of Re-Animator’s core cast — Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs — return here, playing, respectively, an uptight psychiatrist who is turned into a leather-clad sex maniac by space monsters and a sexually ambivalent penis man who eats brains. The special effects are practical, and impressive — there’s a whole lot of rubber, covered with a whole lot of lube, and it’s all delightfully, suggestively unpleasant. 

If that sounds like a good time, it is. So I am not negging From Beyond when I state the following: It is also a movie about how, if women learn to masturbate, they will become unhinged sexual predators and destroy the world. 

Now: Robin Wood (here comes the analysis) argued that horror movies are often accidentally subversive. The monster typically represents sexual “perversion,” or a threat to the nuclear family, and the hero survives by eliminating that threat. However, in order to eradicate queerness, or the female orgasm, or premarital sex, or what-have-you, you first have to depict it. Giving sexual deviancy a charismatic depiction necessarily allows some people to side with it, and (even more importantly) it means that the marginalized sexualities are visible, acknowledged and depicted on screen, whereas the dominant culture normally tries to hide them. 

This is some important context to consider, when you are viewing a movie in which Barbara Crampton nearly annihilates the fabric of reality because she can’t stop using her vibrator. (“Resonator!” Sorry. It’s “the Resonator,” and it is very dangerous.) It is a movie that is devoutly for kinky people (doms and subs; sexually ambivalent penis men; women who like orgasms) while pretending to be scandalized by them. It's in on the joke, which is that for some people, being scandalous is the point.