Voices from Beyond

Voices from Beyond (Voci dal profondo) is a 1994 Italian horror film by director Lucio Fulci. The original shooting title of the film was Urla dal profondo. The story centers around the murder of a wealthy man despised by most of his relatives, with his spirit returning from the afterlife to guide his daughter in uncovering the identity of his killer.

The film is not to be confused with another film by Fulci, The Beyond.

Plot
Wealthy, middle-aged financier Giorgio Mainardi lies dying in a hospital bed surrounded by his family. The last thing he says is, "why?" The doctor's diagnosis of Giorgio's death is an internal hemorrhage, possibly from a stomach or intestinal ulcer. The following day, Giorgio's daughter Rosie arrives at the Mainardi estate having taken a leave of absence from her college studies to attend the funeral and the reading of the will. Rosie finds her family squabbling over the estate. Giorgio's stepmother Hilda, refuses permission for an autopsy and taunts her elderly husband, Giorgio's father Paolo, who is near death himself from a recent stroke and cannot move or speak. Meanwhile, Hilda's son Mario is revealed to be having an affair with Giorgio's third wife, Lucy. Lucy is a few years older than Rosie and is the only one of the Mainardi family who shows any compassion for her presence.

Giorgio's spirit remains conscious after death, and from his buried coffin, he tries to communicate with Rosie. He succeeds by entering her dreams and implores her to discover who in the family was responsible for his death. However, he tells her to hurry, for as his corpse rots away in the coffin, so does his power to communicate with his daughter. At the funeral, each of the mourners thinks back to their relationship with the dead man. Lucy remembers his anger at her frigidity; Mario recalls how Giorgio humiliated and insulted him after he asked for financial help in obtaining a business position; Hilda fumes over the memory of Giorgio ordering the bank not to let her cash the checks from his father's account; and Rita, Giorgio's mistress, remembers being spurned when Giorgio broke off their secret affair and decided to go back to his wife.

At the reading of the will, bad feelings erupt when it is found that Giorgio has left his entire estate to Rosie. Lucy, however, is allowed to remain at the house. But even she is angry because no provision has been made to their child, David, a little boy whom Giorgio believes was not his.

Despite Hilda's objections, an autopsy on Giorgio goes ahead. The pathologist takes a sample of his intestines and discovers lacerations to the interior wall. He puts the piece in a jar of formaldehyde for later inspection. Rosie and her college boyfriend Gianni later discover that the jar has been "accidentally" smashed. However, Gianni, a medical student with access to the pathology lab, found splinters of glass in the intestines before the accident occurred later that night. He suggests that they go to the police with their suspicions. Still, Rosie, who is now frequently in touch with Giorgio's spirit, insists they investigate themselves rather than attract a public scandal.

Lucy tells Rosie that Giorgio had returned from a visit to his mistress the night of his collapse. Rosie suspects that Rita may have put the mini-glass shards in his food. Lucy talks to the Maitre'd at a restaurant where Rita and Giorgio visited for their secret dates. But the Maitre'd says that the couple had pitched into an argument when they arrived over Giorgio wanting to end their clandestine affair. They left the restaurant without even drinking a glass of wine. With Rita written off as a suspect, Rosie returns to the house but accidentally discovers that her soda drinks have been poisoned when a hypodermic hole is found at the top of one of her soda cans. Rosie talks to Dorie, the housekeeper and David's nanny, who says that only she, David, and Lucy were in the house on the night of Giorgio's death. Rosie sees David playing with a mortar and pestle. She confronts Lucy, who seems distressed rather than panicked by her stepdaughter's suspicions.

After another dream, Rosie wakes up with the answer to the puzzle. The glass shards had been concealed in the ice-cubes Giorgio Mainardi took with his late-night drinks. Rosie confronts Lucy and reveals that Hilda Mainardi and her son Mario must have hatched the plot. Hilda admits the plot to kill Giorgio for his money and adds that Lucy knew about the scheme but did nothing to stop them. In case of discovery, David had been encouraged to play with the mortar and pestle, grinding up a light bulb into tiny splinters and adding them to the water in the ice-cube tray as a "game." Hilda hoped to explain the murder away as an accident that way. Rosie tells Hilda that she will leave the conspirators to fester in the Mainardi house together instead of informing the police. As she prepares to return to college, Rosie tells Hilda that Giorgio's spirit will be everywhere, haunting them to the grave. At Giorgio's grave, Rosie tells him how he died, and the two laugh.

Cast

 * Duilio Del Prete: Giorgio Mainardi
 * Karina Huff: Rosie Mainardi
 * Pascal Persiano: Mario Mainardi
 * Lorenzo Flaherty: Gianni/ Tommy
 * Bettina Giovannini: Lucy Mainardi
 * Frances Nacman: Hilda Mainardi
 * Lucio Fulci: Pathologist (cameo)
 * Paolo Paoloni: Grandpa Mainardi
 * Sacha Maria Darwin: Dorie the maid
 * Antonella Tinazzo: Rita
 * Tomasso Felleghy: restaurant manager

Production
The plot for Voices from Beyond was written by Lucio Fulci and Daniele Stroppa, based on a short story Fulci had published in the Gazzetta di Firenze which was later collected in a 1992 anthology of Fulci's short stories titled Le lune nere. Fulci wrote the short story initially with the intention of developing it into a screenplay later. Fulci asked screenwriter Piero Regnoli to work on the screenplay with him.

The film was made in early 1991. When filming, the crew had access to a villa once owned by Luchino Visconti.

The film's end credits added "This film is dedicated to my few real friends, in particular to Clive Barker and Claudio Carabba". Biographer Troy Howarth wrote "Barker's nightmarish visions of hellish horror definitely owe a bit to Fulci's celebrated horror films of the 1980s, of course, while Carabba was one of the few critics in Italy who took Fulci and his work seriously."

Release
Voci dal profondo was released theatrically in Italy on March 1, 1994 at a running time of 89 minutes.

It was later released on home video in the United States and the United Kingdom as Voices from Beyond with a running time of 85 minutes.

Reception
Fulci spoke about the film stating he did "love it very much. It's a wonderful movie with the wrong cast" specifically describing Karina Huff as "unpleasant, Del Prete is completely out of the role, the mother-in-law is too wicked and you understand immediately that she is the killer."