“It ate him! Bit off his head like a gingerbread man!”

In Stuart Gordon’s second film, he repeats the tried and true formula that worked so well on Re-Animator—a loosely adapted H.P. Lovecraft story, an unhinged Jeffrey Combs as the protégé of a maniacal scientist who messes with the arcane, a sexed up Barbara Crampton completely committed to an outrageous role, and grisly practical effects to bring his malevolent beings to life. As with Re-Animator, Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli take gleeful liberty in “adapting” Lovecraft’s little vignette, which is nearly plotless, more suggestive of a story than an actual story itself. Stemming from the author’s passing fascination with how much empty space exists between subatomic particles, he posits alternate planes of reality that are accessible through stimulation of the pineal gland. Lovecraft’s ornate prose makes for a pleasantly creepy few minutes, but Gordon wisely pivots to a slimier, sillier tone for his film, giving himself plenty of room for jubilant shenanigans like skimpily dressing Crampton up with studded black leather and having Combs claw his way out from the inside of his grossly mutated mentor. A faithful adaptation this is not, but it’s all sorts of schlocky fun.

Obsessed with unlocking the mystical third eye, Crawford Tillinghast (Combs) and the brilliant Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) build the Resonator, a device designed to stimulate the pineal gland and open the brain to new realms of experience. Lit by the dark pink glow of the machine, Tillinghast flips the switch. To his dismay, he has not achieved enlightenment or seen the face of God; rather, he sees dozens of eldritch horrors swimming in the interdimensional ether—nameless, faceless creatures swimming through the air with nonsensical anatomies. Before all of this can register, Tillinghast realizes that the Resonator’s vibrations also allow these ghastly creatures to see him, and one leech-like monster quickly suctions itself onto his cheek. Terrified but excited, Tillinghast ushers Pretorius into the attic, where his lust for power and knowledge overrides his survival instinct and leads to his death. Without any explanation for his decapitation besides the truth, the gibbering Tillinghast is institutionalized.

This is where the Lovecraft story ends, but it only takes up a few minutes of the movie. From here, Tillinghast is taken into the custody of Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Crampton), a psychologist who is willing to entertain his wild tale in order to closely observe his pineal gland for schizophrenia research. With the assistance of detective Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree), McMichaels takes Tillinghast back into the attic, where she recreates the initial experiment sans decapitation. After discovering Dr. Pretorius’ sex dungeon and collection of homemade BDSM pornos, they begin to notice strange sexual urges that they chalk up as side effects of exposure to the Resonator. Pretorius reappears, having taken control of the malicious entity that initially ate his brain, and tells the dimensionally bound humans of a realm of pure pleasure. Crawford’s pineal gland peeks out from his forehead like a little membranous worm with a life of its own, Pretorius grows larger and grosser and slimier, and Dr. McMichaels turns into a sex-crazed dominatrix who only avoids shock therapy when a deranged Crawford slaughters the overseeing psychiatrist. It nearly veers out of control in its latter half but it’s pretty short and manages to stay on the rails.

From Beyond is fascinating for the same reason that it fails as a Lovecraft adaptation and that it isn’t as revered as Re-Animator—in its exploitation, it leans so far into provocatively overlapping violent sexuality and body horror that the subject cannot be ignored. It’s not that sex and gore are both prominent (obviously they are), but that we’re steered into the section of the Venn diagram where they both exist together. What is one to make of the sexy pyschiatrist-cum-dominatrix straddling the unconscious, deformed man with a phallus protruding from his forehead? What about the vaginas-with-mouths that attack our protagonists or the slimy penis-with-a-face that Pretorius eventually mutates into? Mucking around in the male psyche and allowing free reign to the most twisted fantasies is not new, but the innovation (if we want to call it that) of From Beyond is in how aggressively it pursues perversion. It’s not merely exaggerating gross-outs from previous eras—in fact, the iconic scene from Re-Animator is probably grosser than anything here—but actively force feeding the audience a perverse amalgamation of kink and gore.

If all that isn’t your thing, though, From Beyond can be admired simply for its committed performances, glossy style, and insanely juicy special effects. There’s plenty of campy goodness to go around, spread more or less equally between Crampton, Sorel, and Combs (Foree’s character doesn’t call for it), and no one phones it in. So take your pick—weird psychoanalysis of sexuality and body horror, or simpler vulgar pleasures like the cannibalistic consumption of brains, a scream queen clad in BDSM gear, or a slimy monster.