OK, But Why Does He Sleep In There? (The Tillenghast Question, Part 2)

Time flies when you’re ticking down the doomsday clock, and I’ve accidentally let an item slide from our packed agenda: Is Dr. Crawford Tillenghast a Sex Pet? This feels like an obvious caveat, but there are massive spoilers for FROM BEYOND below. If you haven't seen it, it's on Tubi.

Stuart Gordon is a filmmaker whose gross-out sensibilities and loose grasp of formalized storytelling create goopy demonic pornography. His sheer disdain for narrative logic, as well as his own source material, is what makes his Lovecraft adaptations my favorites. I do not care about the sanctity of the Lovecraftian canon, as he was a ponderous racist who was terrified of fish. Unfortunately for me, he did come up with a mythos I enjoy, which is why I love a director who rips off the good shit and ditches the rest. 

In the 80s, Gordon attempted to create an ad hoc horror studio playhouse for his riffed Lovecraft universe. The full scope of this plan never came to fruition, but there are some gems regardless. FROM BEYOND is my favorite Gordonian Lovecraft interpretation, aside from my beloved BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR. (We do not talk about CASTLE FREAK.) 

THE SPOILERS START BELOW THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING

FROM BEYOND is an extraordinarily loose riff on the tale of The Resonator. The Resonator is an electromagnetic vibrating device that allows people in our dimension to access the dimension where monsters dwell. In Gordon's version of the story, the chthonic dimension contains flesh-melting bondage sex demons that possess your body with horniness and absorb you into an endless orgy of phalli and ooze.

If you think Cronenberg movies are accidentally queer, wait till you see Ken Foree under the influence of intergalactic sex pollen, jello-wrestling a giant goopworm in tiny orange undies. I don’t know why straight people watch these movies. But who knows why straight people do anything?

In FROM BEYOND, Jeffrey Combs returns to his wheelhouse of tormented academics by playing Dr. Crawford Tillenghast, a lab assistant to the perverse and megalomaniacal Dr. Pretorious. The first time we meet Pretorious he is summoned from a dark room with a distinctive red interior, flushed and sweating and furious to be disturbed. Tillenghast has made a breakthrough with The Resonator that has summoned something from beyond, a discovery that will cost the mortal Pretorious his head.

The undead Pretorious that enters the film later is different in two key ways: his mind has merged with the sex-hungry flesh demons, and his sexual menace is newly directed toward his groveling male assistant. As we already know, queer coding is a common way to denote villains in horror movies thanks to the Hays Code. The fleshmonger Pretorious is an infernal example of the depraved bisexual trope, equal parts flirting and threatening, dripping with lube and leering at the masses of humanity he wishes to devour.

There’s nothing subtle about Pretorious’s queerness, or how it reverberates through his relationship with Tillenghast. In the climax of the film, Tillenghast and Pretorious have an emotional confrontation where Pretorious threatens to force himself on Tillenghast’s female love interest. A weeping Tillenghast furiously calls Pretorious a eunuch and says he doesn’t know “how to make love,” only for a raging Pretorious to chase him down the stairs and attack him instead, snarling “maybe you could teach me (?!?!?!?!).”

Aside from the fact that both of the actors in this scene are covered with globs of rubbery prosthetic dick skin, it feels more Tennessee Williams than HP Lovecraft.

What we see of the previous bond between the living Pretorious and Tillenghast also feels violating and weird. Eventually, the red room that Pretorious occupied at the start of the film is revealed to be an at-home S&M dungeon with a variety of boundary-pushing equipment. Despite the fact that Tillenghast and Pretorious are ostensibly co-workers, Tillenghast is well-acquainted with the dungeon’s function. When asked about the room, Tillenghast briefly dissociates, murmuring about how his boss’s dates all ended with "pretty girls" screaming in the sex dungeon. “And I just laid there, and listened.”

When I rewatched FROM BEYOND recently, that line struck me. Why would Tillenghast lay around his office and listen to his boss having rough sex, especially considering how uncomfortable it made him feel? Perhaps working on The Resonator was getting Pretorious so riled up he had to start spanking people on the clock, or Tillenghast sometimes crashed at work. I thought the question was answered a couple of scenes later when we cut to Tillenghast asleep in a bed I presumed to be his, revealing that he had a bedroom on site.

Imagine a nerdy twink in a tight Miskatonic University t-shirt, dozing under a leopard bedspread and a poster of a campy 80s-style leather pin-up girl. In other words, he looks like the exact kind of pervy esoterica-worshipping queer that buys HD remasters of heinous 70s fisting porn. I can say that, because I recognize my own. It’s not my fault the dude is flagging by using Divine’s dress as a duvet cover.

Until the camera pans out and I realize; that isn’t Tillenghast’s bedroom. That dull bargain red paint glowing on his walls vibrates with what I should have realized from the start—

“Yeah, so he is SLEEPING in the sex dungeon!” It’s the next morning, and my partner has made the well-intentioned mistake of asking what is on my mind. “He is disgusted and terrified by sadomasochistic sex and his death-bringing dom boss, but he also sleeps in there? It makes no sense.”

“Oh.” My partner takes a sip of their tea. “Well, he’s a sex pet, so he sleeps in the dungeon. Right?”

And from that moment on, I knew I would have no peace until I found my answer.

(to be continued!)