Critical response
Upon the film's 1983 release in the United States as 7 Doors of Death, critic Kevin Thomas of the LA Times deemed the film visually "elegant" but noted: "as a thriller of the occult it's overly familiar, just another rotting-flesh ghoul parade". Bill Kelley of the Sun-Sentinel similarly praised the film's visual elements, including the sepia prologue, but added: "The problem is, whenever someone in the film is trying to act, the camera is recording something that's really not worth seeing", ultimately classing it as a "Z-grade horror movie".
The Akron Beacon Journal's Bill O'Connor criticized the plot for a lack of coherence, writing: "People get killed all over the hotel. Then, after they're killed, they get ugly. ... We never know why they get killed or why they get ugly, which leads me to suspect that maybe this is an art film. At the end of the movie, the dead walk. ... Then the people leave the movie theater. They look just like the dead people who walked out of the morgue. Maybe this is not an art movie. Maybe this is a documentary."
Tim Pulleine (The Monthly Film Bulletin) stated that the film allows for "two or three visually striking passages-and granting that, from Bava onwards, narrative concision has not been the strong suit for Italian horror movies—the film is still completely undone by its wildly disorganized plot". The review also critiqued the dub, noting its "sheer ineptitude".
Upon its 1998 re-release, critic Roger Ebert deemed it a film "filled with bad dialogue" and criticized it for having an incoherent plot. In 2000, he included the film in a book of his "most-hated" movies.
On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, The Beyond holds a 75% approval rating based on 24 critic reviews.
AllMovie called the film a "surreal and bloody horror epic" and labeled it "Italian horror at its nightmarish extreme."
DVD Talk said, "The likeable main characters, the sense of place (and anti-place) make it work for me -- and I thought I had plenty of sales resistance to modern guts 'n' gore horror."
Time Out London, alternatively, called it "a shamelessly artless horror movie whose senseless story—a girl inherits a spooky, seedy hotel which just happens to have one of the seven doors of Hell in its cellar—is merely an excuse for a poorly connected series of sadistic tableaux of torture and gore."
Critic John Kenneth Muir wrote in Horror Films of 1980s: "Fulci's films may be dread-filled excursions into surrealism and dream imagery, but in the real world, they don't hang together, and The Beyond is Exhibit A."
Bill Gibron of PopMatters, wrote in 2007:
The Beyond is an incoherent, chaotic combination of Italian terror and monster movie grave robbing that is almost saved by its bleak, atmospheric ending. It is a wretched gore fest sprinkled with wonderfully evocative touches. It has more potential than dozens of past and present Hollywood horror films, yet finds ways to squander and squelch each and every golden gruesome opportunity. It's a movie that gets better with multiple viewings, familiarity lessening the startling goofiness of some of the dialogue and dubbing. It is a film that is far more effective in recollection than it is as an actual viewing experience. It would probably work best as a silent movie, stripped of the illogical scripting, stupendously redundant Goblin-in-training soundtrack drones, and obtuse aural cues.
In the years since its release, The Beyond has acquired a cult following. Time Out London conducted a poll with several authors, directors, actors and critics who have worked within the horror genre to vote for their top horror films. As of 1 October 2019, The Beyond placed at number 64 on Time Out London's top 100 list.
Film critic Steven Jay Schneider ranked the film number 71 in his book 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die (2009).
