After reading the comments posted for this movie, I felt the need to add my opinion.I am a major Lovecraft fan, and have read all of his work I have been able to get my hands on. But the reason I recommend this movie to people has nothing to do with my love for Lovecraft.What really interested me about this movie was the way it made me feel. Most horror movies really go for a 1 second shock as they jump out to get you. Repeatedly through the movie obviously but a series of quick scares are the backbone of 99% of horror.Beyond the wall of sleep brought a creeping feeling of dread to me, with the exception of 5 min at the end, it never strayed into standard "BOO" horror lands in my opinion. It just got uglier and uglier making my soul feel dirty.I just felt it was an interesting approach to horror, although I don't know if it was the directors intention. I recommend this movie to anyone who considers themselves a fan of non-traditional horror stories.

I came to this film as a great admirer of Lovecraft's writing and knowing full well how perilous it is to adapt his work to film. With this in mind, I didn't have high expectations so I can't claim to be disappointed. Still it was laborious at times to watch, and probably not worth the time for most viewers.It has been noted in the other comments that this film is in fact a faithful, probably the most faithful, film adaptation of a Lovecraft story out there. While this is true, this amounts to being more of a weakness than a strength. I've heard somewhere the idea that a masterpiece is a work of art that is perfectly suited to it's medium. The short story fits this description; the film injects too many speculated details seemingly to bulk up the script to approach feature length. It's as though they used the rough notes for the story as the shooting script.What makes Lovecraft so great is his ability to use his medium to manipulate the imagination of the reader. The film is as far away from the story here as it is close to the story in terms of literal detail. The filmmakers' use of montage is cluttered and lacks the power and poetry of Lovecraft's prose. Their attempt to write Lovecraftian dialog gets lazy and anachronistic and sounds like clumsy fan-fiction. There is an attempt to attach a sense of kinky eroticism that doesn't sit well with the story and comes of as an ill-fitting attempt at sex appeal.Utimately this film is bound to severely disappoint a general audience. It's worth watching only as a curiosity for obsessive Lovecraft readers or die-hard horror fanatics.

I hate a DVD box that has a cool looking scary creature on it and then you rent it and the movie turns out to be a piece of crap.This was one of those movies.I hated this movie.It was one of the worst pieces of garbage I've ever watched.I'm not really sure what the movie was about.As near as I can tell it took place in the early 1900's in an insane asylum.A patient is brought in that has a weird deformity on his back and a young intern who is doing weird experiments on patients in the basement starts experimenting on the deformed patient and that leads to chaos and havoc and death at the asylum.And also there was something about evil things happening when the patient slept and maybe a demon was living in the hump on his back.I dunno.This movie was terrible.It had bad acting,really really bad acting.And horrible writing and all during the movie there were the same pictures of dark woods and bloody meat and little kids running around flashing on the screen over and over.I don't know what it meant nor do I care.Rarely have I seen a movie that was so completely worthless and plot less and pointless as this mess.I hate everyone who had anything to do with this movie.May not a single one of them ever work in the entertainment industry again.I gave this movie a 1 only because the rating system doesn't go any lower.

I found this on the $1 rack at the video store and said "ooh, Lovecraft." and thusly rented what I thought would be a fun movie to scare the crap out of myself with at 2am on a Friday Night.Well, it scared me all right, but not with the unspeakable horrors usually expected of something with the name H.P. Lovecraft on it, but with some pretty horrific acting, poor sound equalization and camera angles even my mom could pull off. I expected cheese...you can't watch a movie like that and not expect at least 40-50% cheese but sheesh, there's a limit! It might have been OK had it not been for some pretty unimaginative camera work (a low budget is no excuse for doing nothing more than pointing and shooting, unless the budget didn't include bendable wrists or tripods) and the acting was so distracting that I lost track of what the heck was going on.A couple of handsome guys in the movie didn't quite make up for the "What the *beep* just happened?" feeling when the end credits finally rolled around, leaving me with the thought that I could have bought some M&Ms with that $1 instead.