Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

Whether in the underground or the mainstream, I have viewed a plethora of horrible films during my life. I have dug far and wide, from nation-to-nation (cinematically not geographically, of course) hoping to find those few dark films worthy of recognition and notoriety. Despite all the mediocrity I have encountered on my cinematic journeys, the celluloid adventures have been worth it when I recall such horrific masterpieces as Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik, Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, Roger Watkins' Last House on Dead End Street, Andrey Iskanov's Visions of Suffering, and a variety of others. Recently, I took my chances with an odd and peculiar horror film Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, a film with such an odd title that it would make even the most initiated and jaded of horror hunters out there wonder in amusement.

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was directed by the unknown auteur George Barry, a man that seems to only understand art in his own lost vacuum world as his single horror accomplishment testifies to. The ambiguous ghostly voyeur of the Death Bed is the tragic decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley, who is trapped within his own painting. The last great Sage poet and American patriot Ezra Pound once stated, "Beardsley was a sick man who knew he had to make a name quickly if he wanted to make it, personal wish, not believing in what art is or ought to be.......He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself or his friends in private, He knew that beauty is so difficult. He said, beauty is difficult." Like Pound's statement about Beardsley, director George Barry also should hold the title of "heroic invalid," a filmmaker with a twisted vision whose idea of beauty can only be found in the most dark, damp, and deteriorating of mid-western basements. The world of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is a place that not many people would willingly go to, but those that desire to will be treated to a place of wonderful phantasmagorical bless. For those that cherish their deepest and darkest of strange dreams, the film visualizes a supreme deadly daydream, offering the viewer a glimpse of a deteriorated celluloid netherworld that will not be soon forgotten.


I can only imagine that director George Barry used a wide variety of mind altering drugs before, during, and after the production of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. In fact, I would not be surprised if Mr. Barry got the idea for this lovely nightmare of a film whilst wasting away on his own bed. Some of the most aesthetically powerful scenes in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats occur when the bed eats a much deserving docile victim. The beautiful bed does not really eat the person, but burns them alive in a beer-like yellowish liquid which vaporizes human flesh like acid. The bed also resonates a whitish foam that makes one wonder whether or not the bed is sexually aroused by the humans it consumes. Drug connoisseur or not, I am sure George Barry felt a bed that eats people would make for a distinctly interesting film in comparison to a bed that people die on merely by overdosing on. Despite the many killings that have occurred before the sad quaint eyes of forever young Aubrey Beardsley, he seems to have gotten rather bored with bedside killings.


If you're looking for a vintage and hypnotic piece of original Sinema, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is the film to see. I am pretty sure Aubrey Beardsley would not have minded having his ghost make an appearance in this fantastic acid horror experiment, for this is a film merely following in his hopelessly decadent footsteps. Just as I wonder where artistically Beardsley would have ended up had he not succumbed to tuberculosis at an early age, I also wonder where George Barry would have went cinematically had he continued directing films after Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. Maybe Barry only had one film in him, but this single horror film and one-time director deserve exclusive recognition, for Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is one of those rare horror films that manages to go beyond the typical sensory power of the medium, radiating Sinema gold. Swim inside the Death Bed because surreal nightmares like these never get old.

-Ty E