The World Beyond was a pilot for an occult detective television series in the vein of The Night Stalker (TV, 1972) and The Norliss Tapes (TV, 1973). As explained in the pre-credit sequence, sports writer Paul Taylor (Granville Van Dusen) died while undergoing a surgical procedure but was retrieved from the brink of death. His brush with the "world beyond" allowed him to communicate with the dead--or, more correctly, for the dead to communicate with him. Had the pilot gone to series, each week would have seen Taylor dispatched by a spirit guide to protect innocents confronted by supernatural peril. In this, the second of two like-named pilots (the first being The World of Darkness) Taylor found himself on a remote Canadian island whose inhabitants were being menaced and killed by a golem made of mud and sticks. Because of the monster's unique nature, this program was sometimes aired under the alternate broadcast title, The Mud Monster.
Subtitled simply "Episode: Monster", The World Beyond was first aired in America on January 11, 1978 on the CBS Network. It was directed by Noel Black, who had made a name for himself by directing the feature film Pretty Poison (1968). The teleplay was by Art Wallace, who also wrote The World of Darkness (TV, 1977), as well as episodes for various other fantastic television series such as Dark Shadows, Space: 1999, Planet of the Apes, and Star Trek. One of Wallace's Star Trek episodes, "Assignment: Earth", was also a pilot for an unmade television series.
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