The cover of Philippe Mora’s The Beast Within (1982), now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, looks like a werewolf movie. Mora would later direct werewolf movies, but this horror movie presents a different type of creature, one that represents a very long arm of justice or corruption in the American South.
The Beast Within opens with large letters proclaiming “Mississippi 1964”, and a billboard says we’re in Niobe, “The Heart of Dixie”. To viewers with a sense of history, or merely living memory, the time and place conjures one of the most explosive events of America’s postwar era. 1964 was the Freedom Rider summer, during which civil rights workers attempted to register African-Americans to vote. Three young workers were murdered by Ku Kux Klan members in Neshoba County, not the invented Niobe. A murder conviction was secured in 2005, just over 40 years later.
The Beast Within has nothing to do with these events, at least on the surface. The theme of race is signified only by the presence of one African-American deputy in an otherwise white cast. Instead, this teen-oriented horror move turns on a ghastly murder that’s been hidden by a conspiracy of the town’s most prominent members, who all belong to the same family. In other words, they belong to the same clan.
In 1964, newlyweds Eli and Caroline MacCleary (Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch) have car trouble while driving through Niobe. Eli walks back for a tow truck, and he tells Caroline to keep herself locked in the car. “Okay,” she says, five seconds before wandering in the woods in typical horror movie numbskullery. In a very unpleasant scene, she’s attacked by something unclear. Eli finds her naked and unconscious, and the truck rushes toward town with the couple as viewers hear two shotgun blasts from the forest.
It’s 17 years later, and Eli and Caroline are wringing their hands as son Mike (Paul Clemens) suffers a strange auto-immune disorder that leaves his body rejecting food. He also has freaky nightmares or hallucinations or displaced memories of a dilapidated shack in a scene inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. The family returns to Niobe in a desperate attempt to learn about Caroline’s unknown rapist, Mike’s true father.
As soon as Mike arrives, the seemingly weak and bedridden teen starts killing and cannibalizing the town’s prominent citizens. They’re all related to Judge Curwin (Don Gordon), who’s been concealing the legacy of a murdered brother whose crime will eventually be disclosed.
The judge’s doomed relations include newspaper editor Edwin Curwin (Logan Ramsey), angry peckerwood Horace Platt (John Dennis Johnston), and surly undertaker Dexter Ward (Luke Askew), named for an H.P. Lovecraft character. Also on hand are R.G. Armstrong as the local doc and L.Q. Jones as the sheriff. If it occurs to you that several of these actors worked with Sam Peckinpah, that’s a sign of Philippe Mora’s obsessions.
Although his parents are reluctant to believe it, Mike begins claiming himself as the reincarnation of one Billy Connors, who suffered a horrible fate. For reasons never made clear, it’s taken the 17-year gestation of the cicada for his inner demon to manifest and take over his body.
Then comes the raison d’être, pièce de résistance and sine qua non of The Beast Within: an extended, eye-popping, horror-movie freak-out of a transformation with practical effects by Tom Burman, who receives a major credit and deserves it. The trailer promises something special, and the film delivers. Mora says he figured an over-the-top climax would satisfy ticket buyers. The moulting or splitting that begins along Mike’s back has a distinctly sexual symbolism, if one cares to notice.
No matter how senseless the plot may seem, and that’s plenty, nobody who saw The Beast Within ever forgot that impressive and ridiculous metamorphosis. Shot in 1981, Mora’s horror movie belongs to the 1980s wave of practical-effects horror in Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981), John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), an era swept away by today’s CGI despotism.
As Mora states in his commentary, he made a reference to Franz Kafka’s 1915 story The Metamorphosis when speaking to studio execs, but “their eyes glazed over”. He also states that nobody can figure out the plot even today. Writer Tom Holland, who directed the better-known horror films Fright Night (1985) and Child’s Play (1988), complains in his own commentary that his exposition got hacked up, and that it involves an Indian curse called “the song of the cicada”. The commentaries also refer to critic Joe Bob Briggs, who called The Beast Within a movie about a “were-katydid”.
Under the absurdity, we have a story about a conspiracy to conceal a 1964 atrocity in a Mississippi town and how the repressed (or oppressed) returns to seek vengeance (or justice) years later. At the same time, Mike in his letter jacket, an accessory echoing Michael Landon’s role in Gene Fowler Jr.’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), represents an All-American Boy of the clean-cut middle class who has a hidden capacity for bloodlust. He’s capable of being interpreted as an avenger or perpetrator, or both.
Neither Mora nor Holland refers to this historical subtext. It’s there anyway, and this is a perfect example of how low-budget horror movies channel social anxieties by metaphor. It would be 1988 before a major film, Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, tackled the subject matter directly and with notable liberties.
Mora states that some critics have found a pro-choice message in the subtext of The Beast Within, and that’s not entirely out of left field. A good two decades of horror films tapped into monstrous pregnancies and births. Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960), based on John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, kicked off a cycle extending through Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, up through the Omen and It’s Alive franchises. Harvey Bernhard, who produced The Beast Within, also produced the first Omen movie. It’s not coincidence.
I believe the Ur-inspirations for all these horror movies about evil births can be traced to pulp magazine tales. Ray Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin” (1946), a classic of post-natal depression, and Richard Matheson’s 1950 debut “Born of Man and Woman”, channeling fears of nuclear mutation, soon begot Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” (1953), which turned into a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone. William March’s novel The Bad Seed (1954) was filmed in 1956, and then came Wyndham’s novel. These stories expose Cold War fears of the dangers of middle-class parenthood. Bradbury’s story was even used as the title of a 1962 collection. The bad kids were coming!
The Beast Within was previously issued on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory in the US in 2013 and by Arrow in the UK in 2014. Each disc had different commentary tracks from Mora, and one of these was shared with Clemens. Shout! Factory also had Holland’s track. All three tracks are replicated on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray, along with Arrow’s making-of, for anyone who’s missed out.