Southern Movie 71: “The Beast Within” (1982)

Although the classic horror film The Beast Within is best known for the ghastly (and hokey) transformation scene near the end, its setting in rural Mississippi is an integral part of its story. Though the small town of Nioba is fictional, it represents the American idea of a Southern small town, considering that the film’s director was born in Paris and raised in Australia and that its writer was from Poughkeepsie, New York. It is possible that the town’s name is a twist on Neshoba County, which was where Civil Rights workers Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were killed in 1964, the year of the film’s opening scenes. (That year also saw the release of Two Thousand Maniacs! and Black Like Me, both films about the vicious behavior of Southerners.) The movie combines sexual intrigue and the small-town South with a heavy dose of twisted weirdness and the classic question about GenXers: what in the hell is wrong with my child?

The Beast Within opens at night, and we see a nice-looking blonde woman in a 1960s-style pink suit come out of a shady-looking gas station. She is prim and proper, stepping lightly and wearing white gloves. This couple and the gas station attendant are the only ones around, and the attendant doesn’t look particularly nice or helpful. She goes to the car, where a man is kicking the tires, and she tells him, map in hand, that their destination is not much farther. JUST MARRIED is scrawled in white shoe polish across their back window, so we understand that they’re newlyweds on their honeymoon. As they drive away, the words NIOBA, MISSISSIPPI, 1964 come across the screen.

The next scene is pretty vague, but we’re meant to understand that something ominous is happening. First, there is an old rundown house in the dark, then we see a chain being tugged, which is accompanied by animalistic grunting sounds. The camera pans around a dilapidated place, maybe a basement, since the floor is dirt. Then we’re outside, in the woods in the winter. The camera moves slowly among the bare trees. We are supposed to understand that whoever or whatever was in the house, tugging on the chain, has gotten out.

Then we move back to our newlyweds. They’re going down a lonely road, smiling and kissing, but then they pass the sign for their destination. The gas station man told them to turn before the sign, so the husband (Ronny Cox) tries to make a U-turn. That hub cap he was kicking comes flying off, and since this is only a two-lane, the car goes off the road and gets stuck in the mud. With no one and no place in sight, he tells his pretty young wife to stay put, and he will walk back to the station to get help. It’s the 1960s, so she does what her husband tells her to do. Sort of. He also tells her to lock the car doors and stay inside, but she doesn’t.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen that thing creeping through the woods toward the headlights. We see only legs, which are human-like, and covered in leaves or something. The dog in the car starts barking, and the lady lets it out to go look, then she herself gets out. A short walk into the woods, she finds that the dog has been killed, then she screams as she meets this creature. We don’t actually see it, but she does. The young bride runs through the woods but knocks herself out on a tree branch. The creature then uses the opportunity to take off her clothes and rape her. All we see of him is a hand, ripping her shirt open, that appears to be kind of hairy but possibly scaly. It leaves when the tow truck arrives. After a brief search, her husband finds her, scoops her up, and takes her away in the tow truck.

Ten minutes into the movie, the backstory is done, and the main story moves forward in the then-present day: 1981. The words JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI 17 YEARS LATER appear onscreen. The husband Eli MacCleary and his wife Caroline MacCleary are sitting in a doctor’s office, talking about their son Michael. The doctor is explaining that Michael has an “occult malignancy” that is causing strange things to happen in his body, and he suspects that the pituitary gland is involved. They’ve tested both parents for genetic abnormalities, but they’ve found none. At this point, Eli begins to shake his head, then he storms out of the office. Caroline follows him into the hall and urges him to accept it: she was attacked seventeen years ago and denying it now won’t help. Eli insists though, No, he’s my son! Mine! Though Caroline agrees, she reminds him that Michael is dying and something must be done.

Next, we meet Michael. He is being rolled into a hospital room and appears to be asleep. He is sweating, and soon we see that he is dreaming. In that dream, he sees a floor hatch in an old house that is being pushed open from underneath; he walks to it and opens it, then whatever is down there makes him scream and fall. Michael then wakes up, and his mother is there. He tells her that he is scared, that he is dying, and she soothes him.

In the light of day, Eli and Caroline are in their station wagon, which is rolling slowly into Nioba. The small town is foggy and gray in the middle of winter. A few people are here and there, but the town square, complete with white-columned courthouse, is mostly empty. They park the car and split up. Eli heads to the courthouse, while Caroline goes to the local newspaper office. In the courthouse, Eli finds the local judge (who wears a really bad wig) to be faux-friendly; he claims to know nothing about any assaults seventeen years ago. Caroline finds a particularly unfriendly newspaper editor, who lets her sift through the archives despite giving her a short time frame to do so. It is lunchtime, he tells her. Among the boxes of old issues, she finds a headline about the murder of a man named Lionel Curwin. She tears off the front page, folds it, and puts it in to her pocket.

Out in the town square, she shows Eli the headline, but they don’t know they’re being watched by the judge. The grouchy editor finds what she has done and hurries over to the judge’s office. They watch the couple walk across the square, and the two locals conspire to ensure that no one talks to them.

The MacCleary’s walk over to the sheriff’s office, but they find that the man who was sheriff in 1964 has retired in 1965 and died in 1969. The new sheriff named Pool was his deputy back then and agrees to answer their questions. Caroline lies to the sheriff like she did to the newspaper editor, claiming once again to be working on a book about crime in small-town America. He tells them that Lionel Curwin was a “real son of a bitch.” People were glad he was dead, but they did not wish for what happened him. Curwin was killed and ripped to pieces, then his house was burned down. The latter fact was how they knew that it wasn’t done by an animal. He also tells them that no similar crimes occurred since and that the town has been quiet. The couples leaves, mildly satisfied.

Back in town, the doctor at the hospital realizes that Michael is gone, missing! He is driving a car – presumably stolen – through the night, and across the screen the words THE FIRST NIGHT mark our place in the story. He runs off the road for no seeming reason, then walks up to the old house that we saw in the beginning of the movie. Inside the doorway, Michael goes to the floor hatch from his dream and asks someone down there if they are asleep. A vague, deep voice answers but we cannot understand it. Michael is going to open the door, but he insists, You have to promise me. We don’t know, promise what? But the vague voice responds, I promise. He then opens the latch and descends into the basement with a match to light his way. He hears the same growling/snoring sounds and says into the dark, “I know who you are.”

We don’t see what Michael finds, but the scene cuts to him walking up to a different house, this one with lights on inside. He goes to the door, and it is the home of the newspaper editor. The older man is in his kitchen, wearing a tank top undershirt with nasty stains on it. He is talking on the phone and, for some reason, puts out his cigarette in his glass of whiskey. Michael is then mistaken for the grocery boy, who has apparently dropped the box and the bill and left. He comes into the kitchen, and stands stoically while the old editor plays with a package of ground beef joyfully but also flirtatiously in a homoerotic kind of way. (This scene is very— no, extremely uncomfortable to watch.) When Michael finally flips out, he throws the editor on the floor and chews his neck open while that cherished ground beef squishes between the victim’s toes. Michael finishes with blood dripping from his mouth.

Nearby at another house, a pretty young woman is cutting up leftovers for her dog’s dinner, while the dog has Michael pinned up against the outside of the house. When she walks outside and finds Michael, he passes out on the ground. Next we see him, Sheriff Pool, Eli and Caroline, and the town doctor named Schoonmaker have him lying in a simple bed. Caroline comments that he looks better than he has recently, and Schoonmaker says that he mainly needs sleep.

Outside in the daylight, the judge – whose name is Curwin, like Lionel Curwin – goes over to talk to Dexter, the town’s mortician. He is looking across the street at the newspaper office and comments to the judge that the office isn’t open. It’s after 10:00 AM. “That hasn’t happened since the night Lionel’s house was torched,” Dexter says. In a moment, we see the Judge Curwin entering the editor’s home and finding him bloody on the floor.

When Michael wakes up, he is smiling and amiable. He wants to go thank the young woman from the night before, Amanda Platt. He goes to her house, and they go walk in the woods. He tries like a teenage boy would to seduce her, then asks whether her father is Horce Platt, Lionel Curwin’s cousin. The girl is perplexed at the strange question, yet Michael collapses into a some kind of episode before the conversation can continue. He has some sort of flashback to that floor hatch, then he uses his position on the ground to start making out with Amanda. But . . . the romance is over when her dog runs up with a decomposing human hand that he has found.

Law enforcement has arrived, and everyone is standing around when Horace Platt pulls up in a yellow power company truck. He grabs Amanda harshly and tells Michael to stay away from her. Eli asks if Horace is always so brusque, and Sheriff Pool shares that he killed his wife and the man she was cheating with. Eli inquires why he wasn’t put in prison for the murders. Sheriff Pool responds with a smirk that he’s the judge’s cousin. Michael knows that Horace will hurt is daughter, but his parents assure him that he probably won’t. Eli then stays behind to look around at the law enforcement work. Mother and son leave.

On THE SECOND NIGHT, the good guys discover that there are a whole bunch of corpses! They get more man power, and the skeletons are laid out on the ground, under sheets. The doc is called out to look at the remains, and he recognizes one leg bone with a stainless steel knee replacement that he did. This revelation leads them to question Dexter down at the morgue. As Eli, the sheriff, and the doc walk in, the doc remembers that Dexter wasn’t the coroner back in day— Lionel Curwin was. Dexter is inside, creepy as he can be, getting the dead editor ready for his funeral. He doesn’t like Eli’s presence and won’t answer questions.

Across town, Michael is lying in bed, writhing and shaking. At this, the halfway point, The Beast Within begins to get stranger. There’s a drunk sitting by an abandoned building, pulling from a whiskey bottle, and talking to himself. Michael arrives in the dark and begins speaking to him, calling him by name. The drunkard, Tom, tries to ignore him, but as Michael continues to talk, Tom realizes that his body is possessed by Billy Collins. We don’t yet know who that is, but Tom intimates through his drunken rambling that they were friends. But what is important is a little clue that Tom gives: a vague allusion to locusts and cicadas that go away for a long time then come back to life.

Then, over in the morgue, Dexter is on the phone telling the judge that he has stayed quiet for seventeen years, that he wants money, and that he’s out. But he won’t get that far. He hears a knocks in the dark, then returns to his work. Michael/Billy rises up from one of the steel tables and stabs Dexter to death with one of his tools. The good guys are in graveyard, digging up a grave to see what is in the casket, when this happens. After discovering a casket full of rocks, they return to find Dexter dead.

As they’re leaving the morgue, Caroline arrives frantic. Michael is missing again. Maybe he’s at Amanda’s.

Yep, that’s where he is. First, he is creeping outside, watching through her window as she sleeps. Then he goes all the way inside, into her room. He picks up a heavy glass paperweight and is lifting it over his head to smash her with it, when Eli and the others come banging on the door. At first, a shirtless Horace tells them to go away, but when Amanda screams, they run into her room. A tussle ensues, and Michael claims that he is there to protect the girl from the murderer. No one believes him. After the crowd leaves, Horace slaps his daughter then gives her a big nasty hug, pressing her face into his hairy chest. Outside, Caroline wants to know what he was really doing in there, but he just looks drowsy and doesn’t answer.

Back at the hospital, Doctor Schoonmaker, who is now wearing a Colonel Sanders-style string tie, looks at some chest X-rays of Michael. Under the skin, there is a an appendage or something that runs the full length of his torso. He doesn’t know what it could be. In the room, Eli tells Michael that they can leave, but Michael resists. He defies his father and remarks that Eli isn’t even his father, that Billy Connors is his father. His parents are shocked and distraught. They know the facts, of course, but Michael shouldn’t, and they sure didn’t know the rapist’s name! Caroline tries to console Eli in the hall.

Over in the jail, the judge wants to know where Dexter is – certainly it’s about that phone call the night before – and Sheriff Pool tells him that Dexter is dead. They don’t know who killed him, though. After the judge leaves, Tom, who was in the drunk tank eavesdropping, comes out to tell the sheriff that the killer was Billy Connors but in the body of Michael MacCleary. Sheriff Pool gives him a dollar and tells him to go get some breakfast.

Michael’s transformation into Billy has begun. He has a large wound on his back between his shoulders and, in the bathroom, he declares to no one, You promised! Soon, the doctor comes in, sees the bandage that Michael has put on his own wound, and wants to see. Michael attacks him, throwing him against the wall. Outside, Eli and Caroline are confronted by Tom, who wants them to believe that Michael is now Billy. Eli throws him against the car and tells him to stay away from them. So Tom runs through the swamp and to the local power plant, where he and Billy used to hang out as young dudes. And there’s Michael/Billy. Tom tries to escape but a now-nasty-looking Michael throws into the electrical works, frying him in a shower of sparks.

While the local lawmen try to figure out why the power went out, Eli and Caroline ask the doctor about Billy Collins. The doctor says he was strange but handsome and graceful. People said that he could talk to animals, which explains Tom’s drunken statement about Billy and the cicadas. But before long, the sheriff arrives to tell them that Tom is dead. He wants to talk to Michael. And . . .

Now, we’re on THE THIRD NIGHT. Michael has gone to Amanda’s house to warn her to leave. She’s a Curwin and will be among those the killer will target. He can’t explain how he knows that but assures her that she does. Because she is hesitant to go, Michael gets forceful and causes Amanda cut her finger with a kitchen knife. But against Michael’s wishes, the drips of blood that she leaves behind excite the Billy in him, and he goes upstairs to attack her. The scuffle ends in Michael throwing himself off the second floor landing to keep himself from harming the girl he likes.

Now, The Beast Within is coming to a close. Michael tries to explain to them about Billy inhabiting his body, but their answer is to strap him down. At this point, every character is up in arms. Horace wants blood since Michael won’t stay away from his daughter, and the judge is supportive of his cousin’s violent tendencies. They arrive to kill Michael while he is in that gory transformation, but the shotgun blasts don’t kill the creature. Michael is no longer, and the thing he is becoming is on its way. After a few violent incidents, the mayor – now bald, without the wig – arrives at the sheriff’s office, seeking protection from the creature. Eli knows that he knows what is happening and demands answers.

The mayor explains that his brother Lionel Curwin found Billy Connors in bed with his wife. Instead of killing Billy, Lionel locked Billy in the cellar and nearly starved him to death, before deciding to feed him meat from human corpses. Lionel was the town’s undertaker so he could get away with it. The ordeal turned Billy into the monster that attacked Caroline. Knowing how it must look that he has protected his brother’s grotesque secret, the mayor tries to deny culpability, but Michael/Billy the locust creature arrives anyway. They are all afraid, and the mayor is locked in a jail cell for protection. Ultimately, the creature gets away from them as they stalk it outside the jail. Unfortunately for her, it leaves the jail area and finds Amanda, who is stranded by the roadside. He rapes her in the woods, just as Billy did Caroline . . . and the cycle will start all over again.

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Since it is set partially in Jackson, Mississippi, it seems appropriate to look first at the Clarion-Ledger‘s review of the film back in ’82. Unfortunately, Southern Style writer Bill Nichols had very little good to say about The Beast Within. Lumping it in with other bad horror movies that rely not on the classic “danse macabre” but on baser human instincts, Nichols wrote, on February 12, 1982: “It is the power and grand tradition of horror fiction and film that makes a movie like The Beast Within particularly sad. [ . . . ] It’s truly a monstrous film, sadly representative of exploitative horror movies producers like to pander on a movie public they believe too insensitive to want anything more.” He also quips sardonically that “Caroline is raped by something that looks like a cross between the creature from the black logoon [sic] and Charley the Tuna.” However, he does note the film’s “lone point of interest” as its “striking photography of the Mississippi countryside.” In a review that ran a week later in the Biloxi Sun, their critic’s assessment was not much better: “Along with being disgusting, the film is poorly acted and directed,” wrote critic Paul Drummond. At the end of that review, he noted that, aside from seeing some locals in the film, “being filmed in Mississippi doesn’t help The Beast Within, though.”

I take the reviewers’ points. But bad horror movies are worth watching because they traffic in easily recognizable “types,” which makes us ask ourselves why we recognize and believe in these “types.” Horror films that explore deep human mysteries in nuanced ways require our thought and attention, and are valuable art for those reasons. Cheap, bad horror movies have to reel us in quickly with unexamined cultural beliefs that are already ingrained. This is easily done when Southern culture is involved. For example, everyone agrees that hitchhikers and car trouble on an isolated country road are both scary, which makes Texas Chainsaw Massacre frightening. Or that Louisiana’s swamps are scary, which underpins Hatchet. For The Beast Within, we agree that rural Mississippi is scary— so scary that . . . what if your dad’s car broke down and he left your mom with the car and went to get help, and then a creature came out of the woods and raped your mom, then it disappeared into the woods, and later when you turn 17, your true nature as a monster comes out of you? This film’s premise is absurd, so to participate in its story, a viewer would have to agree that this occurrence is actually possible in a place as strange as rural Mississippi.

As a document of the South, The Beast Within works with those “types” in a small Southern town. Anyone who has any power in this small town – the judge, the newspaper editor, the mortician – is a twisted person and is in cahoots to cover up a stain from the town’s past. Two outsiders arrive to cause problems – to uncover the truth – which threatens the façade of a peaceful town that is not actually peaceful. This scenario should seem reminiscent of Civil Rights violence, where the crimes of the locals are swept under the rug, only to be revealed by outsiders who come meddling in local affairs. Here, we have a different situation but still in that familiar framework. The South’s secrets are hidden in the woods or in structures that burned: murders, lynchings, torture, sexual crimes . . . All things that are better left well enough alone. Seemingly normal townspeople turn out not to be what they seemed. What we learn from stories like this one is that small-town Southerners are sick, twisted people whose sense of justice is warped, often by beliefs about family and by xenophobia. We are left ask ourselves: is the “beast within” the thing that came out of Michael, or is the “beast within” the secret that was held inside of the townspeople?

(Though it is not related to the Southern-ness of the film, one of the bizarre aspects of this movie is how male-centered it is. Other than some extras in the background and a brief appearance from one court clerk, there are only two female characters. Both end up being rape victims and surrogate mothers for a humanoid creature. The judge has no wife, neither does the newspaper editor, nor does Dexter the undertaker. We also hear that two different men murdered their cheating wives yet were not charged with any crimes. Certainly, these two male cuckold-murderers were related to the judge, but didn’t their wives have families who demanded justice? Likewise, after Caroline’s rape, the film shows no concern for her ordeal; what we do see are Eli’s emotional struggles over Michael not being his son. Caroline, the rape victim who carried the resulting child then raised him, is left to soothe her husband through his denial. In the end, there is equally little concern for Amanda as a rape victim. They’re just glad the monster is dead, so they’re “safe.”)