Some of the horror genre’s most enduring entries deal with our inherent fear of ourselves. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s groundbreaking novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to Lon Chaney Jr’s legendary turn as the bloodthirsty Wolfman, to William Friedkin’s iconic cinematic adaptation of The Exorcist, it’s clear that even the most mild-mannered of us are afraid of what could be lurking inside our own skin.
In 1982, a film attempted to capitalize on that anxiety by blending it together with elements seen in the Creature Feature, Slasher, and Hicksploitation pictures of the day. The end result was THE BEAST WITHIN, a grimy and bizarre outing that left audience members and critics alike feeling that a shower was in order by the time its credits rolled. That sensation was inexcusable to many, while to others it was exactly what they wanted from a Saturday night spent at the drive-in. Forty years later, neither camp is budging.
The movie opens with the newly married Eli and Caroline MacCleary driving on a deserted Mississippi backroad on a dark and stormy night. When their car gets stuck in some mud, hubby decides to venture on foot to the nearest gas station so he can call them a tow truck. In his absence, a monstrous insect/human hybrid emerges out of the woods, violates Mrs. MacCleary, then waddles back from whence it came.
Fast-forward over a decade and a half later and we discover that that horrible incident ended up producing a child, the now teenaged Michael. Ma and Pa MacCleary have loved the boy as their own, keeping the secret of his biological father’s hideous form between them the whole time. But when Michael turns 17, his body is thrown into turmoil as his pituitary gland goes off like a firecracker and his mind is plagued by nightmarish visions.
Soon he finds himself inexplicably drawn to the small Mississippi town his parents were passing through on the terrible night he was conceived. Coupled with that is the unstoppable urge to spill the blood of the Curwins, a prominent family that resides in the sordid little burgh. As Michael becomes increasingly more grotesque, his parents attempt to unravel the mystery behind what attacked Caroline all those years ago and what it can tell them about the monstrosity their son is becoming.
THE BEAST WITHIN is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a strange beast of a film. It isn’t necessarily good, but the bones of a great horror movie are there. It’s easy to find yourself dreaming of what it could have been rather than what it ended up being, as if there’s some alternate timeline running parallel to ours where the picture is considered a part of the pantheon of classic ’80s monster movies. Instead, we’re left with a big ol’ gooey question mark as to how a picture with so much talent and potential fell short.
The film’s fruition began with Tom Holland. Most genre fans know him now as the man behind such certified bangers as FRIGHT NIGHT and CHILD’S PLAY, but before those hit the silver screen, he was a successful actor with the dream of breaking into directing. According to Holland, he noticed that one way to make the leap into that coveted canvas chair was to first get noticed as a screenwriter. So, for the next five years he wrote, accumulating experience and rejections until his big break finally came in the form of a phone call from Harvey Bernhard, producer of films like THE LOST BOYS, THE GOONIES, and THE OMEN.
Bernhard had just bought the rights to a novel called The Beast Within, and he wanted Holland to prep it for the big screen. But there was a catch: the book wasn’t finished. Its writer Edward Levy was going through some personal problems at the time and progress on it had stalled, meaning that Holland would be tasked with creating an original screenplay based solely on the title. Seeing how obviously huge this opportunity was for his career, he accepted.
The canvas Holland had to work with was blank with one exception: at some point in the film a character had to go through a monstrous transformation. Obviously lycanthropy sprung to mind but seeing how this would be his first feature film, he didn’t want to retread territory that previous werewolf films had trotted upon. This is where THE BEAST WITHIN’s true stroke of genius comes into play. After much research, Holland settled on the cicada as the basis for the movie’s money-shot metamorphosis.
A bug with beady red eyes that emits a shudder-inducing song from its disgustingly large body, horror had yet to mine the creepiness of the cicada. What’s more, its biology had a unique feature that would play perfectly in the plot of the movie: After hatching from its egg, the cicada nymph burrows into the ground where, over the course of seventeen years, it transforms into its horrible final form before bursting out from its subterranean lair. With that bit of trivia in mind, the image of a teenage boy’s mutation from human to giant insect hybrid began to form in Holland’s mind. It was a visage too terrifying to resist.
With the script in the can, someone was needed at the helm to help bring THE BEAST WITHIN to life. Fresh off the success of his Dennis Hopper-starring debut feature MAD DOG MORGAN, Australian director Philippe Mora was brought on. Initially a documentarian, THE BEAST WITHIN would be his first outing in Hollywood, as well as Mora’s first swing at the horror genre (though certainly not his last, as he would eventually go on to direct the next two installments of THE HOWLING franchise). Mora would bring to the picture a willingness to push the boundaries of taste in order to shock audiences, and also displayed a knowing playfulness in terms of his deployment of a plethora of horror troupes.
Other notable names brought on to round out THE BEAST WITHIN’s crew were special effects wizard Tom Burman (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH), production designer David M. Haber (THE MONSTER SQUAD, THE ICE PIRATES) and legendary composer Les Baxter, who would go on to say (according to Tom Holland) that the music he created for this picture was some of his favorite of his long career.
THE BEAST WITHIN’s cast was a mixture of well-known names and veteran character actors. Bibi Besch (TREMORS, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN) and Ronny Cox (at the time best known for his role in DELIVERANCE) were set to play Mrs. and Mr. MacCleary respectively. Their doomed son Michael was played by young up-and-comer Paul Clemens, whose performance would go on to be a highlight of the production. The rest of the cast was made up of the kind of character actors whose names escape you but whose faces were all too familiar, guys like R.G. Armstrong (PREDATOR, DICK TRACY), L.Q. Jones (THE WILD BUNCH, HANG ‘EM HIGH), and Don Gordon (THE TOWERING INFERNO).
With a ton of talent in tow, filming of THE BEAST WITHIN began in Mississippi on February 8th, 1981. Storm clouds gathered over the production quickly, with Bibi Besch needing to be hospitalized after the filming of her rape scene due to too many hours spent exposed in the frigid weather. This incident would serve as a sort of omen of things to come, as Philippe Mora would immediately begin to receive pushback from studio bigwigs who were concerned by what they were viewing in the dailies being sent to them. Eventually, key scenes of the film were forcibly cut all together, permanently damaging the story’s plot and causing much confusion for audiences later on.
THE BEAST WITHIN hit theaters on February 12th, 1982. It did lukewarm business, eventually grossing $7.7 million. Critics dogpiled on the film, taking the piss out of it in the way so many relish doing when presented with the opportunity. Not all were so quick to bury it, however. Joe Bob Briggs (the patron saint of B-cinema) enjoyed the film thoroughly. It even earned several nominations at that year’s Drive-In Academy Awards, though it lost in every category.
The sinking of THE BEAST WITHIN came about thanks to a combination of breaches rather than a single devastating blow.
To be sure, the rape scene it opens with definitely could have been handled better and gives the film an ugly tone it never quite recovers from. There’s an absurdity lent to the situation thanks to the aggressor being an obviously rubber-suited creature who looks about as threatening as a greased-up Teletubby, but how the scene is executed and the way the camera lingers on the act takes it out of the realm of the ridiculous (think Divine’s violation by giant lobster in MULTIPLE MANIACS) and into decidedly seedier territory. This wasn’t anything new to your average hardened genre fan at the time, but it probably was a little much for mainstream audiences.
While on the subject of rubber suits, Tom Holland has been quick to point out that his ideas for the cicada-man’s design and its putrid transformation may have been a bit too ahead of its time in terms of what the special effects of the day were able to achieve. By the sounds of it, what he had in mind was something more along the lines of what we would see a few years later in David Cronenberg’s THE FLY. What we got instead is a grosser version of Carter Wong’s pumping-up scene in John Carpenter’s BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA. While certainly serviceable and definitely a high point in the film, it doesn’t necessarily reach the full nightmarish potential of what a human-to-insect metamorphosis could be.
In this writer’s mind, these issues take a backseat to two specific problems found in THE BEAST WITHIN’s narrative: The convoluted nature of the Curwin family plot thread, and the fact that we never build an emotional connection to Michael. The former is more of an annoyance, mucking up an otherwise straightforward story about a young man facing his very real inner demons while they threaten to consume him. But it’s the latter where the true problem lies.
We’re not given a reason to care about Michael. No foundation is laid in terms of providing the audience a glimpse of who he is before his body and mind begin to change. Instead, we meet him with that process already under way. Michael appears to be deranged from the jump, so a lot of the emotional punch is sucked out of his deterioration. To refer to THE FLY again, it’d be like if we were given no time to get to know Seth Brundle before he takes his ill-advised trip through the telepods. Without that crucial bit of characterization, all we’re left with are gallons of blood but no heart.
Yet despite these issues, THE BEAST WITHIN refuses to accept the same demise so many other mediocre fright flicks of its era did. Putrid as some of it might be at this point, there’s just too much meat on its bones for the film to decay fully into obscurity. Inevitably, some rabid horror cinephile stumbles across the title while researching the filmographies of Phillippe Mora, Tom Holland, or any of the character-actor legends that make up its cast and decide to watch the picture for the sake of completionism. Or, as was the case for this writer, they remember seeing its simple but effective box art on the shelves of their childhood video rental shop and jump on the chance to finally view it when the movie gets a rerelease, like the one Scream Factory did back in 2013.
But it’s more than just these factors that keeps THE BEAST WITHIN alive. It’s one of those rare films where the idea at its core makes you see past the warts on the surface, and it does so by speaking to a fundamental fear shared by everyone. There are times in our lives where we are a mystery to ourselves, where something in our body makes its existence known and makes us realize how little we truly know about what’s happening within us.
The discovery of a tumor; the onset of a debilitating mental illness; a crippling disease suddenly taking hold. These are all nightmare scenarios that play out in most people’s minds at some point if they’ve been lucky enough not to have experienced one firsthand. Realizing that we are more often than not at the mercy of our bodies (and not the other way around) is terrifying, and it’s something that immediately comes to mind when watching Michael’s descent in THE BEAST WITHIN.
Under all the monstrous goo and B-movie trimmings is a story that earns its memorability by striking a nerve so deep it refuses to be forgotten.
Tags: Bert Lovitt, Bibi Besch, Danilo Bach, Don Gordon, Edward Levy, Jack L. Richards, John Dennis Johnston, Katherine Moffat, L.Q. Jones, Les Baxter, Logan Ramsey, Luke Askew, Meshach Taylor, Paul Clemens, Philippe Mora, R.G. Armstrong, Robert Brown, Ronny Cox, The 1980s, Tom Holland, Werewolves
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