Something Weird on TV: Beasts Part Two – The Great Utility Monster

When it comes to Beasts, everyone has a favorite episode. And while “During Barty’s Party” may be the most successful of the six in terms of pure horror, the one I hear talked about most often is “Baby.” This is probably at least partly because folk horror has been a big topic in recent years, and “Baby” is an undeniable example.

Of course, screenwriter Nigel Kneale is no stranger to folk horror. Quatermass and the Pitcertainly counts, The Stone Tape is a solid contender, and The Witches, which he did for Hammer in 1966, is basically the Platonic ideal of the form. Even Halloween 3, which Kneale wrote and subsequently removed his name from, deals heavily in elements of folk horror.

In the case of “Baby,” Jane Wymark plays a six-month-pregnant newlywed who moves with her veterinarian husband (Simon MacCorkindale, Manimal) into an old cottage in the countryside where they find something weird buried in the walls. Unfortunately for her, in a series filled with insufferable male characters, hubby is easily the most repellant of all, and things take several turns for the worse, including one of the most horrifying witches ever put on film.

By the time you read this, my August Horror as Folk column will already have gone live, which is covering both the “Baby” episode of Beasts and an earlier teleplay by Kneale called “Murrain,” so I’ll save much of my ramblings about this episode for that.

Naturally, I re-watched Beasts in order to write this column, but unlike several of the other series we have covered here, I had seen it once before, years ago. Or, at least, I thought I had. But if that’s so, I had absolutely no recollection of “What Big Eyes,” an affecting drama about a dedicated RSPCA inspector who encounters a man who believes he has found a way to turn himself into a wolf. The inspector is played by Michael Kitchen, who starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in a couple of Bond films, and the would-be werewolf is played to scenery-chewing perfection by horror regular Patrick Magee.

Of all the episodes of Beasts, “What Big Eyes” addresses perhaps the most traditional and familiar figure from horror mythology, although it does so with what Andrew Screen, in his volume The Book of Beasts, calls “a characteristically atypical approach to the subject matter,” culminating in one of those rare moments that would actually be less effective if it was more supernatural.

If “During Barty’s Party” was my favorite episode of Beasts, “The Dummy” is the one that had the most profound effect on me when I first watched the series. In fact, watching “The Dummy” for the first time led directly to my writing “Strange Beast,” one of the stories original to my second collection.

Assuming that one is aware of my predilections, one can easily see why “The Dummy” would have such an impact. It concerns the making of the sixth film in a long-running British horror series, all of which star an actor in a big rubber monster suit known as the eponymous Dummy. When asked what the Dummy is meant to be, a character in the episode replies, “A monster. Well, the monster. A mixture of animal, vegetable, and mineral, really. Immortal, bulletproof, indestructible. I mean the customers don’t really care…”

The episode isn’t terribly concerned with the particulars of the Dummy, either. Kneale himself called it “the great utility monster” in the press. It’s all about the man inside the suit. His psychological state, sure, as he’s going through a messy divorce, being put through the financial wringer, and is threatened with losing custody of his daughter. But there’s more than that. It’s about masks (and, in this case, monster suits), and the effect they have on the person wearing them.

This theorizing gets put in the mouth of magazine writer Joan Eastgate (Lillias Walker), who is on the set hoping to get an interview with the man inside the costume. Discussing tribal masks with the movie’s producer, she says, “They all know the man’s inside but that doesn’t matter. They believe the mask itself is alive. Always, all the time. And the man’s just helping.” (They’re talking about giant ceremonial masks as big as a person, the kind which make a memorable appearance at the beginning of Kneale’s The Witches.)

In a series filled with tragic episodes, “The Dummy” is one of the most wrenching, and yet Kneale says of it, “It was just meant to be funny, which of course the making of a horror film is.” It was specifically designed as a satire of Hammer’s various gothic chillers, with Andrew Screen describing the humor as “pitch black.”

Kneale had a checkered history with Hammer. Their first big hit was the 1955 adaptation of Kneale’s TV miniseries The Quatermass Experiment (renamed “Xperiment” for the big screen, to cash in on the newly introduced X certification it received), which Kneale was famously unhappy with. “I hated the film,” Kneale is quoted as saying in Andy Murray’s book Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale. “It was terrible.”

Despite this, Kneale went on to work with Hammer on numerous other pictures, including two additional Quatermass films as well as The Abominable Snowman and The Witches, so it is safe to say that he knew his way around their filmmaking process, and was poking at least somewhat good-natured fun at them (and at the state of the British film industry in general) in putting together “The Dummy.”

That brings us to the conclusion of Beasts, though if you want to read more, you can check out my Horror as Folk column on “Baby” and “Murrain” or, if you’re really interested, pick up Andrew Screen’s comprehensive tome The Book of Beasts, which covers the series in exhaustive detail. Next time, we’ll stay among the British Isles, but start on a somewhat more traditional horror anthology series, as we begin our exploration of Hammer House of Horror from 1980.