Word: beastes
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...seagull that invades the dining salon, flapping everyone into hysteria. Then there is the matter of the Emir's pet rhinoceros, languishing in the hold and giving off a most unpleasant stench. Seasick, any reasonable person might suppose; lovesick, the opera crowd prefers to believe, bringing the beast into their own frame of reference. Would that the basso profundo could hypnotize the creature with his low tones as easily as he does the chicken from the galley, on which he demonstrates his powers...
Scarifying monsters add a dash of sci-fi glitz. They include Kronovores (creatures capable of devouring time), deadly Cybermen (decaying bodies encased in silver garb), the Yeti (a 9-ft.-tall carpet), the Anti-Matter Beast from Zeta-Minor (a bug-eyed sheet of aluminum wrap) and the Daleks, mobile robots who look like milk churns and scoot around intoning...
Deep in the entrails of a Rumanian castle, a malefic beast has been stirring for a millennium. Now it is 1941, and a platoon of Nazis have let the evil genie out of his battlements. On the side of Good, sort of, are a frail Jewish scholar (the great English actor Ian McKellen, sporting an accent that sounds like south central Iowa) and a preternatural Watchman (Scott Glenn), whose eyes go quilted when he gets really mad. With all these adversaries crossing swords, neither the Nazis nor the narrative stands much of a chance...
...enough for a cineast just to make a horror picture about a young woman who literally gives birth to her nightmares, then copulates with the beast. The film must also be an up-front metaphor for the cosmic anomie of Western civ, and, to boot, a bilious satire on the smugness of the nuclear family...
Fearing such an impulse as "mere anarchy," W.B. Yeats foresaw a Second Coming not long before 1923, in which the world would be devoured by a "rough beast." Yet the impulse was not necessarily anarchic, although things could turn out that way. It was the dream of self-fulfillment. As a goal, self-fulfillment was hardly the 20th century's invention. The European Romantics of the early 1800s had loudly proclaimed the primacy of the individual, the glories of revolution and similar disruptive ideas that have carried forward, with a few halts and alterations, from their time to ours...