Most everyone has favorite seasonal films. Usually it’s the holiday variety, say Christmas or Halloween. Other times it’s something more obscure and flexible like a season or birthday. Years ago I wrote about a Springtime obsession of my own, a little monster movie called The Beast Within. Originally introduced to me via the wonders of Monstervision the film’s atmosphere along with themes of a boy blossoming into a twisted sort of manhood always come to mind during the brightening days and first thunderstorms of Spring. Like a good many horror flicks from back in the day this one was based on a novel. Problem was the book was nowhere near complete by the time a script had to be put together resulting is two divergent tales built on a pile of very similar bones.
The novel was something outside my purview for a the longest time. I’d seen some slight debate online about how it compared to the film with many folks labeling the movie counterpart as an abomination without much in the way of meaningful comparisons. Eventually I manged to snap up a cheap paperback copy at a local book store. The first attempt at giving it a read didn’t make it very far but guess what… it’s Spring again. Taking a break between comics I finally went dove in and completed the book. If you wouldn’t mind indulging I’d like to do something of a civil service and detail the differences between source novel and a favorite flick of yesteryear. Naturally you should expect a certain level of spoilers though I’m gonna leave some mystery for newbies.
Many people report the movie as only being an adaption of the back end of the book and this is sort of a half-truth. The basic premise of an assault leading to the birth of a boy named Michael who goes through some violent changes is intact but the angle of approach is far different. See the novel is divided into four parts with each covering a particular era of the story. Part one concerns the Scruggs and what happened to Jimmy Connors, part two details the relationship between Eli and Carolyn and her assault in the woods, part three is all about a difficult period in Michael’s Childhood, and part four is the return of that problem in his teenage years. The film builds everything around that final quarter while showing portions of the first two and only making a mention of the third. The details of those earlier acts are augmented further with different backgrounds, names, extra characters, and a new origin for the monster. Those last two items makes the biggest difference but let’s go into a bit more detail.
Part one was easily my biggest hurdle when first tackling the book as reading about the miserable marriage of Henry and Sarah Scruggs in Pea Ridge hardly gets the blood pumping. Henry is a wretched bible thumper whose god-fearing nature goes so deep as to shun the notion of procreation with his own wife. This, along with severe isolation, makes Sarah more than eager to stray when flim-flam salesman Jimmy Connors shows on their doorstep after his car breaks down. In this take Henry find Sarah and Jimmy taking a literal roll in the hay only to lock Connors in the cellar and murder the wife. Henry is so far gone he actually believes Connors to be the devil made flesh and must keep him imprisoned and alive. Over years of inhuman treatment, Jimmy becomes more beast than man and gains an opportunity to escape captivity once Henry finally succumbs to a failing heart
In the film version of these events the Scruggs do not exist nor does traveling salesman Jimmy. Instead Billy Connors, a local boy from Nioba Mississippi fools around with Sarah Curwin which gets a woman killed and the boy likewise locked in a cellar. It’s not just years of torture changing his mind and body that results in the monstrous form he takes on either. Billy happens to know some old native magic based on Cicada that allow for a shot at revenge at the cost of ones humanity. Right away these changes have huge ripple effects. Not only does skipping past this part add an air of mystery but, unlike Henry Scruggs, Billy has several opponents who live on which makes for a supernatural family feud. Where’s Richard Dawson when we need him?
Part two is largely about the relationship between Michael's parents, Eli and Carolyn. Both simple small town folk, her a spunky waitress at first and him a hulking lumber worker with little education. We get to their first meeting and see their day to day existence up to the point when it is thrown out of whack as the creature murders their dog and rapes Carolyn. As the pair were trying to conceive a child anyway she chooses to believe the resulting baby is Eli’s. Adding a weird layer to this take is that the creature soon dies of a snakebite leaving none the wiser as to his existence.
In the film these two are newlyweds driving through the country. Carolyn is attacked while Eli is searching for help with their car. They both suspect the kid might be from that night but love their son all the same. The characterizations are vastly different here with Eli in particular being more of an everyman urban type which makes him bristle at dealing with all the hillbilly nonsense in town later on. Their living situation also solves a lingering mystery from the book as that version of Michael wonders if getting away from the woods might solve his condition. In the film his location merely changes the symptoms. While not explicitly shown we learn that this version of the beast was shot not long after assaulting Carolyn.
Part three is arguably the most interesting portion of the novel and is difficult to compare to the film since it’s pretty much entirely skipped over. It concerns Michael’s upbringing and childhood from his affinity with animals to his troubles at school. Eventually the kid begins to have nightmares that manifest as violent behavior where he runs out to the wilderness at night to hunt and kill. For the movie there’s just a few hints of a time in his childhood where he suffered from “terrible nightmares” along with a brief mentioning of his affinity for nature.
Finally part four is where the real meat and potatoes of the story come to a head with Michael’s problems returning to an even worse extent as a teenager. Well sorta. The film makes it that he’s deathly ill and his parents return to this small town in order to learn whatever they can about the kids potential father. In the book this resurgence kicks off at the end of part three when Michael enters puberty and receives a saliva handy-j from a classmate. Yes you read that right.
Contrasting this final section is total night and day as each version has made such different recipes out of roughly the same ingredients. In prose it’s about a family who has lived and worked in this same town while Michael has two ladies of interest, the lovely Susanne and easy patty. In movie land the family are total strangers to this location with Michael finding romance with a girl named Amanda Curwin. The supporting cast feels much larger even though the actual headcount is likely the same. That’s likely due to the number of book characters who factor into the equation for maybe a chapter or even just a few pages whereas film characters feel like they get a bigger piece of the screentime pie. Events move even further from the source novel as Michael’s final transformation and fate and are vastly different, though I won’t spoil those for you except to say the movie is much more slimy.
Getting to my take on the which is better debate I obviously have some bias for the movie. I’ve found it to be a great source of gross comfort viewing for decades whereas I finished the novel just this past week. That being said I’m still quite confident the movie takes home the prize thanks to a variety of solid choices. First off is the mystery aspect. The novel leaves nothing to the imagination, telling us everything in linear fashion leaving zero question as to what is happening. Not only does this leave zero room for surprises but it actually makes it so the reader is better informed than the characters so our feelings are somewhat ditched from theirs. In the film we see a horrifying incident and move on to a family with a sick teenager and a need for answers. Not only are we eager to learn about the assailant but we’re immediately drawn in by a parents need to save their which doesn’t even factor into the book until halfway.
Another winning factor for the movie is atmosphere. It’s got that sort of odd tone some 80s horror flicks had in that it felt like an old 50s drive-in flick only with a level of sleaze and gore afforded by the era of excess. Add to that the setting of wet and foggy southern United States complete with cold nights and dead, spindly trees just makes it all come together. While the novel is likewise centered on the south there’s not much characteristic of the area save for poisonous snakes and some lingo. Much of the environment is very bland and almost too comfortable since the characters have spent their entire lives there. On the hand this helps the themes of the story since it’s about the dangers in your own home, there’s just not enough detail to make it stick. And I won’t go into a full paragraph on this but the monster element in the film is so much nastier than the mental lycanthropy stuff in the pages. The last round that might hold any weight is that of comparison to other works of this kind. The movie holds up quite well alongside gross-out stuff from the 1980s whereas the book seem really generic when contrasted with horror literature of the time.
Each version still makes for solid entertainment and make for a fun exercise where you pick which pieces you’d include for your own optimal variation. I’ll leave you with that and the advice to at least sick out one of these versions. The movie is out-of-print stateside but there’s a nice European blu-ray out there for those with means. Otherwise it sometimes pops up on weirder streaming services. Meanwhile the book is slightly rare but not so much as to be unobtainable. You just might have to put in moderately more work than normal depending on the current crop of online auctions and such. And for those of you who’ve taken in one or both of these formats do share your thoughts on what works about each of them.
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