Beast from Haunted Cave is peculiarly difficult to discuss. Charles Tatum, Jr. claims that "trying to see Beast from Haunted Cave as a personal film by Monte Hellman would be a form of pathological auteurism,"23 while the director himself dismisses it as "primitive work on my part,"24 Hellman once pointed out that the narrative was essentially "Key Largo with a monster added to it,"25 and later told Tatum that "Corman loved the story and had his writers make several variations on the theme. He understood that the old man/woman/young man triangle was rich in dramatic possibilities. For him, Key Largo contained the fundamental structure of the gangster film."26 But if the parallels between Beast from Haunted Cave and John Huston's film are clear enough, the monster provides a disruptive element, its presence being as ambiguous and open to multiple readings as the threat in Hitchcock's The Birds (1962).
Robin Wood has suggested that horror films can be understood by applying the formula "normality vs. the monster," the three variables being the definition of normality, the definition of the monster, and, crucially, the relationship between the two.27 Beneath the surface, it is already clear that Beast's "normality" is profoundly disturbed; the outlaw gang has little respect for human life, while the ostensible "hero" simply inflects their misanthropy in a different direction, presenting his neurotic flight from social interaction as a moral principle. The monster duplicates these tendencies while standing in marked opposition to them, functioning as less a coherent entity than a series of constantly shifting possibilities, and Hellman's visualization of the creature suggests its amorphous nature. On its first appearance (when it attacks Natalie in the mine), we see only disconnected shots of the beast's cobwebbed limbs before it gradually drops over the camera, filling the screen with a blackness which replaces that fade we might otherwise expect to end such a scene (later, Marty also blacks out the screen by advancing into the camera). When Marty observes the creature during his journey to the cabin, it is a transparent image through which the surrounding landscape can be glimpsed. In the cave, it is initially presented as a shadow on a wall, only later being shown in full view. Thus, while the human characters are never anything more (or less) than living bodies, several figural options are worked through in the beast's presentation: it is a cinematic effect, an image, an outline, a shadow.28 These options point to the problematic relationship between protagonist and antagonist. As in so many of his later works, Hellman obliges us to ask questions we will not be able to answer, and the relative straightforwardness of the central characters' motivations here ensure that it is the eponymous beast upon which our enquiries must focus.29 The complexity of its role will be clarified by the following questions. Although none can be definitively answered, all suggest avenues of exploration which enrich the text.
What is the Haunted Cave?
The superficially crude title proves to have unexpected resonances. One might expect the film to be called Beast from a Haunted Cave or Beast from the Haunted Cave. Beast from Haunted Cave suggests something both more and less precise; is "Haunted Cave" a name ("this place is known as Haunted Cave") rather than a description ("this is a haunted cave")? The film compounds the ambiguity by presenting two possible candidates for the title role. Although the climax occurs in what Gil describes as "a haunted cave," the place this beast appears to be from isn't a cave at all, but a mine.
What Is the Beast's Origin?
So is the beast from the haunted cave or the area under the mine? The closest we come to an explanation occurs when Marty tells Alex he "saw pieces of an egg in the mine ... that could have been there for millions of years until the men working on the mine found it." But Hellman's position is closer to that of Alex, who insists, "I don't care what it is. I don't care if it chews up the whole state. I don't care if it came from Mars or happened by spontaneous combustion."
Why Does It Travel?
Why does the beast journey from the mine to the cave (apparently dragging the half-dead Natalie, a source of food, along with it)? Does it follow Gil and the gangsters? Is it trying to find a new home after its old one is destroyed in the explosion? Or is it simply returning to its place of origin?
What Is Its Function?
Given the figural uncertainty attendant upon the beast's visual presentation, as well as the ambiguity of its origin and motivation, it is hardly surprising to discover that the creature's symbolic/ideological function is similarly problematic. Here, Hellman anticipates one of the horror genre's richest motifs: the tracing of America's collective nightmare to a source in the Wild West, an idea given its most thorough expression by Tobe Hooper. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the monstrous family are the true inheritors of America's pioneer tradition, a notion taken to even more outrageous extremes in Hooper's 1986 sequel, where, having set up home in an abandoned amusement park decorated with images of Western icons, the cannibals justify themselves by reference to standard capitalist practice.30 Similarly, in Death Trap (1976) a serial killer is linked with the heroes of Western mythology by the country and western songs ("a cowboy is true to his word") on the soundtrack, while Poltergeist (1982) traces its supernatural events to the Indian burial ground over which a new American town has been built (Kubrick's The Shining uses a similar explanation).
Beast from Haunted Cave frequently alludes to American history. Gypsy sings a humorous variation of "Home on the Range" ("Oh give me a home where the weight-lifters roam"), and the ski resort's bar is decorated with Western-themed imagery, including a wagon wheel and a pianola with a sign reading, "I am 75 years old — still willing to play." The laconic Gil — variously called "Cowboy," "Mountain Man," "Nature Boy" and "Davy Crockett"— is linked with America's pioneers; he owns a wooden cabin and relates Marty's sense that they are being followed to the kind of intuition which "has saved many a trapper and prospector" (for Gypsy he also recalls a more recent past of "blind dates and bobby socks"). Alex's gang, on the other hand, embodies the West's spirit of lawless anarchy. A news report describes their robbery as "The biggest story to hit the Black Hills since the murder of Wild Bill Hickock."