Brad Stevens - Monte Hellman - His Life and Films

The company disbanded in June 1958 (soon after Hellman and Barboura Morris divorced) when the theater was converted into a cinema by its new owner, Robert Lippert (later the producer of two Hellman films): "Lippert bought the theater from the Dahls after I did my season of plays from September 1957 to June 1958 and forced me to give up the building (he wasn't interested in plays). It still exists—now called the New Beverly Cinema. For a time it was divided into twin theaters, but now it's opened up again into one theater." 17Roger Corman advised Hellman to "get healthy," and offered him work at his recently formed company the Filmgroup. It was there that Hellman made Beast from Haunted Cave: "Leo Gordon wrote the original screenplay for Beast. My original contract was as 'writer/director/editor.' Soon after I was hired, Roger decided to get Charles B. Griffith to work on the rewrite with me. He wound up doing the writing, while I supervised. Chuck's re-write bore almost no resemblance to Leo's original. I added a number of private jokes, such as Frank and Sheila calling each other 'Charles', which really came from my relationship with Frank Wolff. Frank was a school friend at Stanford, a summer stock partner, and my roommate in L.A." 18The film was shot in 12 days on South Dakota locations, back-to-back with Ski Troop Attack , a Corman film featuring the same five stars as Hellman's— Frank Wolff, Michael Forest, Sheila Carol, Richard Sinatra and Wally Campo. Roger Corman produced and directed Ski Troop Attack (from another Griffith screenplay), leaving his brother Gene to produce Beast from Haunted Cave: "Gene pawned us off as a group of UCLA students, and he made a deal at a hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota, for 50 cents a night per person, and put two to a room. And we had salami sandwiches for lunch. Just plain bread and salami, in basically 10 degrees below zero weather, so it was a grueling experience, but it was fun. I cast all the actors except Wally Campo. Mike Forest and Frank Wolff were close friends of mine. Sheila Carol was a waitress at a coffee house on the Sunset Strip when I discovered her. Mike, Frank and Sheila were cast in Ski Troop Attack because they were in Beast. " 19The fact that Hellman was still technically an apprentice meant he could not edit his own footage, so the editing was carried out by Anthony Carras: "Since I was not allowed to edit Beast (it wound up as a union picture), Roger paid me for three jobs when I only performed on 1 1/ 2. Since I got paid a total of $1,000, I figure, by Roger's methods, I was overpaid by $500. I was present in the editing room. That's where I learned the rest of what I know about film directing, from seeing my mistakes." 20Nevertheless, Hellman regards the experience as a positive one: "I just did it, and I probably made more mistakes than the average person who makes a first film. I didn't really have any help, and I wouldn't take any help. I had to do it on my own. Once I made my first film I considered myself a film-maker. I lost all interest in the theater and never went back. After Beast from Haunted Cave opened, I got an agent and tried to find directing assignments." 21

Beast from Haunted Cave begins at the ski resort run by Gil Jackson (Michael Forest). Gangster Alexander Ward (Frank Wolff), his moll, Gypsy Boulet (Sheila Carol), and his two henchmen, Marty Jones (Richard Sinatra) and Byron Smith (Wally Campo), are using a skiing holiday as cover for their robbery of a mining company. Marty takes Natalie (Linne Ahlstrand), a waitress from the local bar, to the mine, where he plants a bomb in order to trigger a diversionary explosion. While in the mine, Natalie is killed by a monster. 22The next day, the gang carries out its robbery successfully (though a guard dies in the mine explosion), and makes the arduous journey to Gil's isolated cabin, followed by the beast. While Alex's gang waits for the plane that will fly them to safety, tensions mount as Gil begins to realize who his guests really are, and Gypsy falls in love with him. After the beast attacks, carrying off Gil's housekeeper Small Dove (Kay Jennings), Gil and Gypsy decide to slip away. A snowstorm forces them to take refuge in a haunted cave, where they discover the cocooned, half-living remains of Natalie and Small Dove (as well as Byron, who arrived earlier). Alex and Marty find the cave, and Alex is killed by the beast. Marty attacks the beast with a flare gun. As the beast dies, it lashes out at Marty, killing him. Gil and Gypsy watch as the beast goes up in flames.

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," 23while the director himself dismisses it as "primitive work on my part," 24Hellman 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." 26But 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. 27Beneath 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. 28These 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. 29The 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.