The Beast

The Beast (La Bête, 1975) is Walerian Borowczyk's notorious erotic fantasy, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Lucy, a wealthy American heiress, arrives at a French château buried deep in the woods to marry the Marquis Mathurin — with no idea what curse haunts his bloodline.

Two centuries earlier, the groom's great-grandmother Romilda met a creature in the forest, and the encounter bent the family's fate ever since. Lucy's feverish dreams begin to blur into that old legend until waking life, desire and nightmare no longer hold their borders. The Polish director shapes it all as a dark baroque fairy tale: lavish interiors, the rot of an aging estate, and a sharp sneer aimed at the aristocracy and the Church. Sirpa Lane and Lisbeth Hummel anchor two women separated by two hundred years.

Banned across dozens of countries, jeered and championed in equal measure, it still works as a litmus test for the viewer — an arthouse provocation built from horror, grotesquerie and carnal absurdity, and not for the squeamish. If strange European cinema of the 1970s is your territory, Borowczyk shows just how far it dared to go. Stream The Beast (1975) online on iFILM.