Beasts '76: What Big Eyes (aka Never Trust A Man Whose Eyebrows Meet In The Middle)

All six episodes of Nigel Kneales' Beasts deal with the common theme of the savagery that still endures in human nature, although none have a more literal interest than "What Big Eyes" in the nature of human DNA and the strange and uncomfortable truths it potentially conceals. The antagonist of the story is a man with some highly unorthodox views on human evolution - he believes that wolves are the true evolutionary ancestors of Man, and that with a little genetic tinkering it might even be possible to reverse the process. "What Big Eyes" is a werewolf story, although not really, and that's what frustrates a lot of viewers about it. I get the impression that it's is one of the less popular Beasts installments, which I suspect has to do with its climax - it spends much of its 53-minute running time ostensibly building toward a traditional horror outcome that it ultimately doesn't make good on, opting instead for something far more muted and low-key, but which, I would argue, manages to be even more unsettling, particularly in terms of the bitter lingering aftertaste it leaves behind. Here's a major spoiler straight off the bat - by the end of the story our aspiring lycanthrope is revealed to be a crackpot whose reckless experimentation on his own body ensures little more than his own destruction. He fails to turn himself into a wolf. But he certainly does succeed in bringing out the raging animal in the person closest to him.

"What Big Eyes" has a number of parallels with "During Barty's Party" - once again, the dramatic thrust of the story rests on the interplay between a male and a female who share the same domestic space, the unsettled nature of their relationship being revealed against their preoccupation with a (mostly) off-screen animal (unlike the rats in "During Barty's Party", we do get a couple of fleeting glimpses of a wolf in this one, although I suspect it's actually a German shepherd). But Roger and Angie's emotionally stunted relationship looks positively genteel compared to this particular dysfunctional couple - the elderly lupine obsessive Leo Raymount (Patrick Magee) and his sheepish middle-aged daughter Florence (Madge Ryan), who runs an outwardly prosaic pet shop while her father toils away in the back rooms with altogether more disturbing pursuits (she is a wolf in sheep's clothing, although not in the traditional sense). A crucial difference here is that we experience their relationship from the perspective of an outsider, who enters the situation innocently and only gradually comes to understand what he's up against. The hero of the story is Bob Curry (Michael Kitchen), a young RSPCA inspector who often struggles to exude authority, which proves a problem when he takes on dubious exotic pet dealer Duggie Jebb (Bill Dean), whom he suspects of running a dodgy trade in unquarantined timber wolves. Curry's investigation leads him to Florence's pet shop, which he assumes is being unwittingly used as a cover-up for Jebb's operations, only to discover that the smoke, in this case, stems from one hell of a fire. For Raymount has indeed purchased a quantity of wolves from Jebb, for purposes that, like Curry, we suspect are none too savoury, and Curry's persistent interest in the case takes him to a grisly outcome, albeit not the one the viewer is primed to expect for much of the episode. Telling the story from Curry's point of view is a clever tactic which ensures that its actual purpose remains at arms lengths for much of the time, so that, like Curry, we don't quite grasp what was lurking there in plain sight until the very last act. It's this sly subversion that tends to frustrate a lot of people about "What Big Eyes", but also what makes it such an effective and unsettling piece of horror television - the revelation that Raymount's efforts to transform himself into a werewolf were little more than a smokescreen to the real terror of this story, the more implicit narrative involving Raymount's abusive and controlling treatment of Florence. When Curry first arrives at Raymount's domain, he is assured that there is no cruelty there, although it becomes evident that that isn't the case. As it turns out, there is a tremendous amount of cruelty happening in this establishment, both of the kind that Curry deals with (the wolves and various other animals Raymount is revealed to have vivisected for his experiments) and the kind that he doesn't (Raymount has, perhaps unwittingly, made Florence a test subject all on her own terms).

"What Big Eyes" plays a classic diversion game, whereby Raymount's conspicuous eccentricities draw attention away from Florence's more subdued presence, to the extent that we hardly register her at all for much of the story. This is where Magee's feverish, wild-eyed scenery chewing really comes into play - he seems, for all the world, like a man who's already two-thirds of the way through the transformation process from civility to savagery, and is about to tip over into a snarling fury at any moment. What Chris Newton of The Spooky Isles describes as his "slightly odd Shakespearean B-Movie performance" only adds to the eerie unpleasantness he radiates - pay attention to the way he gnashes his teeth while explaining to Curry the basis of his "Grandma vaccine". By contrast, the docile Florence at first appears to serve no greater purpose than to further accentuate his feral qualities by providing an easy outlet for his brutality. I think the really crucial line in the story, however, lies in a remark that Raymount makes early on of Florence: "One's offspring are a distorting mirror; they mock one with themselves. I have to remember I'm not that." At first, this appears to be indicative purely of Raymount's disdain for his daughter, and of his desire to elevate himself above his perceived inferiors by proving his scientific brilliance, but it also points to the idea of Florence being a reflection of the man who has raised her, our first hint that she is the character who perhaps bears watching.

This is further insinuated in Raymount and Florence's dual obsession with the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which Raymount holds up as a precursor to his own lyncanthropic ambitions. It is, as he tells Curry, not a fairy story but a "folk memory", the implied subtext being that Grandma and the Big Bad Wolf were actually a single entity, two sides of the same coin, and the titular heroine was lured to a gruesome demise by her very own kin. The Grandma/Wolf analogy is itself double-edged - on the one hand, it acts as a warning that the most seemingly benign of characters might harbour more troublesome impulses (which in this case would point toward Florence and not Raymount), while also hinting at the darker nature of Raymount and Florence's relationship. Keep in mind that the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, a story dating as far back as 10th century Europe, is popularly interpreted as a rape/seduction analogy, with the wolf being a sexual predator who persuades the readily-manipulated heroine to wander off the beaten track. In the version that most people are familiar with today, both Red and her grandmother escape the clutches of the wolf, but earlier versions of the story had a far bleaker ending in which the wolf devours the heroine and no woodcutter ever arrives to save the day. Traditionally, the story serves as a warning against stranger danger, but Raymount's retelling contains a disturbing subversion, in which the real threat is revealed to have been lurking within the supposed safety of the heroine's family all along. Raymount acknowledges as such when he states (somewhat bizarrely) that no child could have been taken in by the flimsy disguise of a wolf in a nightcap - in actuality, Red was betrayed by the one she trusted; Grandma herself was always the disguise. As Raymount recounts the story to Curry (and Florence listens in with an eerily infantile reverence), he does so with a seething sensuality that becomes all the more chilling when viewed with the hindsight of Florence's final revelations.

Once you pick up on that subtext, then Raymount's "Grandma vaccine" takes on multiple meanings. There is the very literal sense in which Raymount has been injecting wolf blood and spinal fluid into his own body, in the hopes that it will enable him to undergo his own lycanthropic transformation  - a reckless endeavor which, ultimately, causes him to die of septicemia. But there is also the symbolic sense in which he has been poisoning Florence over the years, both in his implied sexual abuse and in the relentless psychological trauma he has inflicted on her, to the extent that quite the slavering beast has been swelling up inside her in the form of her repressed anger and desperation. When Curry asks Raymount who he has been using as a human subject in his experiments, Raymount responds, "Who is the most available?", by which he only ostensibly refers to himself. There is no evidence that Raymount has subjected Florence to any of his Grandma vaccines in the literal sense - certainly, he is a man far too obsessed with his own brilliance to be willing to share the honors of lycanthropic transformation with a being as far down the food chain as Florence - and yet the implication is that Florence has been his ultimate experiment, albeit inadvertently. It's here that we can draw parallels between Florence and the wolf Curry later discovers caged in Raymount's yard, which Raymount has forced to share in his fate by injecting with his own fluids. This is a link that Florence herself makes explicit at the end of the story when she likens her father's treatment of her to that of the animals he vivisected ("All my childhood, cut out of me and thrown away!") and in her description of their relationship, which resembles that of a master and dog than a parent and child ("I was faithful! I was submitted!").

The various other caged animals seen all throughout the story (both in Florence's pet shop and Jebb's yard) have their own duality, symbolising both Raymount's hypothesis about the untamed beasts that lies dormant in the human shell, and Florence's own domination and entrapment by her father. At the end of the story, when Curry returns to the pet shop for the final time, he finds the place in complete disarray, with all of the cages smashed and most of the animals absconded (save from a lone kitten which continues to linger on the shop floor). Clearly, there has been some kind of grisly new development in Curry's absence. The obvious assumption, of course, is that Raymount has returned from the dead in lupine form and wreaked the prophesied havoc, but the wreckage quickly transpires to have been Florence's doing; having finally seen her father for what he was, she has flown into a bestial rage of all her own, destroying his research tools and everything else in the vicinity. The cage doors have been opened and the animal is now unleashed, and it's here that we finally get the transformation we were promised earlier on in the plot, just not in the form we would have expected. The twist comes in the revelation that it was always Florence who had the capacity for real ferity, the result of having endured a lifetime of metaphorical Grandma vaccines from her father, and as the end-product of Raymount's body of work, she is effectively becoming the werewolf in his stead. The resulting rampage contains nothing as exotic or fantastical as actual lycanthropy, but it is every bit as gruesomely nightmarish. Ryan's performance throughout this sequence is both startling and authentically distressing, as we witness Florence bringing her howling anguish to the forefront for the very first time. As she leans over Raymount's concealed body, she slips into a recital of the "transformation" sequence from Little Red Riding Hood, much as her father had previously done with Curry, and her own facial features are seen to contort with a rabid frenzy that blows his own gnashing recital clean out of the water. A distorted mirror indeed, for Florence is now more of a wolf than Raymount could ever have hoped to have been.

"What Big Eyes" ends on a pessimistic note, suggesting that Florence will never be free of her father's influence, even after his death. In the final moments, she thinks she sees him stirring beneath the sheet covering his body, and her anger morphs into high elation, as she joyously proclaims that his promises were true after all. Curry pulls back the sheet to reveal Raymount's lifeless body underneath, whereupon Florence recognises that he is in fact dead, but chooses to cling to her delusions, insisting that, "Just for a moment, it was true," while continuing to stare adoringly at her father. The closing shot, which pans across the ravaged pet shop, shows the lone kitten from earlier atop the counter, freed from its cage but willfully confining itself to a plastic container, implying that Florence will ultimately remain indebted to her despicable father, opting for the comfort and familiarity of her veneration over the possibility of escape.

Oh yes, and in his review on The Spooky Isles, Newton does also point out a fairly glaring problem with this episode. After Raymount dies of septicemia, you can very visibly see him breathing right after. You would do well to ignore that.