The Beast directly confronts beastiality as one of the strongest modern taboos and the inspiration for such diverse films as King Kong and Beauty and the Beast: bestiality. The Beast’s narrative leading up to the climactic encounter with the mythic beast of the title is a sort of comedy of manners about hypocrisy among the French middle classes and aristocracy in the 18th century. The film is cool, even restrained, in the manner of the contemporaneous late Buñuel. And as in Buñuel, the line between dream and reality becomes difficult to distinguish in the film’s most sexual sequences. Borowczyk began as an animator in his native Poland, but in France, he made a string of artily erotic feature films throughout the 1970s. The Beast was brought to the screen by legendary French producer Anatole Dauman, who went on to oversee a string of films maudits, from Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) to Robbe-Grillet’s La Belle Captive (1982).