‘The Spirit Of The Beehive’ And Its Monstrous Legacy
Alan Kelly
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Since last year, genre fans have been enjoying a Frankenstein revival. Modern sensibilities have intersected with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus, yielding diverse results in their expansion of the source material. Demonstrating Frankenstein’s creation remains the most mutable monster in gothic horror. Zelda Williams offered up 80s-based kitsch in her zany retooling Lisa Frankenstein, Maggie Gyllenhaal engages with gothic horror in her reboot of The Bride of Frankenstein, and expect a visceral interrogation of monstrosity and humanity in Guillermo del Toro’s Bride of Frankenstein. Other properties channeling Shelley are Poor Things, inserting feminist revisionism into the classic framework, and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, a revenge-fueled nightmare with a political bent.
The misunderstood monster of Shelley’s Frankenstein is perhaps the most widely known and sympathetic character in the Gothic horror canon. Themes of science-gone-awry, monstrosity, and abandoning morality for scientific curiosity have had a centuries-spanning impact on horror art and culture. Audiences’ identification with the monster exemplifies how much the story still resonates in the vast landscape of the horror genre and beyond. Victor Erice was one filmmaker who built a narrative around a striking film still from 1931’s Frankenstein. But his attention was not on the horror trappings. Instead, he focused on the connection between the two characters triggering his own spark of creation. 1973 saw the release of a Spanish movie, The Spirit Of The Beehive.
What Is The Spirit Of The Beehive About?
Haunted by James Whale’s 1931 adaptation since childhood, Erice’s inspiration for his story was rooted in the iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster bonding by a lake with a little girl. Horror is simultaneously a mirror and an identity-building platform for horror fans and creators – this is the essence of The Spirit of the Beehive. In the movie, a single viewing of Frankenstein serves as the catalyst for a haunting tale of a girl’s growth and transformation via the power of storytelling and monster movies.
The story takes place in a Castilian village in the 1940s, a remote spot struggling after the Spanish Civil War. It revolves around young sisters Ana (Tesis’s Ana Torrent) and Isobel (Isabel Tellería) left to their own devices, with their parents Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) and Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez) either consumed by memories of the past or obsessed with the hierarchy of bees and barely acknowledge the girl’s existence. A traveling picture arrives in their village, screening James Whale’s Frankenstein. Ana becomes fascinated and obsessed with the creature, prompting her to question her place in the world, scrutinize the adults around her, and empathize with the monster.
The Spirit of the Beehive and The Legacy of Monstrosity
The fledgling filmmaker released his debut to a less-than-warm response from moviegoers and critics, with the film receiving poor box office returns in his native Spain and critically panned. The movie stoked controversy and received backlash for daring to criticize dictator Franco’s regime. Taking creative cues from Spanish filmmakers like Juan Antonio Bardem and borrowing tactics from New Spanish Cinema, Erice needed to lean into metaphor to avoid political censorship and secure a release. The masterpiece dared to view monstrosity through a revolutionary lens, examining the ordinary people at the mercy of Franco’s regime, utilizing the predicament of Frankenstein’s creature as a political metaphor.
In the movie, Ana develops an affinity for the monster following a screening in her hometown and discovers the monstrous is something to be embraced, not feared. This marks a divergence away from the prosaic depiction of a child protagonist and ahead of its time in how Ana assesses and approaches monstrosity. She never perceives the creature as evil or abhorrent. Rather, she questions the reasoning behind its existence while acknowledging the suffering it endures.
Children and Frankenstein As Kindred Spirits
The realization Frankenstein’s creature is a kindred spirit for the child is deftly handled by Erice. A mostly silent child, Ana lives without fear and is a child with an inquisitive mind, curious but never failing to approach life pragmatically. Her connection with the creature changes her in a fundamental way and enables her to face the horrors of her world. In horror storytelling, audiences regularly see children and innocence on a collision course with the otherworldly, monstrous, or despicably human.
Early examples of archetypal figures of childhood are the petrified, lost children inhabiting the pages of a Grimm fairytale, pitted against a sweet-talking wolf, or running afoul of a witch with a lascivious taste for young flesh. Erice goes against the typical narrative grain in the movie, letting his protagonist foster a fixation with the monster, believing it presents an opportunity for personal evolution. The dichotomy of good vs. evil has always been tactfully (safely) delineated in horror tales involving children, where innocence prevails against a grotesque other and life is restored to normal. But that’s not so here.
The Spirit of the Beehive radically subverts the trope, imbuing Ana with both relatability and an enigmatic quality. How many of us recognize her empathetic bond with a monster of pop culture? How many genre fans have sought out the fantastical, adopting it as armor against trauma? Movies, stories, monsters, and the impact they have on the imagination of a child (or adult) is a universal storytelling device—and one that never gets old. Finding identification and recognition in cinema and characters that skew into dark territory when our lives are defined by catastrophe and uncertainty is often our first line of defense against the real world.
Kindred Monstrous Spirits
Erice conveys how Ana only evolved and questioned her surroundings after seeing the James Whale movie, by recognizing that Frankenstein’s creature isn’t the villain of the story. Rather he’s a victim of power wielded corruptly, echoing her own life.
During the war, Ana’s was a childhood teetering on the edge of oblivion, but following her indoctrination into the horror genre, she finds herself on the cusp of revelations. What makes Ana stand out from her adult cinematic counterparts is how she never lets her obsession diminish or consume her completely. She rejoices at the possibilities when she opens Pandora’s Box. Ana is nothing like the immediate adults in her orbit: parents who are trapped in cyclical obsessions, sending them on a downward trajectory. Instead, Ana is driven by empathy, and an even fiercer determination to communicate her new desire, creating her own story by extending the narrative of a famous monster.
Guillermo Del Toro, Issa Lopez, and The Spirit of the Beehive
The legacy of monstrosity is built on the stories preceding it, The Spirit of the Beehive was shaped and steered in a creative direction by Frankenstein’s monster. The Spirit of the Beehive would become one of the most influential genre movies in Spanish history and inspire future filmmakers.
Issa Lopez and Guillermo Del Toro expand on the concepts only hinted at in Erice’s movie. In del Toro’s case, he adopts the speculative layers of Jorge Luis Borges and builds a story of human atrocity and monsters. In his film Pan’s Labyrinth, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is another child who lives inside her own head in a world of stories, oblivious to the suffering around her. A meeting with a fantastical fawn presents her with an opportunity for transcendence if she completes various tasks, enabling her to step into the world of fairytales and reign as queen of an underworld.
Like Ana, Ofelia inserts herself into a bigger narrative and befriends monsters to achieve a kind of transubstantiation. The Spirit of the Beehive loosely connects scenes with languorous pacing, hazy cinematography, and luminous lighting permeating every frame, which all add a dimension of disjointed surrealism. Del Toro’s loosely connected duology (which includes The Devil’s Backbone) possesses a realism and linearity more disturbing in comparison to Erice’s liminal spaces and dreamlike plotting. Ofelia’s descent into a mythic landscape mirrors Ana’s first glimpse of Frankenstein’s creature with both children finding their place in a parallel reality. The essence of del Toro’s movie is the same with the director citing Erice as a key influence for his filmmaking, and the core characters in his earlier movies could co-exist in a shared universe with Ana.
Children And The Power of Storytelling
Issa Lopez’s Tigers Are Not Afraid weaponizes the power of symbols and storytelling and weaves it effortlessly into a story about children’s extreme methods of resilience for children while navigating a culture of violence in Mexico City. Like their cinematic predecessors, the children in Lopez’s movie share a moth-to-a-flame-like curiosity that sometimes puts them in the line of fire. Estrella (Paola Lara) is a girl possibly orphaned by a cartel and plagued by waking nightmares and a clash with the visceral nature of masculinity. Joining forces with a group of homeless street urchins, the children concoct a kamikaze plan to liberate Estrella’s mother and exact vengeance on the men responsible.
Throughout the movie, ghosts and visions of the deceased guide or torment Estrella and the symbol of the tiger becomes a touchstone for survival and a call to arms for her army of street kids. Estella is cut from the same cloth as Ana and Ofelia with the minor difference being Estrella is initially terrified of the ghosts she encounters until gaining an understanding they may be key to her salvation. During an interview with Vulture, Lopez recalled how she processed grief as a child and hit the proverbial nail on the head: “I felt horrible. But that’s who you are as a kid. That’s how you survive: through fantasy, through creating stories, through playing. That’s what the movie’s about.”
The dream-logic visuals and metaphorical storytelling of The Spirit of the Beehive laid the groundwork and shaped the visions of dark luminaries like del Toro and Lopez. It’s a movie exploring the shadowy recesses of childhood and the sanctuary storytelling provides for the people who’ve slipped through the cracks and are a little lost. The movie emphasizes the importance of imagination, art, and our own ability to get lost in the fiction we gravitate towards. Even if that fiction happens to be full of monsters.
Categorized:Editorials
