Wes Craven Loved One of the Most Beautiful Horror Movies Ever Made, and Now it’s Streaming
The data is unclear on whether younger audiences are willing to watch older movies. There’s power in nostalgia—it’s why cargo shorts are back—and younger generations love dredging up old trends and fashioning them as new. When it comes to movies, however, it’s considerably more challenging. Not only is there more stuff to watch on more screens than ever before, but actually tracking down the availability of bona fide classics remains a challenge without access to a niche, cinephile-centric streaming service. Criterion Channel subscribers, this one’s for you.
I get it. When I was younger, I ask also drawn toward media that skewed closer to my demographic, and it wasn’t until I’d gotten older that curiosity encouraged me to start scrapping the earliest catalogues available for some classic cinematic flavor. Some of my favorites of all time emerged from that curiosity, including one classic that comes with a recommendation from one of the preeminent masters of horror.
Whatever generation you’re from, you won’t want to miss this surreal, sumptuous genre classic, now streaming on HBO Max.
Per HBO Max: A mysterious monster forces a young innocent to share his life in an enchanted castle.
I know it sounds weird to describe a movie as delicious, but Jean Cocteau’s rich and evocative Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) really, truly is delicious. Cocteau’s adaptation is seductive and flamboyant, and it’s been reasonably considered one of the best French movies of all time because of that. So much so, the late master of horror Wes Craven regularly regarded Beauty and the Beast as one of his favorite movies ever made.
Craven was “taken with the film’s surrealism, seeing the technique as “a sort of outlaw form of looking at the world as semi-mad,” according to SlashFilm, and even sought to recreate some of Beauty and the Beast’s more indelible images in films of his own, including The People Under the Stairs and The Serpent and the Rainbow. Beyond the images, the surreal, gothic flavor of Beauty and the Beast is pronounced in most of Craven’s work, whether that’s classics like Scream or hidden gems like Shocker. Beauty and the Beast is a genuine masterpiece, and if you haven’t yet seen it, now’s your chance to live deliciously.
What do you think? Any plans to heed Wes Craven’s advice and check out Beauty and the Beast on HBO Max? If you do, please let me know what you think on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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