Welcome to Cultoween! Last year, we took a look at some completely random horror gems from any year, which resulted in a lot of possibilities – of course, we had the whole wide genre to sift through! This year, we are limiting things a bit. There’s still the randomness, still the surprise, but instead of allowing for any horror movie, the selection must come from our own collection! We’re picking unseen movies that we currently physically own! A collector’s worst nightmare is spending money on a disc and then never getting around to watching that, so we’re rectifying that and digging into some titles we own but have never watched.
Alex de la Iglesia’s 1995 dark horror comedy The Day of the Beast concerns a priest who, after a series of mathematical equations and studious years spent poring over scripture, decides he’s learned the date of the Antichrist’s birth – specifically Christmas Eve, somewhere in Madrid. So he enlists the help of a metalhead and a New Age TV personality to help him conjure the Devil to show him where the birth of the Antichrist will occur, to ultimately track him down and prevent it from happening.
Alex de la Igleisa’s output is generally blackly humorous while also exploring more serious overtones, and The Day of the Beast is much like his follow-up Perdita Durango in that regard. Here, the humor is predicated partially on the viewer’s take on organized religion, even though the film can be seen as both a reverent portrayal and a skewering depending on interpretation.
As the priest searches the streets of Madrid for the Antichrist, he’s forced to do a number of evil things in the name of his religion and crusade. He drugs a woman and steals her blood for the virginal sacrifice, he accidentally throws a woman down the stairs, and more generically throughout the movie, he overlooks true “evil” happening on the streets of Madrid in pursuit of his goal. It’s this kind of hypocritical posturing that makes organized religion so farcical, and The Day of the Beast finds a kind of slapstick comedy in that bleakness.
Similarly, Iglesia tracks the genesis of cult-type religions as the priest continues to suck others into his orbit, effectively ruining the lives of the two others he works with. The film concludes with an intentionally humorous and ambiguous resolution: no one will ever know if they really stopped the Antichrist, or if all of their efforts and sins were in vain; and yet their lives are completely destroyed, forced into a solitary lifestyle, disfigured, burned, and unrecognized. The Day of the Beast forces the viewer to reckon with the overarching question, and ultimately allowing individuals to see what they want to see.
Ironically, No, because the film is set at Christmastime and features all of the staples of that season. We should have included this for Cultsploichristmas or something instead. However, them’s the breaks with random picks.
Watch it even though it’s not a Halloween-themed movie.
It would be remiss of me to not recommend The Day of the Beast despite its lack of Halloween atmosphere, because it’s truly an entertaining and comical film regardless of when you watch it. Definitely see it, it’s an important experience.
