MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

One of the most dramatic, gruesome and far-reaching mysteries of the long eighteenth century involved the savage predations of the human-eating Beast of Gevaudan in 1764-7, and the subsequent representations of the attacker, which transformed the identity of what was likely a “natural” animal into a supernatural one. The narratives that developed in response to the Beast’s attacks, which claimed as many as one hundred adult and child victims across the south-central mountainous region, borrowed heavily from medieval poetic traditions; these ideas, fused with local folklore and assisted by a rapid radiation outward into European culture, helped to shape the supernatural image of the werewolf that continues to exist today.

These lycanthropic undercurrents, however, were largely unexplored by director Christophe Gans in his cinematic iteration of the incident Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte des Loups) (2001). Instead, the film discards the werewolf and the supernatural in order to reimagine the Beast within a context that makes the Gevaudan region a focal point for a number of larger eighteenth-century concerns. The conspiracy the film unravels is not adapted from any extant historical sources about the Beast, and instead introduces the presence in the incident of political intrigue and secret societies. The cinematic storyworld brings in such disparate elements as the French Revolution, burgeoning scientific developments on the Continent, the colonial presence of European empires in the New World, and the Vatican.

This project will examine the cinematic Beast as a creature that occupies a storyworld which looks well beyond its immediate geographic and cultural context, and will look specifically at the iteration of the eighteenth century that coagulates around this monster and its wake, and what may be learned from this film’s inclusion of outside factors not typically attached to the folklore of the Beast of Gevaudan.