(1975; La bête, French, English, Italian, dubbed into English) A horror-sex cult-comedy based on the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast from director/writer Walerian Borowczyk opens with an explicit scene of a stallion mounting and copulating with a mare. The act of horse breeding, accompanied by stentorian neighing, is repeated under the supervision of bearded Mathurin de l'Esperance, his right hand bandaged, before he is summoned to the chateau by his father, Pierre (Guy Tréjan).

Before the summoning of Mathurin, Pierre threatens his uncle, Duc Rammendelo de Balo (Marcel Dalio), an elderly man confined to a wheelchair, with the exposure of a 45-year-old secret unless he summons his brother, a Cardinal at the Vatican not yet returned from a mission to Africa, to bless the marriage of Mathurin and Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel), an American heiress on her way to the chateau. Pierre shows the duke the evidence of a bottle of poison, with fingerprints, with which the duchess was murdered.

First Mathurin - whom Lucy has never seen, having fallen in love through correspondence - must be shaved and baptized, the ceremony performed by a priest (Roland Armontel), sufficiently bribed with the promise of a new roof and bell for his church, accompanied by two boys, with whom the clergyman seems overly familiar.

Driven by a black chauffeur in a Rolls Royce, Lucy arrives with her aunt, Virginia Broadhurst (Elisabeth Kaza), executrix of her brother-in-law's will, a document that requires the marriage to take place within six months of his death, leaving only two days to spare. The fate of the family name of l'Esperance is at stake; widower Pierre's other offspring, Clarisse (Pascale Rivault), a nymphomaniac taking care of two children for a friend in Paris, is frequently in bed with the young black servant (their diddling often interrupted by requests for the young man's services elsewhere), while hiding the little boy and girl in a wardrobe.

At dinner the young couple finally make their face-to-face acquaintance, but Mathurin (fearful of his ugly appearance) erupts into a fit - blamed on too much to drink - requiring him to be carried away to his room to sleep it off.

In her bedroom Lucy falls asleep (though intermittently she wakes aroused and goes nakedly to Mathurin's room, each time unable to waken her intended groom from his stupor), dreaming of Romilda de l'Esperance (Sirpa Lane), a reverie that incorporates elements of all she has seen - the family album, the painting of the countess, her corset, Voltaire's poem, a snail, the photo she had taken of the horses mating - and heard (especially a tune on the harpsichord one of the boys played downstairs) during the day into the legendary tale of a 200-year-old event of the countess being chased, disrobed, and ravished by a horrible beast with a humungous member, portrayed like a silent-era flicker.

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