More beautiful than ever in a new digital restoration, Cocteau’s spellbinding, sensuous masterpiece was recently described by Guillermo del Toro as ‘the most perfect cinematic fable ever told’.

With its enchanted castle, home to fantastic living statuary, and Cocteau’s lover Jean Marais starring as a Beast who is at once brutal and gentle, rapacious and vulnerable, shamed and repelled by his own bloodlust, this remains a high point of the cinematic Gothic imagination. A million miles from the vanilla, Disney fluff we were served as kids.

 As Marina Warner has written, ‘The film unfolds to a perfectly poised slow tempo in surreal settings that gain intensity from the fabulous décor and costumes, the glittering lighting and the many moments of magic effects. The candle-lit shadow-play deepens the Gothic atmosphere of the beast’s castle, harking back to early expressionist classics of the genre.’

(You can read our interview with mythographer Marina Warner here.)