Every ‘Beast’ Costume Is A Hot Pile Of Garbage

From bland swim team bros like Prince Erik to date rapey swim team bros like Prince Charming, few Disney princes have ever made their audiences swoon. It’s no wonder, then, that one of the greatest romantic leads in the fairytale canon isn’t a prince but a monster: Beauty and the Beast’s cursed manimal, a prince who, specifically because of his hulking presence and heaving hirsute pecks, has sexually awakened more prepubescent Millennials than Justin Timberlake’s frosted tips. 

Disney

So why is it, then, that any dude who has had to dress up as The Beast as part of a couple’s costume for Halloween (or Valentine’s Day, no judgment) always looks like he just got his face painted by a birthday party clown who forgot to refill his antipsychotic medication?

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Or, worse, looks like the world’s least ambitious steampunk furry?

Amazon

Even elaborate, one-drop-of-sweat-and-you’re-eating-that-deposit fancy dress costumes can offer no better than turning real-life Beasts into either a cursed Liberace …

Costume World Theatrical

Or the kind of painted horror you’d expect to see in a faded photograph on a pig bone altar in True Detective.

The Costume Gallery

These cosplayers will come to a realization the film industry has had for over a century: there’s no making The Beast hot. While costume designers have always been able to just stuff Belle into a quinceanera dress and call it a day, they have racked their brains trying to make Beast actors as animalistically appealing as romantic lit lovers have been picturing him since the 1740s. True, we now do live in a peak Beast-fuckability period where movies like the 2018 Disney remake …

Disney

The Bacherlor: Grimm Edition.

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And the 2014 Franco-German adaptation La Belle et la Bete … 

Pathe Distribution

Oh, he’ll find your magic portal to Narnia all right. 

… have managed to turn their leading men into the kind of hot half-lion boyfriends who’d make you wait in the car while picking up a rent check from their parents. But make no mistake: CGI is doing all of the heavy lifting here. Take away the 50 million dollar special effects team, and you’re left with the kind of Beast who looks like they glued horns and a Fabio wig onto a small town quarterback …

Marchenperlen 

“Babe, I’ve asked you a million times not to leave fingerprints on my carriage’s finish!”

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A dull fate the visionary team-up of Ron Perlman and George R.R. Martin couldn’t even avoid.

CBS

Not since putting a direwolf’s head on a spike has Martin caused so much animal cruelty.

This Beast aesthetic has been around since the dawn of Hollywood — with little success in raising audiences’ blood pressure one way or the other. Whether in color or black-and-white, the result always resembles a depressing combination of the Cowardly Lion …

DisCina

He’ll tear your brain and heart out – and then be depressed about it.

A flat-nosed cat furious over his owners having put a fancy dress collar on him for the family Christmas picture …

Showtime

When your vet tells you to wear a cone but you have a red carpet event coming up. 

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And a Bee Gee with lycanthrope.

United Artists

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk I’m a werewolf man, no time to talk.

By the early 2000s, filmmakers simply gave up on the impossible task of turning a literal manimal into an appealing screen presence. Instead, they turned their Beasts into a series of hot dudes ‘undone’ by some physical deformity. This cop-out gave us such memorable Beasts as Hot Dude With Cool Scars …

CBS Films