It’s a good time to revisit The Ghost and the Darkness, the Beast movie of the 1990s
polygon.comThe new Idris Elba movie Beast is a lean, propulsive creature feature, the kind of efficient man-versus-nature horror story that ladles on the scares, then wraps before the conceit gets old or overstretched. In the film, Elba plays a widower and father of two who has to protect his children from a man-eating lion in South Africa. It’s a comparatively small, intimate movie in scope and character, more like Crawl or Prey than like the Jurassic Park films it’s openly referencing.
For those who prefer to see their lion-gone-rogue stories (and their Steven Spielberg homages) playing out on a more majestic, ambitious scale, though, Beast is an excellent reminder to revisit the 1996 adventure thriller The Ghost and the Darkness, another story where the intellectual power of human prey has a hard time matching up to the physical power of a big veldt predator. As a horror story, The Ghost and the Darkness is surprisingly tense and bloody. But as a character study that actually invests in its characters as people, rather than leaving them as tick marks on a “death by numbers” checklist, it’s particularly well-crafted, in a way that’s familiar from a completely different Spielberg blockbuster.
The Ghost and the Darkness is nominally a historical epic based on actual events in 1898 Kenya, where two lions terrorized a British railroad camp on the Tsavo River for nearly a year, killing dozens of workers. British Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson — played in the film version by Val Kilmer — eventually wrote a book about the events, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, in which he claimed the lions slaughtered more than 130 people, though that total was later heavily disputed. What isn’t disputed is that the lions were uncharacteristically bold,
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