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Episode 485 - The Beast with Five Fingers (Patreon)

Published:
2020-01-31 03:54:13
Edited:
2024-12-12 19:02:15
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

Tune in as we get a grasp on The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey!

Special thanks to our reader - Josh Peters. Get his opinions on all your whiskey needs at The Whiskey Jug!

Coming in February: THE KING IN YELLOW 

Comments

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

On the subject of “hand horror” I dimly remember an episode of... possibly Amazing Stories, or the “new” (for the time) Twilight Zone, or... possibly it was part of a Tales From The Crypt? Anyway, it was about a very successful plastic surgeon who’s hands decide they’re not appreciated enough and rebel. The Hands talk to him and were verbally abusive, eventually the guys hands start trying to hurt him. It was funny right up to the point where the guy’s hands get him in, I think, a car accident. So he wakes up in the hospital and the woman, who was the guy’s love interest, is holding one of his hands lovingly in hers. And I was like, “Oh. Oh no.”

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

Actually, AD&D 2E (and 1E I'm sure, though I've never played it) had two versions of a disembodied hand-monster. Well...one and a half. One is a staple low-threat undead often fashioned by necromancers in big batches called a Crawling Claw. They're often employed either as swarm defense or an especially crude form of assassin, and favor strangulation. Obviously, they aren't very effective and are fairly easy to destroy. Their real strength comes in numbers. The thing I'm counting for half here is...The Hand. Gary Gygax's world, Oerth (it's pronounced "Oiyth," like a guy from the Bronx saying "Earth"), had the lich Vecna, who ascended to Demigod status and whose severed eye and hand each became divine relics. The Cult of Vecna, in turn, used its immense magic to craft servants in their image--The Eye was a seven foot tall man with a giant eye in place of a head which granted immense perceptive abilities. The Hand was a short dude with a giant hand for a head. No. No, really. It's kind of amazing. It's *exactly* the kind of ridiculous thing I'd expect Gary to throw in because it made him grin. You can check out The Hand's 2E stats here: http://adnd.geoshitties.installgentoo.com/mm/hand.html

H P Lovecraft's Cat

‘The Big Hand” by The Cure is a Disintegration Era song "Disintegration is the best album ever!” Kyle Brofloski

Markus Lauerer

Totally unrelated to this episode, but I'm going through the whole backlog again at the moment, and I just remembered how I came across the podcast in the first place. I was reading through some old anthology of Lovecraft over the summer and for some reason really loved "In the Walls of Eryx". I had already read his great stories, mind you, but somehow this strange little tale took hold of my imagination. I googled around a little, and as luck would have it, exactly at that time the podcast did the episode on this particular story. Haven't missed a single episode since then. So yeah, guess I have "In the Walls of Eryx" to thank for that. I still like the story, by the way, it has great atmosphere, even if the science stuff is highly implausible, of course.

Jon Hancock

Amazing. Not only have you stopped me from listening to The Cure again, but in a single episode you've also managed to turn The Muppet Christmas Carol into something altogether unsavoury. Still, this story may be the most astonishing thing I have ever heard (and it is indeed quite different from the film). So many questions, so very many questions.

Steve

"Rolling dice and experiencing God without any intervention" - brilliant. Leeds is also a hotbed, if not the origin, of chaos magic.

Nic Wassell

Surprised you kind of blanked on Michael's Caine's job in The Hand as not only was he an artist but he was a comic book artist of a Conan-like character called "Mandro". According to IMDB, the artist who made the Mandro artwork for the film was Barry Windsor-Smith who drew the Conan The Barbarian comic for Marvel. I also like Michael Caine's reason for doing the film, according to Wikipedia: "Michael Caine, after the success of his previous film Dressed to Kill, was interested in making another horror film to earn enough to put a down payment on a new garage he was having built". Seeing as he also said of Jaws: The Revenge that he hadn't seen the film but had seen the house that he bought with the fee, maybe there is a possible film studies paper charting Michael Caine's career via the architectural purchases he made with his earnings?

Levi Krain

Leeds is about to see a surge in tourism and immigration. If the chamber of commerce doesn't start sponsoring the podcast, I can only conclude it's filled with ungrateful bastards.

Alan Ricks

This is the best story you’ve ever done, hands down.

Mark Saunders

Great episode! Though it was very distracting to hear my name every thirty seconds. I vaguely remember watching the movie on tv as a kid and just laughing at the hand walking around on its own.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

I saw the Michael Caine “Hand” flick on HBO as a wee lad. Random and appropriately disembodied scenes are stuck in my memory, like the moment of the car accident that severs the thing in the first place, when Caine’s character is trying to wave back a truck or something by sticking his hand out the window. I think about it even now whenever my hand goes out a car window—which doesn’t happen often for this very reason, I guess. I seem to remember another disembodied hand flick that came out around the same time as the Michael Caine movie, and I have a memory of Siskel and Ebert mocking both of them together in an episode of Sneak Previews. But all I could find was a compilation of “Dog of the Week” segments of that show from 1981 put up by a YouTube user named Eric Stran (a different Eric from me). It’s at the end of “Dogs of the Week” compilation “Part 8” at around the 10-minute mark. “Supposedly it follows Michael Caine from New England to Nevada,” Siskel complains, “and just the idea of the hand crawling over the expressways and interstates still makes me laugh.”

Ko-Wahi Kit

“The Beast with Five Fingers” Directed by Trevor Towers.

Louis Hobbs

“Dongs-A-Plenty” coincidently, was the name of my The Cure tribute band.

Ben A

Well, hands down, this was quite the handy summation of a handless tale by you handsome gents. I came across this story some years ago, after reading some interesting academic papers about disfigurement and physical handicaps as tropes in horror (where the movie has a prominent role). Like you, I thought the story was more a farce than a horror tale, an absurdist commentary on Edwardian avoidance and sensibilities. It’s strange to think this tale was a contemporary of the White Ship, Dagon, or the Statement of Randolph Carter. They make a heck of a contrast.

OverfedHousecat

Another creepy disembodied hand story: the later part of Neil Gaiman's Coraline! Check out the drawing from the book, just Google "dave mckean coraline hand"

Duana Pearson

Hand-based horrer reminds me of Clive Barker's "The Body Politic" . Great short story where a chaps right hand decides it's the hand-messiah and chops of the left so it can go and rouse a hand army to take over the world. Though there are real creepy parts, there's also a lot of absurd humour. I guess the practical problems of animated disembodied body parts means it's just not that scary. Though maybe I'd feel differently if I actually saw a human hand scuttling around. I'll let you know.

James Anthony

Just want to add Idle Hands(1999) to the list of films in the "disembodied hands" genre, with a possible honorable mention for Summer School (1987) for it's disembodied hand scene.

Allison Albright

I came to this comments section for hand puns and I was not disappointed.

Cacodaemoniacal

Not gonna lie, I'm midkey excited about the AMA. Cleverness will ensue.

Rafe Ball

EUSTACE: What I don’t understand, Saunders, is how this thing got to be so damnably fast and strong? Cut to a flashback TRAINING MONTAGE, complete with 80s TRAINING MONTAGE MUSIC - THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS tries to lift the sleeping ADRIAN BORLSOVER’s other hand, strains and fails - Cut to THE BEAST doing finger push-ups - THE BEAST tries to lift the other hand again, gets it partway up and has to drop it - Cut to THE BEAST with a sports headband (wristband?), running up and down the duvet on two fingers - THE BEAST tries to lift the other hand once more, strains, and gets it off the bed and in the air. It drops it and ‘jumps’ up and down with joy - Cut to THE BEAST doing one-finger press-ups - THE BEAST is now lifting ADRIAN BOLSOVER’s leg off the bed and ‘bench pressing’ it SAUNDERS: Steroids. It’s got to be steroids.

Pete Williams

You could say Eustace was his uncle's right hand man.

Rick Hound

Yeah I feel the same way about a Verge article about the recent rpg Fate of Cthulhu

David Halstead

I know of the Austrian silent film The Hands of Orlac (1924) based on a 1920 French novel by Maurice Renard. It seems to be the common trope of evil hand stories where an artist loses their hands in an accident, gets them replaced with the hands of a criminal and then feels compelled to commit crimes. The best version of this I've seen is Mad Love (1935) in which Colin Clive (Dr. Frankenstein) is a pianist who loses his hands and Peter Lorre is the mad doctor who grafts new hands onto him. The crook whose hands he gets was an expert knife thrower and Clive gains this ability, which comes into play at the climax of the film. It's a very strange and funny film.

Ben Mund

I have vivid memories of a black & white movie I saw on TV when I was very young that centered around a disembodied hand. You mentioned a filmed adaptation - that has to be what I saw. Good lord, I remember the pieces I saw scaring me as much as the "Talking Tina" Twilight Zone episode did when I was 6 or 7. Great show. Also, next, please do "The Beast With Two Backs."

Elisheba

You keep saying no one would act like this, just ignoring the while hand situation, but remember Frankenstein. He creates a being out of dead bodies and then just goes for a walk and ignores it until it goes away. I also try to ignore my problems until they go away on their own. The fact that this never works does not stop me.

Andrew Trnacek

I've seen both the original black and white movie and the Michael Caine movie (which was directed by Oliver Stone).

Andrew Trnacek

I remember being young and finding the concept of a disembodied hand terrifying. (Notice how only disembodied hands are scary, a foot would just be comical, a patella, useless. I also draw your attention to the Gary Larson Cartoon called the return of the nose of doctor Vespucci. Where a disembodied nose returns on the anniversary of his murder). Its worth watching the trailer. At least in the movie the characters have the good sense to be freaked out.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

I've been re-listening to older episodes and in the normal course of things heard "The Mummy's Foot" today, which actually contains a mention of the movie version of "The Beast With Five Fingers" and a longer reminiscence of "The Hand" than this episode has. Huh, come to think of it both "Mummy's Foot" and "Beast" have a similar dry sense of humor about things, although "Beast" doesn't have any hot mummy action.

H P Lovecraft's Cat

A question for February, which will be answered soon anyway. Are you redoing the entire King in Yellow stories or filling in on the ones you haven't covered. I noticed the YouTube channel posted Repairer of Reputations ,it's episode #121 for people who want to listen.

Decoy Ocelot

Glad that you gents had fun covering this whackadoodle story! The bizarre scene where the disembodied hand coaxes the poor parrot, Peter, into a false sense of security only to strangle him made me laugh at the sheer strangeness of it, but this was quickly followed by a cold shiver as I got a nightmarish flashback to the scene in Guy De Maupassant's "Diary of a Madman" in which the esteemed judge stabs his subordinate's poor pet canary with a penknife and successfully conceals the crime so he can commit even greater evils down the line. Avian crimes at their most fowl!!!

Andrew Trnacek

Maybe the hand thought the parrot was a stool pigeon

Peter Larsen

I’m pretty sure Dongs O’Plenty was a supporting character in one of the Bond films starring Roger Moore.

Maria Cichetti

After listening to this episode I jnow that I have read this story, but I have no idea why! I did also think that it was ridiculous that the characters tried so hard (without trying at all) to completely ignore the bizarre fact that there was a fully conscious hand "running" around.