在回家的途中，一位商人（瓦克拉·沃斯卡 Václav Voska 饰）遭遇了罕见的暴风雪，昏天黑地之中，商人误打误撞来到了一幢豪华神秘的城堡前。商人在城堡中受到了贵宾般的优厚待遇，但直到最后，商人仍然不知道城堡的主人究竟是谁。暴风雪停歇了，商人准备离开，临走之前，他决定在花园中摘一朵玫瑰送给自己最喜爱的小女儿贝儿（兹德娜·斯图登科娃 Zdena Studenková 饰），而令他没有想到的是，长相狰狞的野兽（Vlastimil Harapes 饰）出现在了他的面前向他索命。
商人失魂落魄的回到了家，将自己的遭遇告诉了六个儿女，爱父心切的贝儿决定代替父亲，只身来到了城堡。然而，等待着贝儿的却并非死亡，而是更加盛情的款待，野兽对她唯一的要求，就是不要离开城堡半步。贝儿并不惧怕野兽，随着时间的推移，两人之间的关系越来越近。

Oldrich Danek, the scriptwriter for "Hic Sunt Leones", who made his debut as a director in 1960 with the officially irreproachable "Three Tons of Dust" ("Tri tuny prachu"), also turned to history - "The Nuremberg Campaign" ("Spanila jizda" - 1963) - to seek metaphors for the present. In 1967, Danek made his best film, "The Royal Blunder" ("Kralovsky omyl"), a fourteenth-century tale about the relativity of despotic power.
Historical material was by far the best medium for Frantisek Vlacil, who in 1967 completed his unique reconstruction of thirteenth-century Bohemia, "Marketa Lazarova", based on the novel by V. Vancura. Supported by the photography of B. Batka, he achieved an almost flawless recreation of a period that hovered between paganism and Christianity and filled it with authentic portraits of people from another civilization.