By BRANDON GIL
In the 1960s, as the Golden Age of Hollywood was ending due to the rise in popularity of television and non-studio films, actresses like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, who dominated film’s classic era, found themselves in limbo; They were too old to play ingenues and too young to play grandmothers. Unfortunately for them, older actresses were relegated to matronly roles.
Then, in 1962, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? changed the game for former Golden-Age starlets and kicked off the hagsploitation craze.
Bette Davis as unhinged former child star Baby Jane Hudson in “WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?”
Hagsploitation depicts aging actresses as unhinged, tragic, and often grotesque villains or antiheroes. These women, also known as “psycho biddies,” are generally just as melodramatic as they are dangerous, making them great campy gay icons. While men are present in hagsploitation films, they generally play minor roles so our favorite psycho-biddies can have the limelight.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (directed by Robert Aldrich) stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis as aging actresses that unhappily cohabitate in their Hollywood mansion. Baby Jane (Bette Davis) becomes increasingly jealous of her more successful sister, Blanche (Joan Crawford), as the latter is catapulted back into stardom when her films begin airing on television. This jealousy becomes increasingly cringe-worthy neglect and abuse throughout the film, culminating in a shocking revelation that humanizes our favorite psycho biddy, Baby Jane.
A slew of hagsploitation films was released after the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? One film, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (also directed by Robert Aldrich), brought Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland together on screen. Bette Davis stars as Charlotte, a housebound woman accused of murdering her lover decades earlier. Like Baby Jane, Charlotte receives a redemption arc, as we learn she’s just as much a victim as she is a psycho biddy. It turns out that the true villain is Charlotte’s seemingly put-together cousin, Miriam (Olivia de Havilland).
Joan Crawford in “STRAIT-JACKT”
Another seminal hagsploitation film is William Castle’s Strait-Jacket (1964). It stars Joan Crawford as Lucy, a woman who returns to society after spending 20 years in a mental hospital for murdering her husband in a fit of passion after discovering his affair. Axe murders begin again, and Lucy is the obvious suspect. Much like Baby Jane and Charlotte, Lucy is redeemed when we learn that she was framed for the murders by her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker).
Lady in a Cage (1964) is a gritty, unsettling home invasion film with a hagsploitation twist. It stars Olvia de Havilland as Cornelia, a wealthy, disabled woman who gets stuck in an elevator in her mansion. Soon, her home is invaded by burglars who taunt her. One invader finds a note written by her son, begging his mother to release her hold on him or he’ll commit suicide. He cruelly shares this note with Cornelia, causing her to have a mental breakdown. Despite the actual monsters who invaded her home, Cornelia calls herself a monster. Unlike the aforementioned films, Lady in a Cage attempts to soil the leading lady’s image in the final act with the revelation that she’s an overbearing mother.
The women in all of these films are far from damsels in distress. They are also not the villainous femme fatales that dominated film noir in the ’30s and ’40s. They are more complicated than that. These are women with flaws in films that center them. Nonetheless, this subgenre is problematically called “hagsploitation” because it also exploits stereotypes we have about aging women.
Modern horror films such as. The House of the Devil, The Witch, Hereditary, and Barbarian tend to pair extreme violence or taboo acts with aging naked bodies in an attempt to create grotesquery. In doing so, they send a message that the only thing scarier than a woman committing heinous acts is a naked, aging woman committing heinous acts. This, in turn, fuels ageist and misogynistic attitudes toward mature women, creating a vicious and seemingly inescapable circle.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in “WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?”
Given the Hays Code (Hollywood’s infamous self-censorship system) and sensibilities of the time, ‘60s-era filmmakers were limited in how they could depict violence and the grotesque. Nonetheless, they still relied on ageist and misogynistic attitudes to shock and horrify their audiences. This was primarily done through performances, makeup, hair styling, and costuming. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the textbook example. Despite being middle-aged, Baby Jane is stuck in time as a vaudeville child star; She wears a baby-doll dress, pigtails, and clown-like makeup. This film preys on fears of aging and subverts the expectations of what a woman Bette Davis’ age should look like. In turn, we’re given an iconic psycho biddy.
Subtext also dominated throughout the Hays Code years. Moviegoers learned to read between the lines in these films. For example, a camera panning up from a bed became the universal symbol for sex. Subtext also allowed audiences to recognize and identify the hardships of movie characters.
In Strait-Jacket, there is a scene in which Lucy panics when she believes she is trapped in a small powder room with wallpaper reminiscent of a jail cell. Later, she vaguely explains how she has paid her dues for murdering her husband by spending 20 years in a mental asylum. Lucy’s face is etched with trauma. A modern film might go into explicit detail about the trauma she endured during those 20 years, but instead, this Hays Code-era film leaves this to the audience’s imagination. In doing so, it portrays Lucy in a more positive light, thereby eliciting empathy.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a love letter to both the proto-psycho-biddy film Psycho and child vaudeville stars like Shirley Temple. On the surface, Baby Jane is jealous and vindictive, which motivates her to torture her sister, Blanche. On a deeper level, Baby Jane is a traumatized woman who was victimized as a childhood star. Baby Jane is clearly an homage to Shirley Temple, who was sexualized and objectified on and off-screen as early as age 5. Moviegoers in 1962 had the benefit of hindsight to recognize that Baby Jane is a story of what could have happened to Shirley Temple in a parallel universe. Thus, a loveable, quotable, and tragic character was born.
Olivia de Havilland in “LADY IN A CAGE”
We can only imagine the cruelty inflicted by Caroline on her son, Malcolm, in Lady in a Cage. Given that she calls herself a “monster,” it’s unlikely that she’s simply an overbearing mother. We’re given clues that perhaps Malcolm is gay, and she was unaccepting of him. We also see a couple of scenes of Caroline and Malcolm in which they seem more like a couple than a mother and son, leading us to wonder if perhaps there was sexual assault or incest (a la Mildred Pierce) involved. Whichever the case, this film makes a point of transforming Caroline from a damsel in distress to a woman with dark secrets.
Hagsplotiaton reached its peak by the late 1960s when the Golden Age and its starlets began to seem like a distant memory. Moviegoers embraced smaller, grittier, and more violent independent films. Hagsploitation began to look like highbrow camp compared to the slasher films that would dominate the 1980s.
Nonetheless, the ageist and misogynist attitudes toward aging actresses persisted in the minds of Hollywood and moviegoers but so did the appetite for psycho-biddies. The ‘80s and beyond relegated the psycho-biddy archetype to minor roles played by less famous actresses.
Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) meets the woman in room 237 in “THE SHINING”
Perhaps the most memorable minor psycho-biddy of the 1980s is the woman in room 237 in The Shining (1980). She lies in her bathtub, waiting for the next victim to sexually assault. She’s dangerous, she’s lascivious, and her naked body’s grotesqueness is taken to an extreme with gangrenous lesions. While this character has a major impact on the film’s storyline, she is barely in it. She exists solely to advance the storyline and to shock and disturb the audience.
This trend of shocking audiences by juxtaposing women’s bodies with disturbing imagery continues. Examples include the infirm sister, Zelda, in Pet Sematary (1989); Helena Markos, the witch, in Suspiria (1977 and 2018); unnamed cult members of House of the Devil, Hereditary, and Midsommar; and the serial killer, Pearl, in X. Unlike earlier hagsploitation movies, these modern films all center on younger and more conventionally beautiful people.
Films starring younger women portraying psycho-biddies often go to great lengths to make these women horrific. These include Curtains, where the killer dons a creepy, ill-fitting hag mask; Mommie Dearest, in which Faye Dunaway’s face is caked in makeup as she screams, “No more wire hangers!” and Hagasuzza: A Heather’s Curse, where the protagonist’s bodily fluids are juxtaposed with taboo acts to transform her from a sympathetic character to a witch whom we reluctantly root for.
Few recent horror movies and thrillers star aging actresses as quotable and loveable as the classic psycho biddies. Those that do star aging actresses are remarkably different from the hagsploitation films of the ‘60s.
Jill Larson in “THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN”
For example, The Taking of Deborah Logan checks many troublesome hagsploitation trope boxes including, (1.) an elderly woman who is (2.) sometimes naked (3.) while committing dangerous or villainous acts (4.) because she’s mentally ill. Unlike ‘60s-era hagsploitation, the titular character has little agency, as a combination of dementia and demonic possession causes her to commit heinous acts. Unlike Baby Jane, Deborah Logan is someone we pity, but we don’t necessarily want to be her. She’s not campy, nor is she quotable. You certainly will never see a drag queen perform as her. Nonetheless, The Taking of Deborah Logan centers its titular character in a way we rarely see in modern hagsploitation films. In many ways, it’s more similar to ‘60s-era films than it is to modern horror that relegates older women to antagonist or minor roles.
Perhaps we’ll see a new wave of hagsploitaiton films starring the likes of Meryl Streep, Rita Moreno, or Viola Davis as axe-wielding antiheroines, whom we love to cheer for (and secretly admire). Until then, go back and check out some of the 1960s classics and celebrate the women who star in them!
