H.P. Lovecraft was a man of many fears. Born and bred in the upper crest of New England society, Lovecraft came to loathe all that was not like him: white, wealthy, educated and prudent. He was excessively bigoted, even by the late 19th and early 20th century standards. Lovecraft’s bigotry, agoraphobia, misanthropy and existentialism all culminated in a genre fiction he became synonymous with: cosmic horror. Lovecraft’s endless tales of infallible, incomprehensible gods absorbing Earth in apocalyptic terror were a testament to his abiding fear of the “other.” Although Lovecraft died in relative obscurity during his time, his work would finally gain recognition through 1930s and 1940s pulp reprintings. It takes no real stretch of the imagination to understand why Lovecraftian themes resonated with pre-World War II audiences. Anxiety was steep, trust was low, the global economy had bottomed out, authoritarian regimes were popping up like daisies in Europe and all the newspaper headlines seemed to spell out “W-A-R.”
Horror holds societal fears to a funhouse mirror, distorting, abstracting and exaggerating them until they become monsters. Impulsive isolationism, general antipathy towards social and racial minorities and percolating dread were all familiar feelings within the American public by the time Lovecraft’s mythology entered pop culture. Lovecraft gave them monsters for their fears. If in the 1930s, our society made metaphorical monsters of immigration, miscegenation and the looming devastation of another world war, then what fears do we make into monsters today?
Consider the carousel of anti-aging panaceas that deck the shelves of every store. Or the girls, not even in their adolescence, who stockpile retinol creams, polypeptide moisturizers and 24, 48 and 72-hour full-coverage foundation. Or the preteens who abstain from sipping drinks through straws, or smiling too broadly or being in the sun for too long in fear of premature wrinkles and dark spots. Or the young women, barely past their teens, queuing up for “baby botox” and “preventative filler.” Or the internet’s obsession with “girlhood,” while “womanhood” remains undefined and altogether opposite. Given these phenomena have flooded our cultural zeitgeist just within the past decade, it’s not impossible to reckon that our society fears aging. More specifically, aging women. And the horror genre has received our age-crazed hysteria with open arms.
Films and television programs like “The Taking of Deborah Logan” (2014), “Hereditary” (2018), “Marianne” (2019), “X” (2022), “Pearl” (2022), “Barbarian” (2022), “The Front Room” (2024) and “The Substance” (2024) all draw tropes from and, in many cases, fall distinctly into the subgenre of horror known as “hagsploitation.” But what is hagsploitation? And why are more and more horror films beginning to utilize its tropes?
Before 1960, horror across the media largely featured supernatural foes. Horror monsters were ghouls, goblins, vampires, werewolves and phantoms. Before 1960, we only had to fear the wicked imagination of screenwriters and directors. Before 1960, horror was practically an extension of fantasy, another avenue of escapism. But in the summer of 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” was released, it sent shockwaves through audiences, studios and the genre of horror. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), is an isolated, mild-mannered innkeeper who cares for his aging mother while haplessly trying to revive their wilting family business. Throughout the movie, he harbors a terrible secret: his mother, driven mad with jealousy, murders the unsuspecting women who cross through the inn, believing they intend to sweep Norman away. It is not until the final act that it is revealed that Norman committed these murders in a fugue state, believing himself to be his mother, who he had unknowingly killed prior to the events of the film.
Norman Bates was not hardened by a lifetime of juvenile delinquency and mischief. He had empathy for his victims, not realizing that he was the one who killed them. Had Norman not been so alienated, he perhaps could have received psychotherapy to overcome his violent urges. Norman Bates could have led a normal life. In other words, Norman Bates was human. Norman Bates could be anyone, even the viewer. While psychological horror had been attempted to varying degrees of success prior to “Psycho,” few villains were formed who balanced monstrosity and humanity, who could be the reflection of both a funhouse mirror and a plain one, quite as well as Norman Bates.
Following the runaway success of “Psycho,” studios sought films that could imitate its impact. As a result, horror thrillers became more interior, concerned with complex themes, aberrated narratives, sympathetic villains, morally gray protagonists and ambiguous endings that left audiences adrift. Within this industry drive and coinciding audience demand came various strains of experimental horror, among them a short-lived subgenre featuring tragic, murderous beldams, otherwise known as “Grande Dame Guignol Cinema” or “hagsploitation.”
The Grande Dame Guignol tradition was derived from the 20th-century Parisian vaudeville theater of the same name. Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol was known for its sensational productions, extravagant gore and salacious storylines. Apropos of the “Psycho” precedent, Grande Dame Guignol manifested in Hollywood’s golden age primarily as “psycho biddies.” A psycho biddy was an older woman at the nadir of her life. She had appreciated great fame, beauty and adoration in her youth, but struggled to adapt to the disdain and dismissal she received in her old age. Secluded, suppressed and wistful, she was driven mad by her own obsolescence and tormented because of her refusal to fade into the periphery.
“What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) was ostensibly the first hagsploitation film, although the influence of “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) cannot be overstated. It featured aging starlets and real-life rivals, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, playing opposite one another as the feuding sister duo, “Baby Jane” and Blanche Hudson. Jane was a successful child actress who performed for adoring crowds in theaters across the country, while her older sister, Blanche, was made to watch bitterly from the wings. As the girls grew into women, their roles reversed, with Blanche ascending to Hollywood stardom and Jane’s own star dwindling as her theatrical act fell out of popularity. Jane’s decline into obscurity and alcoholism eroded her physical and mental health, culminating in a drunk driving incident where Jane’s recklessness left Blanche paralyzed from the waist down.
As elderly women, the sisters live reclusively in a cavernous mansion purchased with Blanche’s Hollywood earnings. Racked with guilt for the car crash that ended her sister’s career, Jane lives a life of servitude to her sister, even as her mental and physical health continues to deteriorate. The contempt between the sisters is palpable, with each vying to recapture her glory days and distance herself from the other. Blanche dreamily watches reruns of her Hollywood movies on television. Jane, jealous of her sister’s renewed popularity, resolves to revive her childhood act. At the climax of the film, Jane flees law enforcement with Blanche as her hostage, having killed all who attempted to rescue Blanche. Jane absconds to a beach where she once rehearsed as a child. Heaving what she believes to be her final breath, Blanche reveals that she was the one behind the wheel during the pivotal car accident that left her paralyzed, but framed Jane for the collision out of her long-standing resentment.
“You mean all this time,” Jane whimpers, “we could have been friends?” The scene ultimately sanctifies Jane, absolving her of her guilt, and as police descend onto the beach, the film ends with Jane finally performing her act to a crowd of curious onlookers.
Jane, in her neurotic savagery, is just as sympathetic as she is terrifying. Her powdered white makeup accentuates her wrinkles and saggy skin, her brittle hair is bundled in girlish pigtails and her mouth is smothered unevenly in garish red lipstick. We’re meant to laugh and gawk at her attempts at beauty. The horror of Jane’s terrible actions is not limited to her psychosis, but her anachronism as well; her sincere belief that people will love her as much as they did when she was a child if only she could put on the right act.
Camp and melodrama were (and still are) characteristic of hagsploitation productions. The macabre sets, extravagant costumes and overwrought performances work to underscore the psycho biddy as both a tragic monster and a comedic antihero. The lives of Crawford and Davis closely mirrored that of their fictional counterparts. Beautiful and talented women “aged out” of the Hollywood machine. “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” simply had Jane and Blanche do what Crawford and Davis could not: react to injustice. Yes, the psycho biddy is a mentally deranged or willfully malicious murderer, but what’s worse is her gall to live past her prime. That’s her true crime.
As in “Strait-Jacket” (1964),” “Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?” (1972) and “Suspiria” (1977), the psycho biddy was often juxtaposed to a younger, more desirable woman in the narrative who they loathe and envy. The actresses compose a cinematic vanitas, a portrait of mortality; the “ripeness” of the young actress is contrasted by the “rot” of the older actress.
One could argue that “hagsploitation” never completely fell out of fashion, but the recent renaissance of the genre certainly supports the argument that the fear of aging women is more relevant than ever. Women’s bodies, particularly those of older women, have long been depicted as grotesque in horror. From the metamorphic succubus in “The Shining” (1980) to the corpse of Norman Bates’ elderly mother, older women have been used as tertiary gorgons throughout horror. Hagsploitation merely hoisted these women from the margins into the spotlight.
At the time of its release, “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” was the only picture Crawford and Davis were able to land, and they spent the latter half of their careers in a succession of similar roles. Psycho biddy horror was considerably beneath the echelon of Crawford and Davis, a far cry from the prestigious roles they once played. But by 1962, psycho biddies and Grande Dame Guignols were almost the only leading roles for actresses in their mid-50s and beyond.
Hollywood is no longer so rigid in casting older actresses, but there is still a disparity between the variety of roles that older men and older women play in film. Men can be action heroes, mafiosos and heartthrobs (to women who are anywhere from ten to twenty years their junior) well into their sixties, while women struggle to play anything other than a mother or a hag past the age of forty.
The media coverage of the anti-age craze casts women and girls as ignominiously vain, failing to recognize that all of it exists because of our societal tradition to maroon women. The fixation on “girlhood” and “femininity” are mere tendrils of the misogyny and conservatism enshrined in contemporary culture and politics. From the “red-pilled” influencers who pontificate on the “wall” women hit at the ripe age of 30 to the political demonization of the female body, there is more than enough patriarchal influence to explain the indomitable fear women have of aging. However, subconsciously, women and girls are keeping score. And the renewed interest in hagsploitation films is just another tally mark.
When Ti West wrote his erotic, bloody, campy “X” trilogy, he did so with his own anxieties around aging at the forefront. He wrote in a note for the production studio, A24, “It was a way for me to ruminate on some feelings I had about getting older, making films and my lifelong love of horror cinema.” “X”, stars Mia Goth in the dual role of Maxine, the alluring ingenue with dreams of being an actress, and Pearl, the sexually repressed elderly woman who once had the same dreams. Within the film, Maxine’s dreams are treated as achievable, while Pearl’s are treated as mementos of the youth she once had. In their final showdown, Pearl hoarsely slurs prophecies like, “We’re the same. You’ll end up just like me,” and, “It’ll all be taken from you! Just like it was from me!”
It’s a chilling end to a movie that recognizes, in the narrative and in the casting of the protagonist and antagonist, that the psycho-biddy and the ingenue are one and the same. Two points along the same cultural continuum that treat women as disposable as soon as they are no longer desirable to men.
Other modern-day hagsploitation films merely borrow elements of the historic genre. For example, in “Barbarian” (directed by Zach Cregger), the outward villain is an inbred hermit with bloodlust and an ungraceful maternal instinct. As the film progresses, however, the true villains come to be the men who have histories of abusing women for their own personal gratification. In the end, it is the barbaric psycho-biddy who saves the protagonist from one of these men, sacrificing herself in the process.
On the other hand, films like “The Substance” (directed by Coralie Fargeat) follow the hagsploitation formula to the letter. Highly stylized and overwhelmingly grotesque, “The Substance” stars Demi Moore as an aged-out aerobics show host, Elisabeth Sparkle, and Margaret Qualley as her genetic clone and young, hot replacement, Sue (Moore, just like Crawford and Davis before her, has experienced being jettisoned by the Hollywood machine because of her age). The film follows Elisabeth as she is dismissed by her TV show’s producer on her 50th birthday. She begins to take The Substance, a serum that promises to produce a younger, more beautiful version of herself.
Elisabeth and Sue must maintain the balance of their ordeal by swapping bodies every seven days. For the seven days that either Elisabeth or Sue lives, the other is left catatonic. Before long, Sue disrupts this balance, siphoning away three months of time and leaving Elisabeth to wither into a literal hag in her wake. Upon discovering this, Elisabeth attempts to murder Sue, but cannot will herself to do it. Sue wakes up and realizes Elisabeth’s plot, and beats her other half to death in a blind rage. However, without Elisabeth stabilizing her, Sue’s body begins to deteriorate. In a desperate attempt to salvage herself, Sue injects The Substance into herself, emerging as a monstrous amalgamation of Elisabeth and Sue, called Monstro Elisasue. Ironically, however, Elisasue has an admirable amount of self-worth. After being mutilated by an angry crowd, Elisasue collapses into a puddle of pus and entrails. Elisabeth’s face detaches from the viscera and crawls to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and smiling, she accepts herself in her final form.
While the modern wave of hagsploitation has not entirely excised the troubling elements of its predecessor, it certainly has added depth, creativity and feminist critique. Age is just a symptom of the inevitable: death. Evolution has conditioned us to fear death and avoid it at all costs. This is only compacted by the ageism perpetuated in society that treats aging women as abject. So, when women and girls recreate the fountain of youth with Drunk Elephant creams and La Roche-Posay serums or retreat to the safe harbors of “girlhood,” it’s not out of vanity or psychosis, but survival instinct.
Hagsploitation understands this fear.
Hagsploitation says it’s okay to be afraid of the end, of aging into obsolescence and of how different life will be once that threshold is crossed. For all its poor taste, cloying melodrama and problematic themes, fundamentally, hagsploitation understands what it means for a woman to age.
