Text Matters, Number 13, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.27

Grande Dame Guignol at 60: A Review of Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror by Caroline Young (BearManor Media, 2022)

Tomasz Fisiak

University of Lodz
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5514-1287

The year 2022 marked an important date in the history of Gothic cinema: namely, the 60^th anniversary of the premiere of Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, starring two Hollywood legends in the shape of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis—a film that, according to Luke Buckmaster, still “packs a punch.” Its October 1962 release and subsequent success gave birth to a cinematic genre that would remain popular for at least a decade. Film critics quickly adopted several names to refer to Baby Jane and its numerous follow-ups—Grande Dame Guignol, hag horror, psycho-biddy—with only the first one remaining fairly neutral and unbiased. The films were an uncanny mixture of thriller, horror, camp aesthetics and glamour. Grande Dame Guignol productions would usually involve aging actresses of Hollywood’s yesteryear playing emotionally and mentally disturbed women dealing with numerous past and present traumas. As The Terror Trap website accurately observes,

[w]hether the horror projects were well-written thrillers, shameless exploitation, or outright splatterfests, these stormtroopers from Hollywood’s golden era of the 1930s and 1940s seized the opportunity for steady work. And what work it was! These newfound films provided them with a diverse range of juicy roles, from that of the scheming heiress, to the beleaguered victim, to that of a murderess hag.

In his seminal work on the genre, the 2009 Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from “Baby Jane” to “Mother,” Peter Shelley reminds readers that the genre “is an amalgamation of two key and seemingly contradictory concepts—the grande dame and Grande [sic] Guignol” (1), the latter signifying a French theatre specializing in gory, macabre performances that never shied away from scenes of explicit violence. Shelley seems to agree with The Terror Trap’s view on the genre’s eclecticism, calling GDG “a subgenre of the larger film genres of crime, drama, film noir, horror, mystery, and thriller, often appearing with elements of melodrama, comedy, fantasy, and musicals” (2). Sadly, a few years after the Baby Jane premiere, the cinematic fad would fade into oblivion, including in the academic world, with few exceptions, such as Charles Derry’s 1977 Dark Dreams: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film (The Horror Film from “Psycho” to “Jaws”), where he termed Baby Jane and its imitations horrors of personality. However, over approximately the last 15 years there has been a steady revival of interest in the hagsploitation movement,^[1] triggered first and foremost by the publication of Shelley’s aforementioned magnum opus, which was followed by a range of contributions scattered in different edited volumes or journals (see, for example, Fisiak; Harrington; Pagnoni Berns et al.; a chapter in Shary and McVittie; Walker; selected essays in a collection edited by Bowdoin Van Riper and Miller; an updated 2009 version of Derry’s Dark Dreams). Hence, it should not be surprising that the 60^th anniversary of Baby Jane’s cinematic debut would inspire new publications devoted not only to this film but also to the genre it inspired. Apart from online articles (including Buckmaster’s celebratory commemorative piece in The Guardian), what merits attention is a new book discussing the highs and lows not only in the genre’s development but also in their stars’ careers. Titled Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror, it is simultaneously a captivating narrative of Hollywood’s golden years and a poignant analysis of how it is to be a woman, especially a middle-aged one, in an industry “where the lifespan of an actress is usually five years” (Shelley 2).

The book’s author, Caroline Young, explains that she intentionally picked such an eye-catching title, as “a twist on some of the unflattering terms women are called when they reach what’s euphemistically known as ‘a certain age’” (5). Young asserts that her goal is “not to insult or degrade” but rather to “examin[e] the way older women are depicted in cinema, by delving behind the scenes of the making of some of the classics in the genre, exploring the societal context of the period” (5). Judging by the author’s previous works, including Hitchock’s Heroines, Roman Holiday: The Secret Life of Hollywood in Rome or Classic Hollywood Style,^[2] one might rest assured that GDG as a genre is analyzed in a much wider context.

Indeed, Crazy Old Ladies proves that its author is truly invested in her narrative, paying attention to many details that significantly differentiate her book from Shelley’s work, these two texts being in fact the only ones devoted exclusively to Grande Dame Guignol. Contrary to Shelley, who introduces the fairly rigid structure of an extensive introductory part and a succession of chapters discussing 45 selected films, Young opts for a more liberal form, choosing only a handful of the films that Shelley wrote about,^[3] her narration smoothly moving between film descriptions, background information regarding the actresses, the set, the filming process, etc. Although Young’s narrative might suffer from occasional lapses of coherence, it remains riveting, especially when the author interlaces film descriptions with background details concerning the cast members’ on-set antics or juicy biographical details, and thus demonstrates her unabashed enthusiasm towards the book’s subject matter. Young’s personal investment is further enhanced by the inclusion of brief interviews with actors who once starred in hag horrors, such as Mark Lester, a child actor who appeared alongside Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (dir. Curtis Harrington, 1971), or the legendary Piper Laurie, who played Margaret White in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). What also merits praise is a section featuring a selection of rare photographs from the films’ sets and stills from the productions themselves. Their order is rather surprising, though, not keeping any chronology and giving a slight impression of disorganization. Moreover, the captions require proofreading as there are a few spelling errors and film titles are not italicized. Occasional issues with italicization, hyphenation or punctuation throughout the book indicate the need for more careful editing overall. What might also be corrected in future editions is a small number of factual errors such as confused names or dates (“Olivia Spencer” instead of “Octavia,” p. 4; “Margaret Sullivan” instead of “Sullavan,” p. 203; “Raquel Welsh” instead of “Welch,” p. 229; “1966” as the year of Rosemary’s Baby cinematic release, p. 17).

Despite the minor flaws mentioned above, Young’s book deserves attention. Partly academic (thanks to illuminating references to, for instance, Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Jackie Byars’s All that Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama), partly biographical, partly pure entertainment, Crazy Old Ladies is a worthy contribution to the studies of Grande Dame Guignol as a separate cinematic trend. “Above all,” Young writes, “it’s a celebration of some of the most iconic stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood” (5). As the reader quickly learns, this is not an unfounded claim.

Tomasz Fisiak is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture, Institute of English Studies, University of Lodz, Poland. His monograph She-(d)evils? The Construction of a Female Tyrant as a Cultural Critique was published in 2020 by Peter Lang. His publications cover topics such as feminist auto/biographies, Gothic fiction, horror cinema in the 1960s and the 1970s, and popular/pulp culture. He is Managing Editor of Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture. He is also a member of the Board of Polish Association for the Study of English (PASE). Currently, he works as a team member of the project Word, Sound and Image: Intertextuality in Music Videos no. 2019/33/B/HS2/00131 financed by National Science Centre in Poland.

tomasz.fisiak@uni.lodz.pl

© by the author, licensee University of Lodz – Lodz University Press, Lodz, Poland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)