Hagsploitation… All this time we could have been friends?
It’s controversial, creepy and cool, and hagsploitation has once again been thrust into the spotlight with the restoration and release of Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971). So to celebrate the film becoming part of the Hammer Presents range we’re wiping away the make-up and staring into the face of one of cinema’s most contentious categories and asking, whatever happened to hagsploitation?
As if it’s on the run from the authorities, hagsploitation goes by several different names. Psycho-biddy and hag horror are two of its most obvious pseudonyms, and the New York Times called it, ‘…the Terrifying Older Actress Filicidal Mummy genre’ which was never quite snappy enough to catch on. Or if you fancy giving it a little grandeur you might prefer to know it as Grand Dame Guignol. It’s all the same thing, but what that thing actually is might be tricky to pin down. Just like film noir, the precise spectrum of what the term encompasses is difficult to define, but again, just like noir, we know it when we see it.
The basic tenets are obvious. The Fright Club cited one of its central elements as, ‘The main character is a formerly glamorous and beautiful woman who terrorises those around her as her mental health becomes increasingly unbalanced’. Throw in the fact the woman in question is invariably an older individual and we have the essentials of hagsploitation, and also the reason some commentators find it problematic.
Writing for Refinery29, Billie Walker offered this damning definition: ‘Hagsploitation is a term coined to express horror’s obsession with creating an image of the older woman as a monstrous hag. No longer able to produce life, she must be seen as the epitome of death and decay, holding on as her body withers before us.’
A counter argument to this might touch on the fact that in many hag horrors the irony lies in the fact that the main character’s ‘body’ is absolutely fine. What’s askew is society’s perception of it, a fallacy that will often impact disastrously on the ‘psycho-biddy’ in question.
She still is big. Pic: © Paramount Pictures
In Sunset Boulevard (1950), for example, the problem isn’t Norma Desmond’s age or her physical well-being per se. Tucked away in her swish and shadowy mansion, she remains a figure who could be termed beautiful. The central difficulty isn’t even caused by Norma’s self-perception. She wants to regard herself as a movie queen? Fine! She’s got more right to the crown than most. The issue is, she fails to recognise that the film business and her audience won’t accept what she’s selling any more. That may be wrong of them in a dozen different ways but Norma’s greatest strength is also her tragic flaw: she refuses to become a version of the construct others would feel comfortable with.
When Joe tells her, ‘There’s nothing tragic about being 50,’ he’s highlighting an obvious truth. When he adds, ‘…not unless you try to be 25!’ he’s sailing into murkier waters. The tragedy doesn’t stem from Norma’s desires, but from society’s jaundiced attitude towards the ageing process, and specifically, how it applies to women. As Anne Bilson noted in the Guardian, ‘…being 50 always was tragic for grande dames of Hollywood, who had little choice but to go full-on gorgon if they wanted to keep on working.’
Almost 75 years later, the same issue lies at the heart of The Substance (2024), a movie which Eve O’Drea perceptively addresses in her feature, The Woman’s Picture: A History of Hagsploitation: ‘Such societal fear and its effect on one’s self-image has never been so explicitly explored than in The Substance. Coralie Forgeat’s body horror symposium boils down hagsploitation to its very essence without distraction, demonstrating the asinine expectations we place upon women and the self-destructive efforts taken to meet said expectations.’
‘I really felt it [The Substance] was relatable to all of us as humans — the feeling of being discarded, overlooked. A lack of appreciation for who we are.’ – Demi Moore to Variety. Pic: MUBI / © Universal Studios
The picture’s central character, celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle, remains glamorous-looking and as played by Demi Moore, she’s presented as chic and strikingly beautiful. She’s fired from her TV job not because she suddenly becomes inept or has morphed into a stereotypical crone figure. Elisabeth is old news solely because she’s now perceived to be old.
We may loathe her boss for trying to pull the plug on her career, but he’s simply the encapsulation of an all-too-familiar ageist and sexist attitude that still holds sway across certain swathes of society. Faced with the spectre of obsolescence, Elisabeth feels forced to experiment (and then go all in) with a drug that will ostensibly rejuvenate her, and although it’s known as ‘the substance’ it has obvious similarities to various ‘real life’ substances that many individuals feel obliged to take in order to meet societal expectations.
Coralie Fargeat, the director of The Substance, was clear about what her film stood for, and how it focuses on what women ‘usually want to hide, or are told you should hide. That’s why it was important for me to make it very visceral, very present, because it was a real statement… I was trying to deconstruct, explode the idea of beauty. To show the reality of who we really are and what we’re made of.’
Almost three quarters of a century separate Sunset Boulevard and The Substance but the validity of their joint primary message remains topical and real. In highlighting and examining it, it could be claimed that hagsploitation emerges as a force for good.
But is it intrinsically ageist in its depiction of older women?
‘I did a picture in England one winter and it was so cold I almost got married.’ - Shelley Winters.
In Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? the titular figure does not become a monster because she ages. Her tragedy is brought about by the greed and self-centredness of others. The grasping fake medium, the unbearably cruel blackmailer and the vile, lying, selfish couple of kids who prey upon her good nature are not merely the architects of her downfall; they are its builders, painters and decorators. Remove their rapacity and Rosie would have kept on as always, offering charity and kindness whilst searching for peace amongst the dead.
Perhaps that’s why it’s called hagsploitation. In so many films which fall into this category it’s the ‘hag’ who’s being exploited. Take the most famous movie in the subgenre, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and we find a camp melodrama that becomes relentlessly horrific as the deluded ‘Baby’ Jane Hudson ramps up her campaign of terror, waged on her sister, Blanche. Little wonder the American Film Institute placed her in the top ‘50 Best Villains of American Cinema’
But look again and in Jane we find a woman who’s been used and deceived. Her descent into what many would call madness was not brought about by old age, but by old-fashioned treachery. Visually, the sight of Bette Davis in her bright white ‘Baby’ make-up might be the image that stays with viewers long after the credits have rolled, but the emotional resonance comes from the tragedy of its two main characters, bound by lies and wrecked by ignorance. The story’s twist is genuinely heart-breaking and when Jane says, ‘Then you mean… All this time we could have been friends?’ we’re reminded that the story we’ve just witnessed is actually the tale of a woman who’s been manipulated into a life she neither wanted nor deserved.
When Mrs Trefoile tells Patricia, ‘I can only rejoice that he [her son – Patricia’s fiancé] died unblemished. A virgin soul. So much more beloved by the Almighty…’ we begin to realise the younger woman is in deep, deep trouble.
Hammer’s forays into hagland have produced some memorable spins on the oeuvre and demonstrate how broadly its narrative and thematic nets can be thrown. In Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? the loss of a child turns Rosie into a figure who seems lost, but initially at least, she remains thoroughly decent. In Hammer’s Fanatic (1965), however, when Mrs Trefoile endures a similar loss after the death of her son, she evolves into a monster fuelled by an extraordinary malice. Here again, age alone does not turn the grieving mother into a maniac, and as we learn the truth behind her son’s demise, we must strongly suspect that this stern, strict, hard-hearted zealot has always been a callous creature. But her son’s passing results in the nightmare that unfolds as his former fiancée is essentially tortured by the almost-mother-in-law from hell.
The death of a child also triggers the horror that spins out of control in Hammer’s The Nanny (1965), released the same year as Fanatic. It stars Bette Davis but stands as a very different to proposition to Baby Jane, as the star herself insisted: ‘I have always believed in a great variety of parts… The Nanny, for instance, is a complete departure from anything I’ve ever played.’ It’s a fabulous piece of work, by turns mystery, thriller, and family drama. Davis excels as the eponymous helping hand and we’re taken on a gripping did-she-or-didn’t-she ride before the true horror of the ongoing situation is revealed. It ends in redemption of sorts and we’re even left feeling sympathy for the ‘guilty party’.
Did Bette Davis’s character do it? Sorry. Nanny told us not to tell…
The film proved to be a highlight of Hammer’s mid-60s output, doing strong business at the box office and winning over most critics. The Daily Express called it, ‘Adult horror, taut and tense…’ and its success allowed the studio to sell it to US television for a whopping $400,000, a sum which made it a guaranteed financial success.
(l-r) William Dix (as Joey), Wendy Craig (as Virginia) and Bette Davis (as the eponymous ‘Nanny’). Some posters for the film posed the all-important question, ‘Would you trust the nanny or the boy?’
Davis was back in hagsploitation territory in The Anniversary (1968), but there was no mystery about her character this time around. The matriarch of a messed up family who’ve gathered to ‘celebrate’ her 40th wedding anniversary, Mrs Taggert is one of Hammer’s most frightening villains. Vindictive, manipulative and acid-tongued, her attacks are all the more awful because they’re directed at people who deserve her love and support. Some hope. Mrs Taggert makes Cinderella’s step-mother look like a paragon of parental virtue as she dominates her children and the movie itself.
Davis’s second and final film for the studio didn’t quite match the success of The Nanny, but returning to the work several years after its initial release, Sight & Sound put the situation into context: ‘Greeted as a bit of a misfire upon its original release, Hammer’s The Anniversary has ripened in the vaults into a volatile cocktail of high style, overwrought melodrama and obsidian comedy…’ For the avoidance of doubt, the reviewer noted it was ‘nearly perfect’ and rightly praised the lead’s ‘marvellously sustained performance’.
This is hagsploitation meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, offering fascinating insights whilst writer Jimmy Sangster and director Roy Ward Baker deliberately refuse to give us all the answers. A savage attack on maternal miscontrol or a cynical celebration of female acuity? You decide.
Elisabeth (Ingrid Pitt) isn’t about to share the secret of her skin care routine any time soon with the infatuated Toth (Sandor Eles).
Hammer’s Countess Dracula (1971) is another intriguing take on Grand Dame Guignol. We’ve covered its parallels with The Substance in a previous article, but the fact that the film’s central character, Elisabeth, is both the ‘grand dame’ of the piece and its youthful, sexually confident driving force, cajoles us into asking a strangely pertinent question: what’s the difference between a femme fatale and a psycho-biddy? Whereas the former is a trope that’s almost universally applauded, the latter is still seen by some to be controversial. But surely all that separates them is age, rendering the distinction an unwelcome one.
After all, if we add a few years to the murderous Sylvia from Whispering Smith Hits London (1952) the film becomes early hagsploitation. The same applies to the psychotic Gina from Blood Orange (1953) and that charismatic conniver, Carol Forrest who lived in The House Across the Lake (1954).
Perhaps it’s time to re-examine the sub-genre in this light, or maybe such analysis is redundant as Hollywood continues to mine it in new and creative ways. Every few years an article will appear that claims ‘Hagsploitation is back!’ but the truth is, it seldom leaves the big screen. In the past decade alone we’ve seen a variety of psycho-biddy movies that are every bit as varied as the works Hammer was producing in the 60s and 70s, including Greta (2018), X (2022), Weapons (2025), and Bring Her Back (2025).
Whisper it quietly, but attitudes seem to be changing in relation to hagsploitation classics such as Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
Partly due to their success (both financially and on the awards circuit), there’s a growing acceptance and critical embrace of the sub-genre. The Guardian ran a piece examining hagsploitation and although it voiced concerns, it recognised many commentators were warming to it: ‘Their case is that the genre allows a greater range of female characters than some others, and places their interiority centre stage. Viewed through this optimistic lens, hagsploitation films can be seen as a celebration of older women – of their rage, transgression and power to inspire fear.’
Hopefully Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? can be seen in this light. Chilling and thrilling it showcases Shelley Winters at her best, delivering a performance that ricochets between humour, heart, pathos and terror. Writing for Screen Slate, Saffron Maeve commented, ‘Winters configures Roo with just enough delusions of grandeur to render the character both campy and devastating…’ adding, ‘An exercise in hagsploitation and mommy issues… Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is a terribly good time.’
We’ll give the last word to Victoria Brown, who writing for The Fright Club, offered an eloquent and direct overview of the sub-genre the film embodies: ‘Hagsploitation is not a sub-genre of degradation. It is empowering. It opened a door for older women on screen and I hope we open that door a little wider.’
Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is available to pre-order now and Blood Orange and Whispering Smith Hits London are both part of Hammer’s Limited Collector’s Edition range.
