In the compromised annals of American cinema history, there is perhaps no subgenre as equally tortured and significant as a categorization of film once deliriously, condescendingly referred to as “hagsploitation.” The shelf life of women in the film industry, objects destined for profit and consumption, remains notoriously diminished in comparison to their male counterparts. But despite intersecting cultural constructions of beauty standards and profit, an achingly slow evolution has brought us to a formidable new frontier, where a changing landscape demands new nomenclature as the nexus of cinematic output and availability has changed.
Many online sources define hagsploitation as “a subgenre of horror/thriller that features a formerly-glamorous older actress who plays an insane woman who terrorizes those around her.” It was a term and a movement born from the surprise success of Robert Aldrich’s camp classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which revived the careers of Academy Award Winners Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who had their own iconic behind-the-scenes feud worthy of its own entirely tangential discussion (and fictionally hyperbolized by Ryan Murphy in the first season of his series Feud).
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Bette Davis as Baby Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962. (Credit: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)
But there were tremblings of such terrors prior to this template, which bore a phenomenal movement of cinema through the 1960s and 1970s. Namely, Gloria Swanson’s iconic, and briefly lived comeback as Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). The 1950s saw the rise of playwright Tennessee Williams, whose queer-coded hits were adapted into heavily modified masterpieces that remain influential, the most notable being Vivien Leigh’s eternal victimhood as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Less celebrated but even more conspicuous were Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 oddity Suddenly, Last Summer, where the women, respectively playing the mother and niece of an invisible queer predator, were themselves the sparring victims of allyship trauma. They were some of the sterling trailblazers who paved the way for Aldrich’s juggernaut, a cornerstone of what would also come to define the fluctuating aesthetics of camp culture.
The term hagsploitation would go through a series of euphemistic translations, although they would all be valiantly trying to reclaim the positive aspects of a demeaning trajectory. It was as if, culturally, we were stuck in the troubling headspace similar to Akon and David Guetta with their 2009 track, “Sexy Bitch,” which was trying to be complimentary, supposedly, with the line, “I’m tryna to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful.”
“Psycho Biddy Horror” would be the next infantilizing revolution, and a 2009 publication from Peter Shelley would solidify a more grandiose terminology, “Grande Dame Guignol,” to re-anoint a significant lineage once demeaned but now actively celebrated, christened as well in the queer culture annals by drag icon Charles Busch, whose 2003 film Die, Mommie Die! assisted in generating a contemporary hyperlink to not only Davis and Crawford, but also the sensational Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) starring Tallulah Bankhead in her swan song.
But what happens when these representations persist in an era which has collapsed these gaps of unattainable beauty or celebrity? Does it enhance the fear of an audience who can more easily relate to what was once over-the-top? And what about the celebrities, who can engage in the grotesque without it being a final resting place or a typecasting snare? While their star power is still being exploited as a way to enhance the excessive behaviors and themes of genre, they’ve arguably become a conduit to reflecting universal fears, at last humanized. Fear mixed into empathy closes this distance, and alternatively damps the camp.
Kathryn Hunter in The Front Room. (Credit: Jon Pack)
In A24’s new release, The Front Room, we can see a clear crystallization of this exploitative legacy blended with contemporary aesthetics. Brandy Norwood (best known mononymously as Brandy) makes a return to the screen as an expecting mother who must contend with a racist-evangelist mother-in-law played by Kathryn Hunter (The Tragedy of Macbeth; Poor Things) in ways that perfectly exemplify a new dawn of divasploitation, a devious celebration where women wield power and agency wickedly.
I sat down with co-directors Max and Sam Eggers to reflect on their “psycho biddy” approach in making The Front Room. Referencing Charles Busch, “Grand Dame Guignol” was in the back of their minds—it’s a term that “capture(s) the elegance that’s missing from that genre,” an approach often dismissed as, culturally, we “don’t give weight to the pathos, the truth that these women, especially Joan Crawford and Bette Davis brought to it.”
(L-R) Andrew Burnap, Brandy Norwood, Kathryn Hunter (Credit: Jon Pack)
While they pay homage to Rosemary’s Baby, there’s a clear effort to say something new. “Ruth Gordon and Mia Farrow…you’ve seen that so many times. We’re trying to make something fresh,” not only in playing with juxtaposing femme archetypes, but also in visual inspiration, as the directors tapped into surrealist women painters such as Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo. The patriarchal commandeering of the culture, which has “sat on the chair of the matriarchy,” demands a confrontation with this troubled past. The Front Room, by tapping into and re-working the expectations of genre, reignites these conversations. As evidenced in the balance being sought for in their new film, one can’t have “smother”without “mother.”
Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a growing number of similarly extravagant performances that tap into the overblown emotional grotesqueness of Davis and Crawford but divorced from the reproach of decrepitude (which John Baxter in his Hollywood in the Sixties referred to as “exercises in sado-gerontophilia”). If there’s any real criteria as a measuring stick for the defense of starsploitation, maturing celebrities with a considerable cachet delving into hyperbolic human behavior is, at the least, a starting point. With beauty and/or professional longevity intact, here’s a list of exceptional performances that assist in securing a new taxonomy.
10. Josh Hartnett – Trap (2024)
There’s been a largely ignored component of male actors who’ve contributed to the legacy of the psycho biddy, first and foremost being Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960). The 1960s would also see a cavalcade of faded male icons from previous eras make a resurgence for either villainous or comedic effect, thanks in part to Roger Corman’s series of B-grade Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, with Vincent Price reclaiming a relevancy that would come to define his legacy. Lately, there’ve been some provocative contemporizations, the most seductive being M. Night Shyamalan’s use of Josh Hartnett, a teen heartthrob from the late 1990s and early 2000s donning a camp veneer as a notorious serial killer in Trap. Law enforcement closes in on Hartnett while he’s attending a pop star’s concert with his pre adolescent daughter, led by FBI profiler Hayley Mills (whose presence indicates a smug in-joke as the instigator of a much different kind of “parent trap”). Arrogantly rueful, Hartnett’s vicious killer has a flair for the dramatic, revealing, in the film’s final throes, to lead a semi-charmed kinda life.
9. Julianne Moore – Maps to the Stars (2014)
The most highly decorated performance on this list belongs to Julianne Moore in David Cronenberg’s vulgar and absurd Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars (2014), which won her a Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination (for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, no less). Moore is Havana Segrand, a scuzzy Los Angeles nepo baby whose famous mother died in a fire in the 1970s. Incest in the entertainment industry has never felt so literal in this V.C. Andrews-style take on Tinsel Town, with Havana claiming to have been sexually molested by her mother and quite hungry to star in the remake of mom’s most notable film, Stolen Waters. The subplot is an agonized mess of similar issues, such as a drug-addicted child star whose older sister (Mia Wasikowska) now works for Havana, though she tried to kill her sibling and burn down the family home a decade prior. Carrie Fisher shows up as herself to announce every actor should have the opportunity to play their own mother. The attention-hungry Havana eclipses everyone and everything, but Moore brings a pathetic gravitas to the characterization, which makes everything feel as sleazy as it is superficial. But then there’s the moment where she breaks out in song when she learns the death of a child has allowed her to star in the movie she wants to make, and for a brief moment, everything in Maps to the Stars dazzles.
8. Nicolas Cage – Longlegs (2024)
In Osgood Perkins’ runaway indie horror success Longlegs, Nicolas Cage stars as the titular resident nightmare maker, Satan’s emissary who orchestrates complex rural murder-suicides via creepy life-size dolls gifted to targeted families. While Cage’s filmography is littered with gonzo performances, his prosthetically enhanced villain, who resembles Carroll Baker playing Baby Jane Hudson, is consistently one shriek away from an aneurysm. In a previous era, his provocative ugliness would have been tethered to discussions of ruinous performative excess rather than evidentiary of the phenomenal force of the Cage Rage.
7. Willem Dafoe – The Lighthouse (2019)
The sophomore film of director Robert Eggers, co-written by his younger brother Max Eggers, is an unhinged period piece paying homage to a myriad of American literary masters, including Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Orne Jewett. In many ways, it’s the masculine version of the psycho biddy template, concerning two men pitted against one another in an isolated lighthouse where they’re plagued by hallucinatory visions of sea monsters, mermaids, and the disastrous repression of their own sexual urges. Robert Pattinson stars as the novice lighthouse keeper who shows up to replace the last assistant to Willem Dafoe, a man we’re told went mad. It doesn’t take long to figure out why Dafoe’s former sailor exhibits increasingly psychotic behavior exacerbated by his endless isolation in what’s essentially uninhabitable terrain. Together, they assist each other’s descent into murder and madness, hastened by an eventual state of drunken stupor, each of them revealing dark secrets. Dafoe, an actor who has played more than his fair share of villains, is exceptionally crazed here as Thomas Wake, basically a lonely, manipulative spinster who treats the lighthouse like his own palace. Delighting in the pronounced vernacular of the character, he’s a disturbing joy to behold. Yer fond of his lobster, ain’t ye?
6. Kathryn Hunter – The Front Room (2024)
Speaking of the Eggers’ brothers, Max and Sam make their directorial debut with The Front Room, a scenario that plays like the gender reversal of The Lighthouse. Brandy Norwood makes a long-awaited return to genre as the pregnant wife of a public defender (Andrew Burnap) whose current position as an Anthropology professor has been jeopardized. As luck would have it, economic security arrives with the death of her husband’s father. The only catch is, the couple must take in his evangelist step-mother Solange (Kathryn Hunter), who also seems to have deep-seated racist beliefs. The couple’s good will is quickly tested as both women vie for control of the household, with Solange commandeering the titular room originally intended as a nursery. Hunter, who’s called upon to bring a dynamic physicality to Solange, perambulating with the assistance of a considerably loud walker, is agonizing and entertaining as a controlling Southern Belle whose microaggressions (and incontinence) eventually pushes her daughter-in-law to the edge.
5. Glenn Close – The Deliverance (2024)
Lee Daniels has displayed a considerable penchant for casting actors of a certain pedigree in unadulteratedly trashy roles, from Helen Mirren in his bizarre Shadowboxer (2005) to Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy (2012). However, nothing comes close to what he does with Glenn Close in The Deliverance, based on the true story of a family plagued by possession. Daniels relocates the action to 2011 Philadelphia, where frazzled mom Andra Day has to take care of three children with mounting debts while also caring for her combative, cancer-ridden mother. Close is Alberta, a white woman who, despite her age, seems to have boundless energy for pursuing Black men, much to her daughter’s chagrin. A demon in their new rental seems to have possessed the children, which calls for spiritual intervention. But the seething energy shared between the various women in the film reaches operatic fever pitch, Close going no-holds-barred with Day and a combative Mo’Nique as a semi-sympathetic social worker. In her long, storied career, Close is called upon to say shockingly vulgar lines (albeit, when she’s possessed by the demon), all the more surprising from the woman who terrorized Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, played Cruella de Vil (twice), and will usurp the cinematic reins from Gloria Swanson in the remake of Sunset Boulevard.
4. Isabelle Huppert – Greta (2018)
If anyone has cornered the market on prickly, arguably unlikeable women, it’s Isabelle Huppert. From abortionists to serial killers to sexually repressed piano teachers, she’s covered every facet of disturbing psychosexual behavior. So it’s no surprise she leaned into Grand Guignol, finally, in Neil Jordan’s Greta (2018), in which she stars as a Hungarian immigrant in New York who lures young women to her home like a fashionista spider and then locks them up for her weird little games until she tires of them. Greta gets hemmed up when the shockingly resourceful Chloe Grace Moretz turns out to have a greater support network than your run-of-the-mill NYC ingénue. While Jordan leads us down a familiar path, it’s Huppert who adds the extra bit of necessary cruelty to make this effective, from spitting chewing gum into Mortez’s hair to a table tossing freak out in a swank restaurant to her disturbing treatment of stray dogs. There’s certainly nothing helpless about Greta, who pirouettes with devious finesse into our dark, cold, tell-tale hearts.
3. Sigourney Weaver – The Assignment (2016)
There are indisputable arguments regarding the dubious presentation of trans characterization in Walter Hill’s much maligned 2016 title The Assignment, a 1970s script reconfigured from Tomboy to the title (Re)Assignment upon its initial premiere before finally going with a generic title meant to fly under the radar to avoid controversy. The plot concerns a rogue doctor who takes revenge on the hitman who killed her brother by performing radical sex reassignment. The killer re-emerges as Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez), who then spends the rest of the narrative attempting to exact revenge on Sigourney Weaver, the delusional black-market physician. Ludicrous, to the say least, but Hill gives Weaver a rare chance to play a maniacal B-grade villain, who, at a hearing regarding her deeds, gets a show-stopping moment where she confesses “to the crime of hubris, to the unforgivable crime of an overweening estimation of my own worth.” Rambling on to announce she finds herself “the prisoner of lesser minds,” she declines to answer questions as “none of you are worth my time.” Film critic Keith Ulrich described Weaver’s Dr. Rachel Jane as “a sort of Hannibal Lecter by way of Marlene Dietrich.”
2. Octavia Spencer – Ma (2019)
Had Ma, Tate Taylor’s 2019 psychological horror film, not starred Octavia Spencer (with whom she reunited after winning an Academy Award for 2011’s The Help), it would have been like any other run-of-the-mill echoes of psycho-biddy horror. The fact the script was not written with a Black woman in mind, is, however, glaringly evident, and the film could have been incredibly potent had it been re-tooled for the interiority of Spencer’s lonely spinster Sue Ann, a veterinary assistant who, much like Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy (1996), just wants friends. So badly, in fact, she lures a group of fun loving teens into her basement to party and then, of course, goes haywire. Spencer is exceptionally bizarre in one of the rare chances to play against type, with some of her best moments reacting to the gross antagonization of her boss (Allison Janney). The film’s only explicit reference to race arrives in the denouement, when Ma treats each of her teen victims to their own personal punishment. Dante Brown’s Darrell is the only Black member of his friend group. “They’ve only got room for one of us,” she states, painting his face white. Despite the metatextual ambivalence this suggests the film itself has for Sue Ann, Spencer’s eerie characterization transcends these limitations about a kooky woman who never moved beyond the belief of adolescence being the best years of a life she never really got to experience.
1. Demi Moore – The Substance (2024)
With its uncannily perfect casting and thematically sublime subtexts, Demi Moore headlines Coralie Fargeat’s second film, The Substance. Paying homage to a litany of ‘80s body horror classics, recalling Cronenberg, Henenlotter, Cohen, and Brian Yuzna, to name a few, it’s also a modern femme version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where an Oscar-winning actress named Lizzie, turning 50 and fired from her long-running fitness show, is offered a Death Becomes Her-type elixir to experience youth again. But there’s a considerable catch with disastrous repercussions if the rules are not followed. After taking “the substance,” a younger woman (Margaret Qualley) literally emerges from Moore’s body, but they’re supposed to share control every seven days. Only Sue, the younger woman, has no interest in relinquishing control to her owner. Despite the ruinous results, Lizzie also can’t seem to serve her own best interests, controlled by own self-loathing. Excessive, ridiculous, and hyperbolic, there’s also a formidable compassion in Fargeat’s treatment, aided significantly by Moore, whose desperation is toxic but relatable. By the time we get to a fantastically supercharged showdown between Lizzie and Sue, a new monstrosity is born on the glistening horizon of starsploitation.
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