Hag Horror: Why Are We So Afraid of Old Women?

I have a podcast called rehash I co-host it with my friend Hannah and it's all about internet phenomena that get us all up in arms only to forget about them within a week so we rehash them as they say we just concluded our fifth season which is all about what happens when art meets the internet is the sun rising on a new creative era or has it set before it even began go check it [Music] out anyone who even so much as heard of a horror movie knows how often old ladies appear in this genre

if it's Jason's mom in Friday the 13th or that naked ghost that climbs out of the bathtub in The Shining or the corpse of Norman bates's mother and psycho or Pearl and X horror films seem to know that one thing that scares people more than anything is an elderly lady and even worse her body of course the old one woman or hag fulfills a wide range of symbolic purposes within the horror genre she plays the role of castrating mother horrific herodin neighborhood witch most recently she appeared in Coral Le farot's hit body horror film the

substance the substance Stars Dei Moore and Margaret quy and it's been making waves for what many people perceive as a very timely commentary on the gendered anti-aging culture of this current moment Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle a Jane f esque aging aerobic star who's presented with an alluring subscription style drug that allows her to create a younger perkier version of herself the two halves of the self split their time with a substance every 7 Days the catch being that both halves must always remember that they are one and the same what happens is what you could

predict knowing what kind of movie this is Elizabeth's younger self Sue played by quy usurps Elizabeth's job and begins to enjoy her life as a beautiful young woman quickly abusing the substance and chewing into Elizabeth's 7 days this results in Elizabeth's body rapidly aging against her will and Elizabeth being so unhappy with her life as an older woman allowing Sue to abuse her until it's too late the two have a violent Clash where Sue defeats Elizabeth but without her other half Sue's body falls apart she breaks yet another rule of the substance by trying to

reanimate herself and becomes a deformed hybrid of the two women named Monstra Alysa Su persistent Iz Su attends the New Year's Eve special she's starring in and horrifies the audience who in a scene reminiscent of car's blood-filled prom humiliate attack and ultimately Vanquish her Elizabeth's face breaks off the remains of Eliza Sue and drags itself to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame repeating the first shot of the film before melting into a bloody puddle now the substance takes inspiration from what I see to be two different subss of horror ha exploitation or psycho

bitty film and body horror it's got all the gendered young woman older woman dynamics of a exploitation film and all the grotesque gratuitous goore of a body horror movie and I think it does a lot of this quite well it's got a great score and wonderful practical effects and unleashes a balls to thewall insane third act that makes the movie a lot of fun its politics are also in the right place it poses a compelling philosophical inquiry into the concept of time and the symbiosis of our younger and older El showing how the hedonistic neglect

of our younger bodies is a form of abuse towards our older selves how beauty is compulsive and addictive these themes are all very obvious in the film I recognized all of this about the substance yet I still left the theater with a strange feeling something about the film felt like while it was attempting to say something poignant about women's fears of Aging it actually risked contradicting that message so I want to look at two films that I think heavily influenced the substance Robert Al ditch's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and David cronenberg's the fly to

explore the delicate balance between empathy and exploitation within these particular conventions of horror and how the substance threatens to tip into the ladder if the body really is a temple why are we so afraid of it [Music] [Music] for the first half of the 20th century horror movies were about Fantastical monsters zombies ghosts vampires but in 1960 one movie came and changed that for forever Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho about a murderous Motel proprietor named Norman Bates shifted the focus of horror from the Fantastical to the mundane the monster was no longer a mythical beast but rather

a beast that lies within us all one that only Society can bring out what psycho popularized was a fear of the normal people who are so brought down and traumatized by the horrors of everyday life that they end up deranged Norman Bates is the murderous and Agonist of psycho but the big twist is that he believes himself to be his own mother who he killed before the start of the film and whose mummified corpse he keeps in his basement Norman as mother kills the women Norman is attracted to including our protagonist Marian in fits of

jealous rage and the monster in Norman is one produced by an increasingly isolated alienating Society extending from the tradition of psycho came a subgenre of horror that took this fear of the normal and specified it to the fear of growing old these were called hag exploitation films and they belonged to a short-lived wave of films in the' 60s and' 7s which feature aging starlets and focused on a Grand Dame guol a Gothic archetype of a distinguished older woman that extends from the grand guol tradition a 19th Century Theater that specialized in maob gory horror shows

designed to scare audiences according to scholar Peter Shelly the Grand Dame guol or psycho bidy or hag can either present as a ment unstable antagonist or a woman in Peril protagonist whose mental state deteriorates as she's victimized throughout the film but most often she's the unstable antagonist an older woman who struggles to deal with the process of aging and resulting social exclusion which is highlighted when she's paired with a much younger actress the Grand Dame is often deranged and attempts to trap herself and those around her in time and in shelle's words this refusal to

accept reality and the natural process of Life exemplifies the fear of aging and death and implicitly a fear of women whatever happened to Baby Jane is widely considered the first ha exploitation film it stars juggernauts of the Hollywood golden age and real life enemies Betty Davis and Joan Crawford as Jane and blanch sisters who at different parts in life experienced stardom but now live in a lavish house together in solitude Jane is our psycho biddy a former Child Star who in her desperation to relive of her glory years has become deranged she's the caretaker of

blanch who was formerly a successful actress as a young adult until she was confined to a wheelchair from an accident were led to believe she suffered at the hands of Jane throughout the film Jane becomes increasingly violent and detached from reality a growing threat to herself and the people around her especially blanch things culminate in a massive fight Jane abducts blanch and drives her to a beach where it reveals that it was actually blanch who tried and failed to kill Jane but was injured in the process then framing Jane for her injury and driving her

mad with guilt the movie ends with blanch getting help from the police and Jane singing her creepy little song on the beach for a crowd of gawking onlookers now ha exploitation has drawn a bit of criticism over the years for what people saw to be an exploitative use of these older actresses incredible talents who had been forcibly aged out of the Hollywood Machine and were now forced to perform what some have described as an old lady minstral show cartoonishly lathering themselves in makeup and carrying out a degrading caricature much beneath their station as highly respected

artists I mean conspicuously there is no genre of be movies about psycho grandpas who refuse to stay in their socially imposed roles it's a very gendered thing so ha exploitation movies Stoke our fears of Aging but walk a very thin line between empathy towards old women and mockery of them it's never always clear which which side whatever happened to Baby Jane leans towards the horror of this film lies in Jane's anachronism her refusal or inability to accept her role as an old woman and Retreat from society accordingly our Terror comes from seeing Betty Davis wearing

an ill-fitting dated dress pigtails and white makeup that highlights the Deep lines in her face we are uncomfortable with this uncanny presentation there's something ridiculous about it and this transgression will scare you or make you laugh or Worse both so it's often hard to tell in this film if we're scared of what Society does to us when we get older or if we're scared of Jane scholar Charles Dairy describes the tone of the film as poignancy mixed with voyerism and revulsion but for me poignancy triumphs revulsion here because ultimately I think baby Jane is more

empathetic to the psycho bidy than its many iterations are the film spotlights Jane's social isolation and the tragedy of her obsolescence you can laugh at Jane for her terrible performances and ill-fitting dresses but when she regresses into her frightened childlike State you feel awfully for her and then with the big reveal at the end the movie encourages us to forgive Jane for her sins in some ha exploitation movies the hag is vanquished by being killed but in Baby Jane it's closer to what happens to Norman Bates she's fully regressed into an ultra ego unbefitting to

her age and completely submissive by ending the film in broad daylight as opposed to the sister's cavernous house we see Jane stripped of her power pitiable publicly scorned and unbeknownst to her old it's tragic but what baby Jane succeeds in where other ha exploitation films fail is that it lets you in on the joke with the actresses if you've heard of this movie before it's likely because it's largely remembered as a camp classic Betty Davis and Jo Crawford are delivering the most outlandish over-the-top performances here and you can really tell that these women are having

a lot of fun many lesser High exploitation films like straight jacket or whoever slew Auntie Ru are much more restrained in their approach to the Grand Dame she's often a woman in Peril who's constantly in distress yet is inexplicably capable of murder and the actress often starts the film out with an over-the-top performance but slowly descends into naturalism by the end if the meta Narrative of an in Starlet is so imperative to the exploitation film then you want to feel like the actress is enjoying herself it needs to be balls to the wall insane or

else it just leaves you either fearing or pitying the character for being old as scholar Timothy Sherry writes what ever happened to Baby Jane can be seen as a meeting point between melodrama horror and comedy a vital moment when the audience was presented with the tragedy and horror of being old in post-war America but learned to deflect C it with laughter the substance while not explicitly a high exploitation film Bears many traits of one Elizabeth spargle shares a likeness to the woman in Peril Grand Dame she doesn't start out the film as mentally unstable but

as she's more and more victimized by Sue she becomes increasingly erratic muttering to herself banging her head against the floor and walls and violently clawing at her own face Elizabeth like many Grand Dames is just opposed to a younger mirror image of herself and violently clashes with her she's punished for transgressing her role as an older obsolete Woman by choosing to take the substance and in the end she's destroyed by it Elizabeth is also played by Demi Moore whose Superstar career spanned several decades but in recent years has really slowed down many people especially see

the film as a meta commentary on Moore's celebrity she was once ridiculed for dating a much younger man and she's undergone many cosmetic procedures in the public eye and has been scrutinized for it so her age has been a topic of conversation for some time now the thing is one of the issues I had with the substance is that it never fully commits to being Camp the movie is heavily stylized the sets and costumes are really colorful all of the Mis on S is really generic and stripped back and many of the supporting actors are

delivering extremely over-the-top performances but Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle with a great deal of restraint which puts her at odds with her Camp surroundings especially when we compare her subdued performance to qu's much more cartoonish delivery I personally found this to be tonally jarring and it made a lot of the more artificial and fun elements fall flat for me Demi's naturalist and subdued performance paired with the fact that Elizabeth is more of a woman in Peril Dame than a psycho bidy like Baby Jane results in a Relentless victimization of Elizabeth from the beginning of the film

to its end in Baby Jane we see Jane deflecting her oppression in the public sphere by taking power wherever she can in the private sphere at the expense of blanch of course her violent behavior is scary but again that's kind of part of the fun she's deflecting her anger but Elizabeth never really gets to exact that power other than the Montage of her cooking and binge eating repulsive French food to get back at Sue and destroying her apartment as she does it we never really get to see her be violent and just when he thinks

she's going to rise up she ultimately fails choosing to resuscitate Sue who in a fit of rage beats her older self to death for the rest of the film we only see Elizabeth Twice first as her battered aged corpse and second as a face stretched across Monstra elzu because Elizabeth is a victim with no agency who was also vanquished at the end of the film the substance can be read as tragic for sure but it can just as easily be read as punishment for Elizabeth's hubristic quest to be beautiful body horror also has its origins

in the grand quol this time in its Reliance on Gore back during the days of the grand quol the success of a performance was judged by the number of Spectators who fainted or vomited the same can be said for body horror body horror is concerned with our fears towards transformations of the body the corporeal as scholar Xavier Aldon re explains the workings of a body horror involve the inscription of horror onto the human body by virtue of a change or series of them that transforms the perceived normal body into a negatively exceptional or painful version

of itself often a character in a body horror film will either start the film disfigured or they'll be confronted with their Corporal form their body as it undergo a major life-threatening change and if they don't try to annihilate whatever is inside of them that's changing their body other people will as this body poses a perceived threat to the status quo by way of being different according to Reese there are two major forms of body horror there's the kind where our disgust stems from watching the violent physical transformation of a character being attacked by an outside

force and the other is a more Supernatural kind where we're disgusted by a metaphysical imposition upon a character that transforms their body in terrible often painful ways ree says that the horror of the latter type is more of the latter kind of body horror it was made by David Cronenberg who more or less popularized the body horror genre with this movie he had made several body horror films before this but the fly was considered to be his first of this kind to achieve mainstream success and acclaim cronenberg's filmography is characterized by its fascination with the

limits of the human form and all the sociopsychological issues under scoring our relationship to our bodies and the bodies of others the fly is very simple based on a much different 1958 film of the same name cronenberg's is a better an Ecentric scientist named Seth brundle played by Jeff Goldblum who has recently developed a teleportation technology the film is framed by a romance he begins with a science journalist named Ronnie played by Gina Davis who serves as witness to the horrors that unfold essentially one night Seth is upset about Ronnie seeing an ex-boyfriend gets drunk

and decides to put himself through the teleporter despite knowing that the machine is dangerous he unknowingly enters the telepod with a fly causing a catastrophic Fusion between himself and the insect which leads to Seth slowly transforming into a grotesque human insect hybrid called the brundlefly as his human body deteriorates he adopts other supernatural fly-like abilities like an increased libido and the ability to walk on walls even more terrible Ronnie finds out she's pregnant with Seth's baby and is unsure whether The Offspring will also carry the DNA of a fly with the support of her formerly

insufferable ex staus she attempts to abort the fetus but is kidnapped by brundlefly in the process who pleads with her not to kill all that's left of the real H in a desperate attempt to reverse the transformation he violently attacks staus and attempts to jump into the Pod with Ronnie so that he she and the fetus can merge into one instead he alone Falls in and becomes a completely unsustainable injured hybrid creature the injured Brun fly pleads with Ronnie to kill him she does and is left crying over his remains what is immediately striking about

the fly to me is that while the gore is very difficult to watch the movie is much more sad devastating even then it is scary the fly spends a great deal of time developing the characters and challenging our assumptions about them it even has us rooting for status by the end and because of this it provides a great deal of insight into Seth's mind the screenplay which is one of my favorite ever written really encourages you to ponder the moral and philosophical implications of Seth's plate during his Decay Seth oscillates between Terror over what's happening

to him help me and excitement about being freed of his human form that's not too terrible is it most people would give anything to be turned into something else and so as we recoil from Seth's grotesque rapidly decaying body were faced with the conflict of having to empathize with him greatly because of Seth's social exclusion and his discussions of impurity and contagion it might be contagious somehow I wouldn't want to infect you many people read the fly as an allegory for AIDS which it very well could be but Cronenberg has said that the film has

a more General message in that it's a metaphor for aging Seth's skin becomes wrinkled and discolored he loses teeth and hair early on for a while he uses crutches these are transformations we will all grapple with as we get older as scholar Colin mcin so beautifully puts it all human life is metamorphosis from fertilized egg to fetus from baby to child then the Spurt of adolescence adulthood and then the long decline into old age infirmity and finally the rapidly decaying corpse being equipped with memory and self-consciousness we are always aware of our own inevitable Metamorphoses

of the body's temporal convulsions and rebirths in the creature brundlefly we see our own lives speeded up caricatured but not falsely represented megin talks about how the real horror of the fly is not in the transformation of Seth's body but actually the fact that the fly was in him all along similar to Psycho and the horrors of the normal the monster was lurking inside Seth and by extension us this entire time the monster coming out of him is inevitable and this inevitability is terrifying it reminds us that we cannot reverse the effects of growing old

that our bodies will change and there's nothing we can do to stop them and in placing Us in Seth shoes the fly holds up a mirror to us and makes us feel seen New York Times critic Alyssa Wilkinson raised a similar point to mcin in her review of the substance she says the movie is appropriately enough a mirror and our discomfort reveals our own hidden biases and fears about oursel being older being famous being seen being loved being usurped by someone Young younger and hotter it's all here nothing like a mirror to remind you of

what lurks beneath but I think the substance is less effective a mirror than the fly and here's why the fly uses the kofka esque metaphor of a man turning into a fly to explore our fears of Aging so our disgust is cushioned not only by an empathetic script but also by the fact that what we're recoiling from is a supernatural impossible hybrid creature something that isn't real the substance on the other hand does not use metaphor yes the actual substance drug is not real and serves as a metaphor for the way we treat our older

selves but Elizabeth's transformation for the majority of the film is not into a monster but simply into an old lady she is actually rapidly aging like any horror movie the substance has a number of reveal sequences to scare the viewer but every reveal prior to the creation of Monstra alasu is simply the reveal of a decrepit body part an elderly finger a lumpy veiny elderly leg Elizabeth now with gray hair and rotted teeth and then finally the grand reveal as an entirely geriatric Elizabeth deformed by age she has almost no hair her back is severely

hunched one shot is just of her wrinkly discolored bum and the biggest response from the audience I watched this movie with during the sequence was when Elizabeth turns around to display one naked heavily sagging breast when this happened the people around me screamed in Terror followed closely by laughter these responses are aided by the film its suspenseful music editing and the reaction of Elizabeth all encouraged the audience to scream as they did but in this moment I felt very sad not for Elizabeth but for all the elderly women I've ever known in my life who

bodies are not so different from what had been displayed here I was reminded in this moment of the naked old lady in The Shining of meia goth and old lady Prosthetics and I was confused because what I was watching was an explicitly feminist film about women's beauty standards and here I was surrounded by an audience screaming at the body of an old woman there's something very cyborgian about cronenberg's films he's fixated on the idea of the body as technology which makes his voyerism over Seth's mutilation feel like a moment of awe over this creature he

invented whereas farot's voyerism over Elizabeth's elderly figure felt just gratuitous and unlike the fly which spends a lot of time getting you comfortable enough with this character that when he dies you're mourning a person you spent the past hour and a half getting to know the dialogue in the substance is very sparse so much so that you never really get to know Elizabeth at all who are her friends does she have any why is she single because the film is so stylized every character is an archetype rather than a flushed out person but I don't

think that serves it well in these moments I feel bad for Elizabeth because I'm a woman and can project all my own feelings about beauty and aging onto her but I also want to feel bad for her and so I actually found myself empathizing more with Seth as a fly man than I did with Elizabeth as an actual person I think the reason that sagging breast moment elicited such a big reaction from the audience is because outside of horror when do we ever see a sagging breast on screen one of the only instances I can

recall seeing an elderly body portrayed in a light other than horror is in this Tom Ford Campaign which I saw for the first time over 10 years ago Demi Mo did an incredible job with this film and she deserves her roses but let's put things into perspective Betty Davis was 7 years younger than Dei Moore is now when she filmed whatever happened to Baby Jane yet the film relies heavily on Davis's aged appearance Mo on the otherand like I said has undergone extensive cosmetic procedures in her life to the point that as a 61-year-old she

looks like she could be 40 she's nude for a lot of this film and her body is certainly slightly outside the norm of the typical female body we're used to seeing but it also barely shows the signs of aging of a 61-year-old body and this is absolutely nothing against more but only that older actresses these days are so nipped and tucked beyond recognition so as to spare us from the supposed horror of their bodies the actual elderly female body is completely invisible to us as a public and when we do see it in horror as

a jump scare it's often in the the form of a younger actress wearing Prosthetics like Mo does in these later sequences so as we get accustomed to this actress's body which is still very much viable to male desire and the standards of beauty of course it's jarring when we then see her again as a much older much less viable form of herself but in that moment of screaming at her sagging breast are we actually holding the mirror up or are we just scared in in his book the culture of narcissism Christopher lash talks about the

way Modern Life alienates us from each other and from ourselves thus turning inwards and adopting new radical behaviors like working out and he has this great quote where he says as we lose the ability to perceive ourselves we lose the ability to clearly perceive others I think latch's book applies very well to the themes of the substance but also in our reactions to it the more we become alienated from each other and from older Generations we experience a cultural dysmorphia a collective fear of aging and as a consequence of elderly people that I don't think

the substance very acutely comments on but inadvertently blows up and in a time where young women are taping their mouths shut to go to sleep and drinking from special straws to avoid wrinkle lines putting retinol on their hands getting baby Botox I don't know if a movie that elicits such a reaction is necessarily helping what is a fear of Aging well it's a fear of death death is the only inevitable thing there's no escape from it like Elizabeth Baby Jane and Seth brundle we may try our best to reverse it to buy ourselves time but

it comes for all of us and so who can fault us for being terrified when our body shows visible signs of drawing closer to this moment preparing itself for the inevitable oh I'm like the crap keeper okay that's enough what I think is so great about a ha exploitation film like Baby Jane or a body horror movie like The Fly is that they bravely tackle this concept these movies are about control losing it the illusion of it but they don't condemn those who try to to maintain it baby Jane and brundlefly are both incredibly complicated

characters who command empathy from us no matter what we watch them do and that's why these movies are such great mirrors they're telling us that delaying the inevitable is futile but that it's okay to be scared the substance is an explicitly empathetic film there's no doubt about it but women's bodies have always been a canvas on which to project all our anxieties about aging and the movie comes at a dire time when being an old woman is more taboo than ever before so to cut the metaphorical legs off its character building and present Elizabeth's aging

body not once but four times as a jump scare is just something we might not be able to afford right now although I'm glad I got the conversation going I want to end with a quote from scholar Jesse STL who argues that we need to reconstitute the way we view aging dying and dead bodies he says that our culture strips dead bodies of their substance for lack of better words that we fail to approach images of horror with any critical voraciousness instead consuming them with passive amusement or reprobation disgust or Terror instead we need to

make the body vital again he says the dead body reminds us that we are always in a state of constant Decay and reanimation Reinventing ourselves intellectually emotionally and spiritually but also repairing physical damage repl placing dead cells with live ones and collecting more and more layers of Flesh all the while we grow old wrinkle rot wkak and break little by little our organs fail our skin cultures fungi and our stomachs has hundreds of bacteria species we are losing our individuality our Singularity more and more as our identities proliferate like screen names in the glow of

our computer screens and going against the grain of much of the thinking on the subject I argue that none of this is such a bad after all and instead offers Us increasing opportunities for Mutiny to rise not from the dead but like the dead if this video got you in the mood for spooky season and you're looking for more then you'll love this brand new commentary on Night of the Living Dead hosted by Rift tracks if you aren't familiar with Rift tracks they're a comedy group comprised of former actors and writers from the iconic film

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