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 Family in the Horror Genre: Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and Foxes

The horror genre consistently has focused on ‘our most basic fears and desires’1. In her book
Gender and the Nuclear Family in the 21st Century Horror Kimberly Jackson writes how
‘horror films are located in the space where such anxieties are born: the family home’2. The
horror intrusions in the home come from external forces like in The Exorcist (William
Friedkin, 1973) where the child Reagan (Linda Blair) is possessed from the outside demon, or
it comes internally as seen in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) where Jack Torrance (Jack
Nicholson) is the threat to his wife and son. Both the use of external and internal intrusions
are used in the horror to break down the family unit and look at it when it’s unstable.

In Robert Aldrich’s film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) the distorted family
home is viewed in a new way as it’s family dynamic is what specifically creates the horror. In
this essay I will look at how Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? subverts and sticks to the
conventions of the horror genre and specifically looking at it through the relationship of the
Hudson sisters, Blanche (Joan Crawford) and the titular Baby Jane (Bette Davis) and it’s
hybridity with the melodrams. Furthermore, I will compare how we looked at the film
stylistically and narratively as an inspiration for our own short film, Foxes. Then how we
specifically approached the conventions of the genre to either follow or subvert.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was released in 1962 and follows the fading child star
Baby Jane who is forced to look after her sister, an old golden age actress, Blanche who is
wheelchair bound after an accident suggested to be the fault of Jane. Whilst it had a mixed
reception upon release it has since become a cult classic and seen as establishing its own sub-
genre of horror, the Grand Dame Guignol.

Baby Jane still utilises the mains conventions of horror. It uses the mansion which the
Hudson sisters live in as a place linked with the terror. The place is macabre. Whilst on the
outside it’s a sunny California mansion on the inside it it’s decrepit. The house is cluttered
with Baby Jane’s memorabilia and rusting iron bars on the window represent the trapped state
of Blanche, who is subjected to her sister’s torture of being served dead animals. It also is

1
Kimberly Jackson, Gender and the Nuclear Family in Twenty-First-Century Horror, (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan US, 2015), 1.
2
Jackson, Gender and the Nuclear Family, 1.
linked to the car accident which put the sisters in this co-dependent relationship. Like other
horror films Aldrich links the terror of the place with the terror of the villain. Baby Jane’s
character is a continuation of showing the villains psyche, previously seen with Norman
Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), a stark contrast to the simple
monsters of the Universal Classic monsters seen in films like Dracula (Browning, 1931) and
Frankenstein (Whale, 1931). Jane’s delusions are shown to the audience in the scene when
she sings the song that made her famous as a kid ‘I’ve written a letter to daddy’. The scene
starts in a close-up of Jane playing the melody on the piano, her shadow projected onto the
wall behind her. Then she starts to hear her childhood self sing the song. Jane clings her onto
her delusion and youth by taking the bow from the baby jane doll and putting it on herself as
she now sings the song herself. Her garish make-up and short temper make her a suspenseful
presence on screen as she stares into the mirror with high key lighting snapping at Blanche.
Like Norman Bates dressed as his dead mother the film follows the convention of making the
ordinary human a horror. The film treats both sisters with the same attention which makes the
character of Jane a tragic villain. It is clear she is not born insane which is suggested with
Norman Bates in Psycho but as she struggles with her fading image her mental stability also
fades.

Whilst the scene shows the film sticking to genre conventions through its delusional villains,
the use of age and gender is what specifically made Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
subversive to the genre. The film started its own short lived sub-genre of horror films that
focus on the dichotomy relationship between its leads. The Grande Dame Guignol films, also
known as hagsploataion or the biddy horror, would come be known for the films that as Stacy
Davies writes focus on ‘delusional predator antagonist’ and the ‘woman in peril protagonist’3.
They utilise, as Baby Jane does, of casting older golden age Hollywood actresses, both Joan
Crawford and Bette Davis where prominent in the genre but Olivia de Hayward and Barbara
Stanwyck also had shorts rebirths in their careers for staring in these types of films. At the
core of these horror films is the relationships between their main characters. As we can see
with Baby Jane it’s this uneasy relationship that creates the horror. The genre has always had
disturbing characters but what Aldrich does is use that specific relationship between them to

3
Stacy Davies, “16 Creepy Grande Dame Guignol Horror Films to Freak You Out”, Taste of Cinema – Movie
Reviews and Classic Movie Lists, Jan 10 2015, accessed Jan 9 2023, https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/16-
creepy-grande-dame-guignol-horror-films-to-freak-you-out/.
create suspense. He is leaning on aspects of the melodrama to push their horror narratives.
The film leans into campness and as David Green writes in his article Bringing out Baby
Jane: camp, sympathy, and the 1960s horror-woman's film, ‘the political uses of women's
melodrama by gay men can be summed up in a single, simple formula: to turn tragedy into
melodrama’4 and as I have already stated the motivations of Jane make her a tragic character.
Aldrich represents the older woman in conflict and this hybridity can be seen in the scene
where the sisters argue about the house. The scene starts with a high angle shot of Jane
walking up the staircase. The staircase is constantly used in the classic melodramas, like
Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1959), to show power and whilst Blanche is at the top,
she is stuck there due to being wheelchair bound. As they argue the height disparity between
them is shown with low angle close ups on Jane and high angle close ups on blanche it
represents the relationship dynamic. The internal horror threat of Jane is always above
Blanche and makes her the woman trapped in peril. Unlike other classic melodramas the
nuclear family is not the focus as it has already crumbled leaving the problems between the
sisters that create the horror and uneasy atmosphere.

Whatever happened to Baby Jane? was a clear influence when making our own film Foxes.
We wanted to explore the family dynamic and make it the core of our horror film but like
Kimberly Jackson writes in her book since the 1960s ‘the family took on a different role in
horror films . . . often shown as morally compromised at its core’5. This corruption of the
family centre is what we wanted to do for our film. In Whatever happened to Baby Jane? the
nuclear family is only ever shown to be complete at the beginning and even then, it is still
corrupted as the Hudson Sister’s Father clearly over values Baby Jane to the detriment of
Blanche. With Foxes there is a clear imbalance of the nuclear family as the mother figure is
never present nor mentioned. With both relationships a power play is created through
imbalance of nuclear family. Whilst Alice (Annika Walter) is not physically refined like
Blanche she faces the same constraints from an abusive family member. Both are inquisitive
to their states and the power that is held over them. The height disparity is emphasised, and
different angled shots are used by Robert Aldrich to show this power dynamic and we wanted
to similarly highlight a height disparity which we did in the scene when The Father (Brendan

4
David Greven, Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the 1960s horror-woman's film, Jump Cut: A
Review of Contemporary Media, Issue 55 (2013): 7.
5
Jackson, Gender and the Nuclear Family, 7.
McLatchie) leaves for the night. We place Alice in a chair facing the door and cut to low and
high angles between the two highlighting the power dynamic between the two.

The dynamic between the two characters to create a horror was a central relationship we
wanted to explore as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. We make the relationship filled
with unease in the home. The relationships are filled with deceit that are held over the
narrative. Only Blanche really knows what happened in the accident but holds that
information from the audience and Jane, but it propels her motivations more than what the
audience expects. With The Father he uses the knowledge of the forest over Alice to propel
his own motivations and as a way to promote his authority over Alice. Even though these
relationships are unstable there is still a family relationship to it that makes them complex as
a family love complicates it. This unstable nature creates scenes of suspense for both duos as
one is always unsure where they will react. In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? quick cuts
and close-ups show Blanche’s shock at being served a dead rat and in Foxes the flickering
lights that illuminate the walls and Alice’s performance show her hesitation and fear to ask
more questions. Both films represent family in unique ways with it being a part of the horror
for the relationships to be inherently unstable. It was an inspiration for us to use the dynamics
seen in the Grande Dame Guignol but with a different age and gender to create the
relationship.

The family home as previously stated is key to the horror film and was key for us in making
Foxes. By making it a secluded cottage follows the horror convention of making the places in
which the terror take place secluded, like The Shining’s Overlook Hotel or Psycho’s Bates
Motel does, as a way to make the characters more trapped. We use empty close-ups of The
Father to emphasise his foreboding speeches that is seen within the genre. We built these
layers of trapped upon Alice, such as making her frames more cluttered, to make the outside
world a more terrifying force to her. Within the home we wanted to subvert tropes of
investigation or desperate phone calls to an unbelieving police station operator so we put the
film in a period setting so that there would be this lack of technology. This allowed for more
characterization in the conversations between Alice and her Father as he is her only source of
information for the outside world. His conversations are filled with stereotypical foreboding
horror jargon like ‘things I’d never wish for you to see’. This however does allow for the
audience to connect with Alice more as they are on the same level of knowledge and
exposition.
Location became important for the film when dealing with the horror of the other.
Throughout the film an unknown threat is constantly made aware to the audience, but we try
to subvert the genre by holding back that threat that is seen as a constant presence in monster
and slasher horror films. We still see its effects such as the woman running across the forest
and screaming that peaks Alice’s interest in shot-reverse shots. This horror of the other
allowed us to put in a plot twist as it is revealed in a pan up to be the father who is the cause
of the horror. However, we put a spin on this twist. Through a establishing a melodramatic
throughline in the horror we make the twist a tragic turn. The Father does not go on a
murderous rampage upon the discovery of his secret instead he is filled with guilt which we
show through close-ups. Our dealing of narrative expositions to the audience allows for us to
subvert the horror villain of the other by not having be this rage fuelled psychotic character
like Jack Torrance or Baby Jane instead The Father is able to see himself as a tragic villain
and have a self-awareness of his character.

The characterisation of the father allowed us to deal with the female protagonist in a way that
sticks to and is subversive to the genre. The Horror genre is full of victimised female
characters to the point where actresses like Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis become known
as ‘Scream Queens’ due to their association with the genre. In Foxes we deal with this female
protagonist in Alice, named so after C. S. Lewis’ Alice in Wonderland. Like female
protagonists and scream queens before her she is investigative trying to find out the reasons
behind her father’s words and shot-reverse shots between her and the door paired with the
swelling orchestration and soundscapes show her relationship to the outside world of the
family home. It is a clear patriarchal relationship with her and her father as she is constantly
looking for his approval and for her to prove something to him as he holds the power. Like
other female victims she is under the psychological torment, but she does not encounter a
psychical violence that threatens her. Whilst she observes how others like the man and the
woman are inflicted pain, she herself does not experience the same torment. It is always at a
length away as we show the discovering in the forest through more handheld shots as
opposed to more static shots that we use in the home. This leads to a subversive ending that
pairs the guilty father with Alice who is becoming more independent as a character. While
other horror villains face a comeuppance at the end there is an uneasy acceptance at the end
of Foxes to subvert the trope of the final girl killing her predator. There is a reversal of
performance between the pair at the end subverts the usual bloodbath horror endings. It
showcases the complicated relationship between the pair and how the use of love in the
relationship makes the events take a different turn than expected.

Genre films are successful because of the audiences pre-conceived notions about the film.
Viewers know and like the formulas making them want to return to them. The pre-conceived
notions allow for filmmakers to engage the audience by creating new and subversive ways of
the genre’s narrative. This is something Robert Aldrich in Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane? does by bringing a hybridity to the film by injecting melodramatic elements into the
family of the Hudson sisters. These new elements keep the genre fresh and something that
other films are able to take influence from. Genres are evolving and as family stays focus of
the horror genre it is built on in different ways. We took influence from Aldrich’s approach to
looking at corrupted family core but then were able to take that in our directions of having an
unconventional return to the family home with both characters that other films’ families
usually don’t all survive to come back. Taking influence from and changing conventions in
Foxes allowed us to create unique approach and showcase a different turn on the horror film.

2482

Bibliography
Davies, Stacy. “16 Creepy Grande Dame Guignol Horror Films to Freak You Out”.
Taste of Cinema – Movie Reviews and Classic Movie Lists. Jan 10 2015. Accessed Jan 9 2023,
https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/16-creepy-grande-dame-guignol-horror-films-to-
freak-you-out/.

Greven, David. “Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the 1960s horror-woman's film”. Jump
Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 55 (2013): 7-7.

Jackson, Kimberly. Gender and the Nuclear Family in Twenty-First-Century Horror. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan US, 2015.

Filmmography
Dracula. Directed by Tod Browning. Universal Pictures, 1931.
Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale. Universal Pictures, 1931.
Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures, 1960.
The Exorcist. Directed by William Friedkin. Warner Bros, 1973.
The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. The Producer Circle Company
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Seven Arts Productions, 1962
Written on the Wind. Directed by Douglas Sirk. Universal-International, 1956.