31 Days of Horror Redux: Spider Baby

Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.

Day 8: Spider Baby, Or the Maddest Story Ever Told, directed by Jack Hill

I like the alternate title to this film a lot. Spider Baby is truer to the actual events of the story, but The Maddest Story Ever Told feels appropriate for the emotional reality of the world. This is a gothic freakout of epic proportions, with every performance turned up to 10 and the darkly comic joy of the filmmakers bursting through every frame.

I didn’t know anything about this movie going into it and had no expectations. I suppose I thought it might resemble something like Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of The Haunting or, a step down from that, perhaps one of those Roger Corman-produced, Vincent Price-starring Edgar Allen Poe adaptations like The Raven or The Pit and the Pendulum. And, it is all that, but from the opening moments of the film’s incredible theme song, we recognize it as something else, too.

There is a knowing campiness to everything about this movie. The comparison I kept coming back to while watching the movie was the original The Munsters TV show, which aired from 1964-1966. Hill’s film, which came out in 1967, is clearly in conversation with that aesthetic, up to and including the theme, which plays like a mashup of the The Munsters theme and “The Monster Mash” from 1962.

The reason I like The Maddest Story Ever Told is because the film’s framing device is that we are hearing the tale told by a survivor of the incidents portrayed, Peter (Quinn K. Redeker). Of course, to an outsider, this would absolutely be the maddest thing that ever happened. However, despite the bookends, much of the story is told from the point of view of the eccentric Merrye family, whose dark secrets we come to learn. It’s the same lesson as The Munsters or The Addams Family: If you tell the story from the POV of the weirdos, the strangest things seem normal.

The Merrye (pronounced Mary) family suffer a genetic curse that causes some members of the family to mentally regress as they physically age, like a reverse Benjamin Button. Those afflicted are Liz (Beverly Washburn), Virginia (Jill Banner), and Ralph (Sid Haig). Their minder is Uncle Bruno, played by the legendary Lon Chaney Jr. The first thing that happens in the movie is Liz murders a delivery man while playing a game of spider, wherein she catches an unsuspecting victim in a net, then uses a pair of knives as makeshift fangs to kill the victim. So, we know we’re in for a wild ride.

The actual plot of the film involves some distant relatives arriving to make a claim on the Merrye estate, given the perceived mental incapacity of Liz, Virginia, and Ralph, while Uncle Bruno tries to get his clan to act normal enough for long enough to get these people to leave. That doesn’t happen.

Chaney, who would appear in just four more films after this, is excellent as the put-upon caretaker of these murderous psychopaths – he made a promise to their father to look after them, you see – and it’s a fun bit of horror history to have Chaney and Haig on screen together. Haig was a Hill favorite, appearing in a number of the director’s films, and of course went on to be a recurring player in the Rob Zombie universe of movies in the 2000s and 2010s. So, in a very real way, this film serves as a bridge across roughly 75 years of horror filmmaking.

One last note, in researching this film for this piece, it appears the house where all of the main action is set is located less than a mile from where I am typing this. The famed Smith Estate in Highland Park is a scant 15 minute walk from my own home. Perhaps I will make a little sojourn over there before this month of horror delights comes to a close.