SPIDER BABY 1967
Spider Baby (1967): The Maddest Story Ever Told—A Lyrical Descent into Gothic Whimsy and Horror
Spider Baby (1967), or as it’s affectionately subtitled, The Maddest Story Ever Told, is a fiendishly playful cult oddity perched at the edge of 1960s horror, a black-and-white film that spins its grotesque tale like a modern Gothic bedtime story for adults, humming with black humor and genuine pathos. Directed by Jack Hill, whose later legacy would bend toward exploitation classics like Foxy Brown 1974, Coffy 1973featuring Pam Grier’s star quality and Switchblade Sisters 1975, The Big Doll House, and The Big Bird Cage, this debut feature sets Hill’s distinct tone: campy yet clever, bold in its choices, and always attentive to strange, subversive textures and comic rythyms in both his character study and distinctive settings.
Jack Hill’s hand is unmistakable through every warped, lilting frame. Before he gave the world blaxploitation heroines and switchblade-wielding delinquents, he conjured Spider Baby practically guerrilla-style, having written, edited, and directed it on a shoestring budget across twelve sweltering days in Los Angeles. Hill’s affection for both the golden age of Universal horror and low-budget ingenuity is everywhere onscreen. Though its plot, a tale of inbred siblings regressing to a primal state, their crumbling manor beset by greedy relatives, could have easily shambled on like a tired B-movie, Hill infuses everything with lyrical weirdness, Gothic melancholy, and an impish sense of how horror can mirror the absurdity of family, society, and civilization itself. All this makes me feel a fierce affection for this quirky adult fairytale with all its gleefully twisted whimsy that collides with the film’s shadowy charm. I can’t help but light up from within my own quirky little soul. The delightful darkness sends currents of pure, irrepressible joy humming through me, as if each mischievous moment were designed to spark some secret, unending grin I can never suppress. It never gets old. Spider Baby is an irreverent gem!
The heart and haunted soul of the film is Lon Chaney Jr. as Bruno, the grave but gentle chauffeur and caretaker, whose craggy face and sad, soft voice seem to carry all the ghosts and regrets of 20th-century horror.
Lon Chaney Jr., a legendary figure among the Universal Monsters for his role as the tragic Lawrence Talbot, finds in Bruno a part as tragic and complex as any poor full moon beset hero. He’s the loyal guardian, sworn to shield the last Merrye children from a world that would destroy them, but also heartbreakingly helpless as his good intentions slip toward violence. His performance, at times teary-eyed with both fear and tenderness, grounds the movie’s carnival of madness: “Children! You’ve got to promise me—no more games tonight.” In one of his many quietly devastating moments, Bruno confesses, “I made a promise. A promise I swore to keep, no matter what,” and “Just because something isn’t good doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
Opposite him are the three Merrye siblings, especially dear to me is Beverly Washburn’s Elizabeth, who dances between innocence and menace with bracing precision. Washburn, known for her earlier role in Old Yeller, gives Elizabeth a child’s logic running wild through a fraught, feral world. Her eyes flash with both glee and cunning, inviting us to wonder where childish play ends and malice begins. Washburn’s performance embodies the film’s central tension: the disquieting overlap of the deeply familiar and the utterly alien, the way that inside every family lies the capacity for love, cruelty, and something far weirder lurking just beneath the surface.
The Merrye family’s darkest secret lurks beneath the house–in the basement, a group of deranged, degenerated relatives is kept hidden from the world. These secluded family members have regressed to a near-feral state, sustaining themselves through cannibalism. Their presence is marked only by guttural sounds and unsettling glimpses, a grim reminder that the family’s madness runs generations deep and has literally been locked away, left to feed on itself. The basement dwellers are the ultimate embodiment of the Merrye curse: primal appetites, cut off from civilization, haunting the estate both in body and legend.
Elizabeth Merrye in Spider Baby takes on a sort of self-appointed, strict role within the decaying household. She’s often seen enforcing rules, policing the rest of the clan, and acting like the family’s harshest arbiter, balancing childlike innocence with a surprisingly severe and unforgiving streak.
Her distinctive hairstyle: she wears pigtails. These pigtails, often tied with simple ribbons, frame her expressive face and further highlight the odd mixture of girlishness and responsibility she brings to the dysfunctional Merrye household. Her attire is typically modest and old-fashioned, echoing a bygone era, blouses with Peter Pan collars, demure skirts, and often a faintly prim demeanor in how she carries herself. This classic, almost vintage look accentuates the timeless, fairy-tale-gone-wrong atmosphere of the film. The pigtails, in particular, make her seem more youthful and outwardly harmless, which sharply contrasts with the stern and judgmental role masked in that sardonic cherubic grin, she takes on within her crumbling family, making her presence both disarming and quietly commanding.
Jill Banner as Virginia, the so-called “Spider Baby,” spins her eerie games with giggling seriousness, luring and “stinging” her victims with a pair of kitchen knives.
I caught a big fat bug right in my spider web and now the spider gets to give the bug a big sting. Sting! Sting! Sting! Sting! Sting!
Banner presents a haunting yet mischievous appearance that perfectly complements her unsettling role. She often wears her hair in soft, loose waves framing her face, which contrasts with the film’s darker themes. Her look is deceptively innocent, embodying a childlike vulnerability mixed with a sly, eerie smile that hints at her character’s dangerous unpredictability.
Sid Haig’s Ralph, the wordless brother who leers and lurches through the film’s corridors, lends a physical unpredictability bordering on the uncanny. Haig’s character, Ralph, in Spider Baby is a deliciously wild force of nature, a mostly silent, unsettling presence whose facial expressions and movements deliver more laughs and chills than any line of dialogue could. With his ragged clothes and a mischievous gleam in his eyes, Ralph looks like a cross between a feral hairless primate and a mischievous ghost haunting the decaying Merrye estate. Haig’s performance is equal parts silent clown and eerie predator, as he shuffles through the house or scuttles down dumbwaiter shafts, lending him a spider-like eeriness that perfectly matches the film’s macabre whimsy.
His physicality, part grotesque, part childlike, makes him feel both terrifying and oddly endearing, like a misunderstood creature playing a horrifying, off-kilter game of hide and seek. Sid Haig himself once described how he studied primates at the zoo and kids on playgrounds to create Ralph’s uncanny mix of animalistic playfulness and terrifying unpredictability. Watching Ralph is like witnessing chaos in slow motion, where every twitch and leer carries the promise of unexpected mayhem, but somehow it’s impossible not to be amused by his gleeful oddness. He’s the film’s perfectly unhinged embodiment of that quirky, grim humor, equal parts menace and comic relief spiraling through the house’s shadowy halls. Ralph skulks and lurks, a wiry, baldfaced miscreant with the restless energy of a wild child popping up out of the dumbwaiter like a creepy jack-in-the-box who’s had way too much time to perfect his creepy timing.
The fashions handled by Joan Keller Stern, credited as the costume designer, was responsible for crafting the film’s memorable blend of decayed vintage looks and character-driven fashions. Her work contributed significantly to the movie’s unique atmosphere, with each character’s outfit ranging from Elizabeth’s pigtails and old-fashioned dresses to Emily Howe’s polished, urbane attire, serving to underscore the clash between innocence, menace, and outsider status in the Merrye estate.
One of the little character flourishes that I adore about the fashion sense behind Spider Baby is how Ralph famously wears a tight, old-fashioned velvet outfit reminiscent of a little lord Fauntleroy outfit, which is clearly too small and ill-fitting for him. Ralph struts into the room sporting his velvet get-up like a Gothic toddler who’s outgrown everything except his wild streak. He’s a hulking adult squeezed into a costume fit for a 19th-century pageant dropout. The sleeves threaten to burst at any moment, buttons straining like they’re holding back an existential crisis, while his developed limbs stick out in all directions, making him look like a sinister marionette dressed by someone with a very warped sense of fashion. Add in the perpetual look of gleeful mayhem on his face, and you’ve got the undeniable child-king of the Merrye madhouse—part deranged heir, part overgrown baby-man, and all unforgettable.
Notorious for her turn as the scheming Annabelle in House on Haunted Hill, Carol Ohmart trades supernatural scheming for old-money exasperation in this film, and she’s a treat to watch in both. In Spider Baby, Ohmart plays Emily Howe, the uptight and self-important distant cousin who arrives at the crumbling Merrye estate and has grand ideas about inheriting what’s left of the family fortune. She’s all sharp elbows, frostbitten manners, and city-slicker impatience, bristling at the weirdness around her before she even steps through the door.
Ohmart’s look is carefully crafted to embody the polished, controlled sensibility of Emily, who is thrust into the chaotic decay of the Merrye family estate. Her wardrobe and styling reflect mid-century upper-class propriety: tailored dresses, precise hairdos, and subtle, impeccably applied makeup, all of which signify her outsider status and her attempts to impose order on the household’s unraveling madness. This visual presentation contrasts sharply with the film’s pervasive atmosphere of rot and disorder, underlining Emily’s role as the pragmatic, no-nonsense foil to the grotesque and unpredictable Merrye siblings. Ohmart’s appearance functions as a quiet but telling symbol of societal norms and rationality standing at odds with the film’s eccentric, practically surreal family world, holding a mirror up to the tension between civilization and degeneration that runs through the narrative.
But the specter of old horror and old Hollywood is always present in Chaney’s weathered eyes, urging us to look past cliché and see the sadness behind the mask.
Into the Web: Unraveling the Oddities and Nightmares of the House of Merrye:
The film opens with a deviously cheerful song, sung by Lon Chaney Jr. himself, over a parade of cartoon horrors (“This cannibal orgy is strange to behold, in the maddest story ever told!”). Setting the tone: Addams Family-style whimsy collides with genuinely unsettling violence. Almost immediately, Jack Hill’s camera (through the lens of cinematographer Alfred Taylor) turns the Smith Estate’s real-life decay into a menacing fairy tale: sharp beams of sunlight filtered by makeshift reflectors in powerless rooms, shadowy corridors yawning with the threat of what’s unseen, austere compositions that hold on a smile just long enough for it to turn sinister.
Prolific character actor Mantan Moreland, known for his extensive work in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, often cast in comic relief roles but beloved for his sharp timing and expressive face, shows up on the scene.
In Spider Baby, Moreland’s character, the postman, innocently arrives at the Merrye estate to deliver a letter. His visit takes a gruesome turn when Virginia lures him into the house as part of her disturbingly playful “spider” game. As the unsuspecting postman is caught in her web, Virginia attacks him and, with chilling childlike detachment, cuts off his ear with a knife and proceeds to stab him to death. This shocking scene in black and white still packs a wallop. Done with a twisted sense of playfulness, it gives us one of the early glimpses into the violent, unpredictable world of the Merrye family.
Scene by scene, the film unfolds with hypnotic oddity. Virginia’s game with the visiting deliveryman, luring him into a fake web before dispatching him, casts the children’s madness as both play and predatory. Bruno’s nervous attempts to coach the girls in etiquette for their visiting cousins is both funny and pathetic: “Elizabeth, Virginia, remember to be nice tonight. We must have no…unpleasantness.” The would-be heirs, Peter and Emily Howe, and their oily lawyer Schlocker, who sports a disquieting, irreverent Hitler mustache, plus his ever-watchful secretary Ann, played by Mary Mitchel, snake their way into the Merrye house. Descending as a mismatched party of outsiders all at once into the heart of the Merryes’ peculiar world, power shifts and facades crumble. The Merrye sisters trade off between childlike hospitality (“Would you like to play Spider?”) and sudden violence, the tension always charged with the knowledge that in this house, innocence is as perilous as guilt.
The black humor is relentless but never merely sarcastic; it blooms from the grotesque absurdities Hill weaves into every encounter. When the family’s secrets, rotted corpses, festering wounds, and a “pit” in the basement housing far-gone relatives are finally exposed, all pretense vanishes and the narrative tumbles inexorably toward destruction. Elizabeth’s eerie calm as she leads Ann to her doom, or Virginia’s singsong approach to killing “Be still now, spider will sting you.”, are as chilling as they are darkly funny. The violence, mostly implied but acutely felt, stands as both primal acting-out and a childish test of boundaries that were never set.
The quirkiness of Spider Baby is its heartbeat: the way its horrors are rendered almost sweet, familial, and fairy tale-like, shimmering on the edge of grotesque parody but never quite lapsing into full camp. Each character is drawn with affection and a touch of sadness; even the monstrous seems to long for normalcy, for understanding. That’s all that Bruno ever aspired to with his charges.
Lines of dialogue stick in your mind, echoed like half-remembered nursery rhymes: Bruno says, “We’re not evil! We’re just different.”
When Ralph turns his unblinking, feral attention on Emily, his fixation mounts with unsettling speed. Emily’s carefully maintained composure quickly gives way to panic, especially as she realizes just how out of place and out of her depth she truly is in the Merrye household. As Ralph, childlike and unnerving in his too-small velvet getup, starts to pursue her through the shadowy corridors, the atmosphere shifts dramatically from brittle civility to nightmarish cat-and-mouse. The camera lingers on her mad dash, turning her flight into a portrait of unraveling dignity: her hair disheveled, breath ragged, fleeing through twisting stairways and dark rooms as shadows snarl on the walls. This sequence isn’t just exploitative; it symbolizes her breakdown as she’s forced to shed her urban armor and face the chaos on the Merrye family’s terms.
Emily flees the decaying Merrye estate, darting through its shadowed corridors and ultimately winding up outside on the overgrown grounds. Dressed only in her black lace bra and slip, Emily’s flight becomes a desperate, disoriented escape from the madness closing in around her. The contrast between her elegant black lace, the crumbling environment, her delicate attire, and the wild, untamed exterior underscores her vulnerability, loss of control, and the house’s predatory energy.
Once Emily is out in the open, away from the house’s grim interior, Ralph finally catches her; it’s a moment chillingly intimated rather than overtly shown, where the film suggests he ravages her. This violent climax offscreen leaves us with a sense of horror amplified by what is left to the imagination, while also marking Emily’s complete descent from order and civility into the chaotic, brutal world the Merryes inhabit. The sequence remains a dark, haunting testament to the film’s blending of unsettling menace and irony.
By the time Emily is chased and cornered, her descent into madness is palpable; her screams echo, her elegance swapped for raw terror. It’s a moment that mixes horror, dark humor, and a kind of Gothic spectacle that defines Spider Baby’s strange magic.
As the chaos at the Merrye estate reaches its peak, Schlocker, the hapless, mustachioed scoundrel, finds himself poking around where he shouldn’t, drawn down into the basement’s shadowy depths. There, amid the dank gloom and echoes of madness, he’s suddenly seized by the cannibalistic relatives lurking in the darkness.
Elizabeth and Virginia descend the stairs, finally revealing the madness and violence behind the child’s play. As the sisters head downward into the bowls of the house’s hell in the film’s haunting climax, cinematographer Alfred Taylor frames their silhouette in stark, high-contrast black and white, the light from the basement doorway casting them as motionless shadows poised on the threshold between innocence and menace. The image is saturated with deep shadows and sharp edges, capturing the sisters’ otherworldly composure while the pitchfork glints ominously in their grasp. Taylor’s strategic use of light and darkness heightens the suspense, turning the scene into a Gothic tableau where the sisters emerge from shadow, outlined with a ghostly clarity that transforms their descent into a chilling, unforgettable moment of visual storytelling. The expression on Beverly Washburn’s face is sublime as her features flicker with ghostlit menace, a spectral radiance playing across her face, where sublime dread and uncanny beauty converge in a single, unearthly glow.
“This has gone well beyond the boundaries of prudence and good taste.” – Schlocker
The scene is tense and claustrophobic; Schlocker’s disbelief turns to terror as hands claw from the pitch-black to drag him offscreen, his cries echoing while the lurking shapes descend on him. He meets his end as another victim of the family’s oldest, hungriest secret, and silence falls, broken only by the distant, hollow sounds of feasting.
Peter Howe played with a genial optimism by Quinn K. Redeker, the distant relative of the Merrye family, who arrives at the estate along with his sister Emily and the others, has been intent on claiming the family property and guardianship of the afflicted Merrye children. But unlike the plagued siblings, Peter is unaffected by Merrye Syndrome and acts as a more grounded, rational presence amidst the chaos. Throughout the film, he navigates the growing dangers of the Merrye household, eventually escaping Virginia’s deadly “spider” game and rescuing Ann from Ralph’s grasp.
Bruno’s desperate decision, with dynamite in hand, Virginia and Elizabeth’s deadly games lead to the estate’s fiery destruction, an ending that feels like both a knowing wink and a sharp wound as the “maddest story ever told” burns away to reveal the traces of the true tragedy both literally, as their ancestral home is reduced to ashes, and symbolically, as the painful legacy of the family with all its madness, isolation, and ruin consumes them, despite the film’s darkly playful tone and black humor.
In the end, after the Merrye estate is destroyed in the explosion set by Bruno to prevent further tragedy, Peter inherits the Merrye family fortune and caretaking responsibilities. He marries Ann and even writes a book on Merrye Syndrome, representing a hopeful, untainted continuation of the family line. However, the closing scene, where their young daughter is fascinated by a spider, leaves a haunting suggestion that the family legacy, and perhaps the syndrome, may still linger. Peter never quite grasps the danger, nor the sadness that clings to the history of his family’s legacy. Even the final image, Peter and Ann’s child, years later, enraptured by that spider, suggests that the stories that haunt us rarely ever end.
Spider Baby never enjoyed the mainstream recognition it deserved on first release, but its reverberations across the genre are unmistakable and have now attained a beloved cult status like no other. Its mix of rural decay, familial dysfunction, dark satire, and violent whimsy foreshadowed the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and countless “hillbilly horror” films that would follow. It stands unique: both a love letter to, and a sly upending of, the horror tradition. In its jittery, black-and-white gloom, its adult fairy-tale logic and singular cast, especially the draw of Chaney and Washburn, Hill created a cult artifact that unsettles and enchants, spinning its strange web for anyone curious enough to heed its song.
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