Editorials
A Hag For All Seasons: Why Baby Jane Speaks To Us

[Author’s Note: This particular piece largely focuses on cis gay men specifically, though there are a variety of people in the broader queer community with relationships to this film that deserve to be written about as well, by people more capable of speaking to those experiences.]
1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a good film. Hell, it’s a great film. Based on Henry Farrell’s novel of the same name, it follows the toxic relationship between two sisters: former child star Baby Jane (Bette Davis) and her older sister Blanche (Joan Crawford).
Although Jane was a huge star as a toddler, Blanche handled the transition into adulthood much better and became a bona fide Hollywood success story while Jane faded into obscurity and alcoholism, unable to fit into a world that had moved away from vaudeville. Now that they’re both elderly (by Hollywood standards – Davis was 54 and Crawford only about 4 years older the year the film was released), their roles have reversed yet again. Blanche has paraplegia after an accident, and Jane has become her caretaker. However, Jane’s increasing mental instability forces Blanche to attempt to find ways to escape a house that has now become a torture chamber.
Baby Jane is a taut survival thriller, an engrossing psychological drama, and a showcase of two tremendous talents butting heads both on and off the screen. These things should be appealing to pretty much everyone, and they are. But, to a certain type of gay man (which includes me, though we’re not all the same, and I certainly don’t speak for all of us), the movie is so much more than that.
Friends of Baby Jane
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a minted camp classic that gay men especially can’t seem to stop chewing on. The film has received tributes in the form of RuPaul’s Drag Race performances and countless more local live shows, plus a feature-length drag remake in 2010. Hell, Ryan Murphy even made an entire season of an FX series to dig into the delicious feud between Bette and Joan on the film’s set.
The same obsession extends to the rest of the “hagsploitation” genre that this movie birthed and depictions of over-the-top older women everywhere, from The Golden Girls to Arrested Development to High Point Coffee commercials. However, the connection between the gay community and onscreen “hags” is perhaps at its most potent with Baby Jane, which is why that film is the centerpiece of this particular attempt to answer one big question. Why do older women, especially cruel ones in horror movies, tend to connect with the gay community so much?
“I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy”
While there are infinite reasons to love it, Baby Jane strikes a chord that reverberates across a multitude of gay experiences. That might not seem immediately obvious in scenes like Jane’s notoriously unhinged performance of the song “Letter to Daddy” in a chirpy childlike warble. Jane’s attempts to recapture the glory days of her prepubescent self are awkward at best and deeply menacing at worst. However, these moments are what make her such a compelling figure.
While gender and sexuality are a spectrum, there is almost no gay person on Earth who didn’t grow up being told that the gender binary and heteronormativity define society. Men are supposed to behave this way. And the people attracted to men are supposed to behave that way. Oh, and those people are all supposed to be women.
The things associated with the people attracted to men (glamour, passion, pretty much anything exciting) are thus deemed womanly and tacitly forbidden to young men. That forbidden nature can make those things even more alluring once the young man in question has already realized he’s broken society’s dictum to be attracted to women and might want to break even more if he can. Not every gay man desires those things, of course, but there is a gulf between glamour and maleness that sometimes feels uncrossable for those who want it.
“It’s Still a Pretty Good Picture”
Jane also experiences a gulf between herself and glamour, but the tenor of it is different. She is no longer a person who society (particularly the entertainment industry) deems beautiful. However, she did have access to the trappings of beauty and glamour once upon a time. Because she is a woman, to some degree it is still socially acceptable for her to indulge in those trappings, like makeup, fur coats, and the like.
That combination of access and frustrated desire is likely why she’s such a thrilling character through which to experience the world. As a woman, she is allowed to desire men, to express beauty, to experience drama and passion and color. Those are the qualities that can make women on film such intriguing characters for gay men, particularly closeted gay men. They provide characters upon whom gay men can safely project themselves, providing a fictional vehicle through which they can explore those suppressed desires.
However, Jane isn’t merely an onscreen surrogate. The reason she’s such a rich character is her inability to get what she wants. Otherwise, hers would be a role that any random rom-com heroine could fill.
“Well, Why Should That Upset You?”
Unfortunately for Jane, the intensity with which she desires the trappings of femininity turns her inside out and makes her into a buffoonish caricature and a wrathful monster, lashing out at her captive sister for possessing what she doesn’t, even despite Blanche’s injuries and the fact that she’s totally dependent on Jane. Jane has a habit of lashing out at anyone who she’s jealous of, or who she feels is blocking her way to feeling the way she wishes to feel about herself.
However, that ultimately makes her more appealing rather than less. Jane’s open resentment of the world around her and the people who make it that way is intoxicating. She uses every last foothold into the world of womanhood to shred that world with her exquisitely pointed nails, ultimately exacting revenge on the very system she wants so dearly to belong to, even if it means entirely losing herself – and her sister- in the process.
The term “revenge fantasy” exists for a reason. Jane already has her foot in the door of femininity, and she uses that foot to stomp everything she can find. It’s a bit of rulebreaking that doesn’t end up working out for her, but it makes her so much more valuable to identify with. Jane is a figure through which gay men can exorcise the demons of the heteronormative binary, indulging in the forbidden fruit and simultaneously slashing at the whole damn basket.
While What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the ur-text of this phenomenon because Jane is so dynamic and perfectly balanced, the DNA of her campy, twisted, delicious menace can be traced through the ages. Without her, other titanic figures like Scream 2’s Mrs. Loomis or X’s Pearl might not have the same luster or even have existed at all. Jane and every badly behaved woman she inspired provide an outlet for frustrations that frequently can’t even be named by the people feeling them. For that, and so much more, the gay community thanks her for her service.
Editorials
What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy
The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.

If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.
Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown
Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?
But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)
What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?
What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.
However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.
What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?
Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.
This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.
Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.
If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.
Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.
So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?
It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us
I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.
For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?
Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.
However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.
What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie
Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.
Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.
Editorials
Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?
Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?
Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest
The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies
While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time.
Watch the trailer for Umma below
Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More
Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.
I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.