Spider Baby

Jack Hill's Spider Baby has some striking parallels with Roger Corman's The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Both present the last, tragic days of a doomed family line that suffers from progressive insanity. Both are set in large, deteriorating manors that are destroyed at the climax. Both star a big-name Hollywood bogeyman. Both portray in their own fashion something of the American Gothic. And it's perhaps relevant to note that Hill broke into the industry, along with legions of big names past and present, as one of Corman's disciples. But while Usher took Corman's fame as a director to the next level, Spider Baby, Hill's first full-length feature, was stuck in distribution hell for four years waiting for a lawsuit settlement. By the time it was finally released, in 1968, the drive-in market (the film's intended venue) no longer bought black and white films as features. By this time, Hill was scraping by making so-called "nudie cuties" and profited neither by Spider Baby's first release or the second attempt under the title The Liver Eaters.

It would be many years, following a moderately successful career lensing exploitation movies, before Hill would discover that his crowning opus was making the rounds on the cult-video underground in the form of poorly duped videotapes. He also found that there were people who actually remembered the movie from the drive-in runs. One of them, cult movie aficionado Johnny Legend, tracked down the original negative of the film, and Spider Baby was re-released. To Hill's astonishment his work had become a minor sensation thirty years after completion, and he was enjoying some richly-deserved attention for the film's uniquely quirky ingenuity. It is this same, re-mastered 30th anniversary revival print, along with a cast reunion, that made it on the Image DVD. It also includes an informative audio commentary by Hill, sharing inside information about a movie which he'd never imagined he'd be celebrated for.

Yes, Spider Baby exudes a peculiar sort of charm for a horror movie, seeming to anticipate the zany synthesis of light domestic comedy and macabre dysfunction of The Addam's Family and The Munsters, two other weirdo television families that made their debuts in 1964, the same year Hill wrapped production on Spider Baby. It also marks the final great film of Lon Chaney Jr., who, ironically, did not live to see it released. The ailing but enthusiastic Chaney, perhaps sensing that this was apt to be his last significant movie role, gave the performance of his life, even providing the raspy vocals for the uniquely kooky opening jingle.

Strange moans and bats and bones.
And teenage monsters in haunted homes,
A ghost on the stair, a vampire's bite,
Better beware- there's a FULL MOON tonight!

Cannibal spiders creep and crawl,
And boys and ghouls having a ball.
Frankenstein, Dracula and even the Mummy.
Are sure to end up in somebody's tummy.

Take a fresh rodent, some toadstools and weeds,
And ad it all now in the young one she breeds.
Mix in seven legs from an eight-legged beast,
And then you're all set for a cannibal feast.

Sit 'round the fire with this cup of brew,
A fiend and a werewolf on each side of you.
This cannibal orgy is strange to behold,
And the maddest story ever told.

As the Lon rattles off this unexpected little ditty, the opening credits inform us this is Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told. Lying on a coffee table, we see a book titled "DICTIONARY OF RARE AND PECULIAR DISEASES", which a man seated nearby picks up. This debonair-looking fellow opens the book and reads aloud to us, the audience, from a chapter entitled "The Merrye Syndrome", explaining how those afflicted with this condition are doomed to eventually regress to a feral state, making them a bit of a public menace. This disease is so rare it only afflicts one family- the Merrye family- but, he informs us, (drawing, as we later find out, on personal experience) the disease has long since perished, along with it's few remaining victims.

Hill takes a necessary liberty here, having this character, Uncle Peter, flash-back to a point in the story before he actually appears. As the story picks up we see a postal worker riding a motor-scooter through the sunny sticks to the isolated house of the reclusive Merrye clan bearing, it turns out, a very important message delivery. Shunned by the austere locals when he asks for directions to the infamous household, he eventually finds it at the top of a foreboding hill, an iron fence closing it off from the outside world. The actor who plays the very brief role of the mailman is Mantan Moreland, who had made a career performing in mysteries and comic thrillers, portraying what some civil-rights figures at the time considered an unflattering, bug-eyed "'fraidy" negro character. By this time, as a result of this bad publicity in recent years, Moreland was grateful even to get bit parts, and his presence is to the movie's gain.

Our intrepid mailman, unable to get an answer at the door, tragically elects to poke his head through an open window and, after the heavy window comes down, pinning him in a prone position, gets a crash course in rare and peculiar diseases. Our titular character Virginia skitters into the room and savagely slashes the hapless delivery-person to death in an amazingly bloodless murder. We see his severed ear, also bloodless, hit the floor as the slaying climaxes.

"I just caught a big, fat bug, right in my spider-web...And now the spider gets to give the bug a BIG STING!"

No, Virginia Merrye isn't some sort of freakish genetic fusion of arachnid and human. Her particular variation of the Merrye madness is a bizarre emulation of spiders. She's the Spider Baby- the cold instincts of a predator concealed beneath becoming cherubic innocence.

This dream-like occurrence is interrupted when Virginia's blonde sister Elizabeth appears to chide Virginia for her naughty behavior, taunting her that "Bruno" will hate her. Bruno (Chaney) is the Merye-family chauffer, and it is at this moment that he drives up to the house in the limousine and notices the mail-buggy. He finds our remorseless killer innocently skipping rope, and, not long after, the body of the mailman, legs still sticking out of the window. Elizabeth informs Bruno that Virginia was "playing spider", and we get the distinct impression that this sort of thing has happened before. Uninterested in this, Virginia runs down to the limo and we meet the older brother Ralph, who was sleeping in the back of the limo. Ralph, played by Sid Haig, appears to be severely retarded and acts kind of like a big, dopey, slobbering, pet dog: an impression that is probably bolstered by the way Virginia barks his name in greeting him.

Bruno scolds both of them- Elizabeth for not watching her marginally more primal sister while he took Ralph to the doctors- and he forbids Virginia from ever playing spider again. Chaney's character is sworn to care for the Merrye kids by a promise to their late father, who Bruno refers to as "The Master". Chaney effectively conveys this belabored man's grief as he calmly tries to explain to these grown toddlers their dire situation. Worse, the mailman was delivering a telegram informing them that the last heirs of the Merrye estate have been awarded custody of the children and the house. And these strange, city relatives would be arriving that very day with their lawyer to inspect their acquisition.

"It's not nice to hate!"

Bruno puts the kids to work cleaning up their mess. Ralph is somehow smart enough to stash Mantan's ride, and Virginia and Elizabeth attend to the bloodstains that we didn't see before. Virginia, not content to focus on her grisly chore, places her victim's ear in a box as a souvenir. Bruno himself disposes of the corpus delecti, dumb-waitering it down to the cellar where Uncle Ned, Aunt Clara and Aunt Martha, three of the Merrye clan who have devolved into cannibals and have been confined below, presumably for some time.

We cut to a convertible Olds whizzing along a rural road rather erratically. Dusk is approaching. Behind the wheel are the Howells, the heirs mentioned in the telegram. Likeable lug Peter, played by Quinn Reddecker, is the man we saw at the beginning finally arriving to his own flashback. His sister Emily, played by Carol Ohmart, is clearly eager to get to the Merrye house and stake their claim. The laid-back Peter is somewhat reluctant to go along with his pushy sister's scheme, and is basically along for the ride. We find out that the Howell's have never actually met the Merryes, and they certainly don't appear to be afflicted with the Merrye curse, though Emily herself is evidently something of a bitch. Truth be known, Ohmart's Aunt Emily is a veritable clone of the character she played in House On Haunted Hill, as Vincent Price's treacherous wife.

They arrive ahead of their lawyer, but Emily doesn't care to wait so she goes up to the house and, as there's no answer at the door, she proceeds to stick her head in the same window where the postman earlier met his bloody but bloodless demise. Instead of receiving a sting from Victoria, Emily emerges from the window safely only to find herself face-to-face with Ralph, who, incapable of making a good first impression, sends her screaming back down to the car. Bruno arrives in his limo with Emily's lawyer Mr. Schlocker, a sawed-off cigar-smoking creep with a Hitler moustache, and Schlocker's lovely, young, blonde secretary Ann.

Before taking the group up to the house, Bruno tries to prepare them for the strange habitat they are about to enter, a bit like a zookeeper welcoming visitors into the lion cage. For the moment, the sisters are at their best behavior. Peter and his sister are introduced to the girls as Uncle Peter and Aunt Emily. They find Ralph on the dumbwaiter, back from a short visit with the ravenous relatives. Shlocker starts grilling Bruno about his questionable guardianship of the children, and Bruno explains more about the Merrye Syndrome. The disease not only erodes the brain, he elaborates, but actually leads to physical changes in the subject. A form of lycanthropy, perhaps? Bruno suggests that Merrye's Syndrome is a result of inbreeding, but the werewolf association, starting with the very idea of Lon Chaney Jr.'s name on the playbill, is alluded to again.

Emily makes known their intention of having dinner and spending the night at the house, boldly implying that it is Bruno himself who is the guest now and he might well be shown the door if he has any objections. Bruno agrees to scare up some down-home vittles, seeing his chance to show the fickle city kinfolk the wholesome environment he's created for the kids. But whipping up supper at the Merrye household is clearly no conventional affair, as we see later when Virginia stalks a patch of mushrooms and Ralph pounces on a vagrant feline.

Dinner comes off like a side-show. Bruno presents the scrawny carcass of the cat as the main course (which is presumed to be rabbit) and reveals that the Merryes are, by necessity, vegetarians. It seems that the more flesh a Merrye eats, the swifter their slide into bestial oblivion. Nonetheless, he allows Ralph to indulge in some of the "rabbit" since he bagged it himself, and Virginia enjoys a slimy plate of live insects.

Bruno's motives are a bit puzzling here as he serves what he knows to be a cat to the usurping outsiders and their lawyer. He seems to want to repel the unwanted guests with the families revolting customs; and the suggestion that the children are dangerous is obvious. Yet he appears to have entirely adapted to these conditions and can no longer completely clearly distinguish them from normalcy. Peter acts as foil to both sides with his sincere geniality and effortless tolerance of the gruesome food and awkward dinner conversation. If Bruno was hoping to discourage the Howells from staying, he failed. But after a brief and ironic discourse about horror movies and werewolves that ends with the revelation that there will be a full moon that night, Shlocker's secretary Ann gets a sudden attack of bad vibes, upon which Peter obligingly agrees to drive her hot young ass to the nearest motel.

"Hey, are you really a Wolf Man fan, Ann?..."
"Oh, yes! I think that's how every man should be- Like a wild beast!"

As dinner comes to a close a large spider crawls on to the table. Emily screams with revulsion, and Shlocker kills it, earning both the immediate distrust of Virginia. Little do they know that they have become snared in a spider's web themselves. The sinister sisters immediately start conspiring against the unwary bugs, and we see what inevitably becomes of Merryes when they get older after Virginia goes down to say goodnight to "daddy". Meanwhile, Shlocker lurks around the house with a flashlight trying to sleuth up something on Bruno as Aunt Emily, settling into her room, stumbles upon the lost trove of Merrye negligee, and tries on some of the spicier numbers in front of a mirror. Ralph, doing some investigating of his own, dangles upside-down outside her window, enjoying the unexpected peep-show.

Shlocker's shlocky fate is sealed after he manages to discover the secret passage down to the cobwebby cellar and gets some sense of the impropriety afoot there before finding himself cornered by the murderous minors Virginia and Elizabeth. He lectures them on the finer points of bureaucratic society as naughty Virginia "stings" him with her knifes and Elizabeth skewers him with a pitchfork. Shortly thereafter, Bruno comes home to find the girls naively trying to cover up the incident and he realizes what must be done. He leaves the morally oblivious sisters there, promising to return with a wonderful new toy that will fix thing so that he and the children can be together forever. This makes for a curiously touching Merrye-family moment in spite of the unsettling nature of Bruno's parting words.

Emily's sartorial bliss is interrupted when she hears Bruno's limo speeding off and looks out the window to see Ralph there doing his own spider impersonation. Emily runs out into the night in a fetching nightee after witnessing the girls dragging her lawyer's body out of the dumbwaiter and the Merryes instinctually pursue their fleeing prey into the woods. Undisputed cat-catching champ Ralph reaches her first, performing some sort of horrifying violation on her off-screen as the sisters look on puzzled.

After an evening of bar-hopping, Peter and Ann are unable to find a room in town and head back to the house. They are greeted by the girls, who are so aggressively cordial as to be immediately suspicious. Ann seems to sense something is amiss as eccentric Elizabeth offers to show her her room in the cellar (but trusting Uncle Peter actually lets Virginia tie him to a chair during a friendly little game of "spider"!). Ralph and Elizabeth nab Ann as Peter slowly comes around to the premise of Virginia's little charade. Spurning the Spider Baby's sexual advance, Peter narrowly escapes her sting after she's distracted by Elizabeth, who is trying to figure out a way to keep Ann quiet. Virginia notes that bugs become very quiet after they've been bled by a spider, and she proposes that method. Upstairs, Peter struggles to free himself from Virginia's web, as Ann struggles to keep her captors from hack-sawing her feet off. To top it off, Emily has survived her uncertain interlude with Ralph, and seems mysteriously determined to find the boy. Finally embracing her animal nature, Emily tears savagely into her randy nephew Ralph before being pulled into the pit by Uncle Ned, Aunt Clara and Aunt Martha for one of most unusual family reunions imaginable. About this time Bruno shows up with his big surprise- a case of TNT. The girls, as excited as average kids on Christmas morning, gather around as he lights the fuse. Following a close encounter with Virginia's fuzzy tarantula friends, Peter breaks free and carries Ann out of the house just in the nick o' time.

"What's it gonna do, Bruno?"
"Well, it's gonna make a big flash, and go BANG!"
"Oh boy!"

There is an implied explosion and we flash back forward to a smiling Peter, closing the book entitled "DICTIONARY OF RARE AND PECULIAR DISEASES". The Merrye fortune, he explains, was considerable larger than expected, and it's no real surprise that he and Ann are happily married and have a young daughter. On a final note, he assures us, the audience, that his own side of the family is, thankfully, untainted by the Merrye cruse. But as we see his odd-looking daughter in the back-yard staring at a spider with unhealthy fascination, we have to seriously wonder.

It is interesting for a fan to ponder how Jack Hill's career, and cinema history itself, might have been changed if Spider Baby had received timely distribution in 1964. Would Chaney's career have been resurrected from B-Movie limbo? What heights would Sid Haig's career as an actor reached if he'd been recognized early on for his portrayal of Ralph Merrye? It should be noted that even without that benefit, Haig has done fairly well for himself in B-Movies, recently playing the enigmatic Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie's controversial House Of 1000 Corpses. Jill Banner, utterly hypnotic in the role of "Spider Baby" Virginia Merrye, did well in her own right, starring in the major picture The President's Analyst, and might have been destined for stardom before being tragically killed in a car-crash. Quinn Redecker, who nailed the role of hipster Uncle Peter, went on to a long career on the popular soap opera The Young And The Restless, and has scarcely suffered for not having Spider Baby on his resume. Beverly Washburn, who played Elizabeth with comic perfection, had been a child actor, starring in such films as Shane and Old Yeller, but aside from her participation in the movie's 30th Anniversary Reunion, has appeared in only three movies since Spider Baby. And then there is Jack Hill, who went on to make low-budget horror like The Snake People, and exploitation fare like The Big Doll House and Foxy Brown. These are classics in their own sub-genres, but among them only Jack Hill's grim fairy tale Spider Baby represents an extraordinary lucky amalgam of talents who were all at their peak.

And how might Spider Baby have shaped and inspired the medium in spite of it's early obscurity? Well-known directors have cited the movie as an influence. Could Tobe Hooper have seen it before he wrote The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

Perhaps the opposite is true. Ironically, it may be that the movie's cult reputation as a "lost movie" is to a large degree what kept it from being forgotten. But Spider Baby has all of the elements for a classic movie. The talent and vision came together in the near-magical low-budget fashion of a Herke Harvey's Carnival Of Souls, or Mario Bava's Black Sunday, and it might have been as ground-breaking as either. But for those of us lucky enough to have discovered it, Jack Hill's story of a family of American cannibals has it's rightful place on the mantle alongside the other masterworks of independent horror cinema.