(Distributor David Hewitt sold Hill's film with the advertising tag "Whatever happened to.Spider Baby?") Some of Spider Baby's action seems lifted directly from Dracula, with credit due more to Bram Stoker than to Tod Browning. The Merrye Kids and the Hudson Sisters both evince a singular dying-on-the-vine atavism aggravated by the unkindness of strangers. The moldering Merrye household shares some similarities with the dilapidated Hudson Mansion, setting of Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
#OLD BABY MOVIE FULL#
As a protégé of Roger Corman, Hill also would likely have seen Corman's House of Usher (1960), with its Freudian spin on one family's troubled bloodline, and The Haunted Palace (1963), with its misty town square full of malformed evolutionary throwbacks. The isolated Merrye Mansion and the misdeeds of its inhabitants also echo the morbid humor of cartoonist Charles Addams and Shirley Jackson's like-minded 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in which a weird family's legacy is pursued by an avaricious cousin. Priestley's source novel for his remake of The Old Dark House (1963), released a year before Spider Baby went into production.
suggests at least a childhood familiarity on Hill's part with the Universal Studios monster classics, while the film's Gothic blandishments hearken back to James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932). Still, it's intriguing to speculate as to what works of art might have suggested, even if subconsciously, the particulars of "the maddest story ever told." Certainly the central casting of Lon Chaney, Jr.
Jack Hill has remained steadfastly closed-mouthed about any possible inspirations for Spider Baby (shot in 1964, released in 1968), telling interviewers in the decade since its rediscovery that the spark just came to him.
0 kommentar(er)
