Watching Stephen King’s list of scary movies in the 30 years prior to 1980, I’ve found one or two that hardly strike me as horror. Some of the others remain remarkably effective today. I had the wrong idea about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; I’d supposed from the title that it had to do with an abducted child, a topic I generally avoid. When looking up yet another movie on Tubi that was free, but only in Spanish, I saw Baby Jane on offer and decided to give it a try. I was pretty impressed. It’s overly long and drags a bit, but the story is good. One thing about horror films from the period is that they relied on story because the special effects really didn’t exist to make movies such as many we now see—splashy, but shallow.
In case you’re even more outdated than me, Baby Jane was a successful child actor whose sister grows up to outshine her. Blanche, the sister, is crippled in a car accident that has been blamed on Jane for the last couple of decades. Jane really can’t act, and once her sister is disabled, the two live on Blanche’s money until Jane’s growing insanity threatens her wheelchair-bound sister. Trapped upstairs without any means of communicating with anyone who might help, Blanche is tortured and starved by her sister. There’s an incredible amount of tension, even if the events begin to seem unlikely as the two hours roll on. There are a few dropped subplots—the neighbor who harbors no suspicions at all, and the musician Jane hires who discovers her secret—but overall the tension keeps building.
One thing that occurred to me was that part of the plot involves leaving a phone extension off the hook to prevent Blanche from getting help. I pondered how some young people who only know phones as personal devices might not understand this. How, when I was a child that if you left an extension off the hook no calls could go in or out. And that the annoying “off the hook” tone didn’t yet exist. Ironically, now you could watch the movie on your personal phone that you carry with you at all times. While this isn’t a perfect movie, it is an engaging one on many levels. The sisterly rivalry, the growing insanity of Jane, and the helplessness of an invalid all work together to create some frightening moments. Technology sure makes life convenient, but it cuts off some avenues for horror. Of course, as Unfriended shows, it opens new venues. I agree with King—this is one of the actually scary films from before the eighties.
