Spider Baby (Directed by Jack Hill, 1964, released 1968)

“Spider Baby” is difficult to classify. You really have to see to believe it. It is a lovable horror film. It is a horrifying comedy. It is macabre and grotesque, but in a way that gives you the warm fuzzies.

This 1964 B-movie, written and directed by Jack Hill (Foxy Brown, The Switchblade Sisters) tells the story of the Merrye family who suffer from a genetic disorder called “Merrye’s Syndrome”, as it only afflicts members of their family. This disorder causes its victims to regress mentally, beginning at the age of ten, to a pre-human cannibalistic state. In other words, they become monsters.

As the film opens there are only three surviving members of the clan, the teenage children of Titus Merrye: Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) who wears little-girl party dresses and hates everything, Virginia (Jill Banner) who likes to play “Spider” and eats insects, and Ralph (Sid Haig) who is the oldest and most regressed - a 6-foot, thumb sucking toddler. They are savage innocents who murder and play jump rope with equal enthusiasm. These three are cared for by Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.), the family chauffer, who tries to keep both the “children” and the neighbors safe from harm.

Virginia plays “Spider” with the mailman, wrapping him in her “web” and stinging him with her “stingers”, two butcher knives, while Bruno is away. The letter the “juicy bug” carried brings dire news. Enter the outside world in the form of two distant cousins, Peter (Quinn Redeker) and Emily Carol Ohmart) Howe. They arrive at the Merrye mansion with their lawyer and his secretary, intending to claim the Merrye fortune, including the mansion, for themselves. Inevitably, carnage and wackiness ensues. The interlopers are no match for the madmen.

The violence in “Spider Baby” is always off-screen. The film relies on the weird characters and their bizarre behaviors to hold the viewer’s attention. It succeeds wonderfully. It is shot in black and white, giving it the look of film noir, with deep shadows and melodramatic lighting. The mansion itself is a testament to insanity. It looks abandoned and dusty. Cobwebs hang from the furniture and the curtains hang in tatters. Dolls are impaled on the walls and in one room a bloody handprint can be glimpsed on the wall.

The acting is surprisingly good for a B-movie. Chaney gives one of the finest performances of his career. He is completely sincere in his portrayal of Bruno, a man who is compassionate of the plight of his wards, and desperate to keep them from becoming laboratory freaks. Jill Banner as the “Spider Baby” is a perfect blend of naiveté, seduction, and menace. Veteran B-movie actor Sid Haig utters not one word of dialogue, but communicates volumes with a combination of grunts and over-sized facial expressions. He is a cuddly pinhead, reminiscent of Tod Browning’s “Freaks.”

It is clear from the beginning that things will not end well for our monster children; monsters must always die in the end. But death, when it comes, has no sting. The children meet it with innocent anticipation, a new game to play, and Bruno has only a shrug for the life he is sacrificing to keep the family together.

The logic of this film belongs wholly to itself. With such catchphrases as, “Ralph is allowed to eat anything he catches,” although the family is vegetarian, the audience knows that anything goes in the Merrye world. Chaney sings the title song, which is an oddball spoken-word ditty that warns, "Frankenstein, Dracula, and even the Mummy are sure to wind up in somebody's tummy." It’s a ghoulish, good time.