Kynan Dias:
I’ve written a letter to Mommy, as she stars in that new horror flick. Once hip, cool, and chic, they cast her as a ghoul, a.k.a. a slightly older chick. Instead of a stamp I put kisses. Baby Jane, Sweet Charlotte, Auntie Roo. Must confess, don’t know why seeing wrinkles under the eye means I’m afraid of you.

From TruStory FM, this is Sitting in the Dark. My name is Kynan Dias, and this week we are looking at a lost sort of cycle of horror films, a subgenre that is both anti-feminist and very feminist, depending on where you are. That is: Psycho-Biddy, Qu’est-Ce Que C’est? I’ll try not to sing the non-royalty-free music here as we push it over to our friends. My Baby Jane, Tommy Metz III.

Tommy Metz III:
What happened to me?

Kynan Dias:
My sweet, sweet Pete Wright. Hello.

Pete Wright:
I was hoping for the sociopathic youth.

Kynan Dias:
Oh no, I’m sorry. And of course our Auntie Chelsea. Whoever slew you?

Chelsea Stardust:
Hell’s yeah.

Kynan Dias:
So, this is psycho-biddy. It’s about older women, and when we get to each film, I’ll say how old these scary women actually are. But for the time, incredibly old women. Oh my goodness, they’re past the age of 40 and they’re starring in movies. What we can do is make them monstrous. This is called psycho-biddy, sometimes called hagsploitation. But we have had some people trying to reclaim it as an actually feminist subgenre and call it things like Grande Dame Guignol. It’s about the horror of being around old women, or being an older woman who is put away by society — sometimes down a well, down a dumbwaiter, but sometimes in a locked attic door of their own making.

Chelsea was really excited to hear that we were doing psycho-biddy slash hagsploitation. Tommy, Pete, how familiar were you with this subgenre?

Tommy Metz III:
A hundred percent first time I’d ever heard of it. But it feels like something I should have heard of. It just locked into place. Like, oh right, this is a whole thing. So it’s exciting.

Pete Wright:
We had done a series over on The Next Reel on Bette Davis and had talked about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but the other two were completely new to me, and I had not explored the genre at all. So this was really fun.

Kynan Dias:
You can point out older movies, older books where it’s like, oh geez, there’s a crazy old woman here — even Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. But there’s something that really caught fire in 1962 when Robert Aldrich put Bette Davis and Joan Crawford together, and people were like, yes, more of that. It starts with, literally, let’s do more of Baby Jane, with the whole team getting back together. And then it’s just kind of a quick-burning fire. So we have Joan Crawford in movies, we have Bette Davis in movies, Geraldine Page is a villain, Debbie Reynolds is a villain — just all over the place. I think that it is a flash-in-the-pan genre, but then the ones that we respect, we don’t even think of them as being in that genre.

Like, say, Rosemary’s Baby. Why don’t we put that in the same genre as this? It’s so respected, it’s this other thing. And we wouldn’t have Ruth Gordon’s Oscar for Rosemary’s Baby, or Amy Madigan’s Oscar for Weapons, really, if we didn’t have this subgenre. There might not be any roles for old ladies — again, quote-unquote old ladies — in Hollywood at all if there wasn’t this little explosion in being terrified of them, or terrified for them. Chelsea, what do you think of the psycho-biddy subgenre?

Chelsea Stardust:
I think this genre is fascinating. I love this genre. I grew up with these movies. I love Bette Davis, I love Joan Crawford, Shelley Winters. And I think people are sort of talking about them again — I think they’re getting their flowers now, and also these incredible performances. This is still true today, but it was even more so back then: these roles just weren’t available once you hit a certain age.

And so people like Robert Aldrich are like, let’s do this. Maybe feeling like he’s giving them a job, but maybe feeling exploitative as well, and kind of balancing that. But at the end of the day, you have to recognize these incredible performances that these women are just fucking giving. And I am here for that, and for giving them this opportunity to shine. I think this subgenre has recently come back. But I have kind of mixed feelings about it, because it’s mainly movies directed by men who seem fearful of women aging and not liking that. Like X, like Barbarian, like Weapons — funny, those are two films directed by the same person, who has grandma issues.

Pete Wright:
Well, he’s working through some stuff. Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
But that’s come back around recently, which I think is fascinating, which is starting this conversation. I’m a fan of this genre and seeing these women just give.

Kynan Dias:
So we’re going to focus on the original What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. This is 1962, by Robert Aldrich, starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who were famously feuding for decades. There’s the Ryan Murphy series Feud, and there’s a lot of Hollywood lore around that. Robert Aldrich goes back in 1964 and tries to get the entire gang back together to make Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which is based on a short story — kind of unpublished — by the same author of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, called “What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte?” So it was very explicitly the same. They tried to get Joan Crawford back, and she did a couple of shots that are still in the movie, like far shots where she’s in a car.

Pete Wright:
It’s weird.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, so she’s there. But she pulled out because of issues that most people will read and say, like, she’d had enough of Bette Davis finally, after all this time.

Chelsea Stardust:
That’s not quite true.

Kynan Dias:
No? Great, wonderful. I would love to hear more about that. And then we will go a little bit further, in 1972 with Curtis Harrington, who makes a couple of these movies. This one is with the great Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?. Why don’t we start with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and ask if you have any axes to grind?

Tommy Metz III:
I don’t have an axe to grind. I thought I had seen this movie. It’s one of those movies that I think I’ve seen so many parts of — “But you are in that chair. You are.” I’ve seen that so many times that I’m like, I’ve seen that movie. But I had not seen the movie. It was always kind of ahead of me. I certainly didn’t know about the twist.

Kynan Dias:
Oh, okay, great. So the frame story is something that you like. This is one of those movies that, when people see it on TV, they’re sucked into it. I realized I hadn’t seen the beginning of Planet of the Apes until very recently — all the stuff before they get to the planet. Like, what is all this stuff? Oh, that changes it. This is one of my favorite movies and I hadn’t really seen it.

Pete Wright:
You just always turn on Turner Classic Movies like a half hour after it starts.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah. It’s like, oh, there it is. Any other axes to grind?

Chelsea Stardust:
None from me. I love this movie.

Pete Wright:
No axes.

Kynan Dias:
We need to keep track of the ones that get no axes.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, actually I do have one axe. My apologies. One frustration — and I know it’s the engine that keeps the movie going — but Blanche is so incapable of asking for help in a productive way. She’s just so ineffectual. I know that she’s in a wheelchair, but she’s bad at notes. She’s bad at talking. She’s not helping. It’s the anti-Misery. Get out of there! That was the only thing where I was like, oh, come on, you can do a little bit better. But I know that’s a dumb sort of quibble.

Pete Wright:
I don’t think it’s a dumb quibble. It’s dumb to call it an axe, but I’m going to call it an axe for the sake of the segment. I feel like one of the challenges of the movie is that, because she’s so ineffectual, the film never really opens the door to her getting out. She’s so bad at it that you know she’s going to get caught every single time. And you kind of need hope. You need a couple of doses of hope where you feel like, okay, surely we’re going to get out this time.

Case in point: Jane gets in the car and goes to the cleaners or something. Do you notice how time passes as those sequences are cut together? The answer is horribly. Everything that Blanche is doing is in slow motion and everything Jane is doing is in very fast motion, and that time compression messes up every bit of emotional stake you might have in the sequence. You know she’s going to get caught at every turn. And so I don’t think I ever get the feeling of a rug pull that I want with this movie. I want to care enough. I want to feel like I’m ahead of it to the point where there’s hope she’s going to get out and Jane’s going to get her just desserts. And you never get it.

Kynan Dias:
I think that’s an interesting part of this genre as well — what the movie says about the monstrous Baby Jane Hudson, who was this nine-year-old star and now is stuck in that world, but also the monstrosity of Blanche, who is disabled and unmarried and all of those things. She is some strange effed-up character as well. I don’t think we ever believe that she will get out of this on her own. We’re waiting for the police to save her. We’re waiting for poor Elvira to save her.

Chelsea Stardust:
Ugh, Elvira.

Kynan Dias:
And then we have this subplot with Victor Buono as Edwin. The first time I saw it, I was wondering, what is this character? I think you’re supposed to be waiting for him to be like, oh gosh, I see you and I’m going to save you, or I can see through Jane. So she doesn’t have any agency of her own, which I think is really fascinating the more that I think about it.

Tommy Metz III:
I love him.

Pete Wright:
That character of Edwin — what a delightful distraction he is in the movie.

Tommy Metz III:
So fun.

Pete Wright:
And that’s another example. This is another opportunity where you could have had somebody who had a little bit of agency that could have maybe given us that dose of hope. But now we get to see the peak of how bad Blanche is at asking for help, and the fact that she’s asking a doorknob in the form of Edwin.

Kynan Dias:
One of the things that I want to look at as we’re here is how these movies are — I don’t know what the word is — monsterizing all of the things that we associate with womanhood. It’s a checklist, and I was like, oh, they’re all even in this first one. What do we expect of a woman? That she’s a daughter, that she’s a sister, that she’s a lover, a wife, a mother, the housekeeper, the nurse. And Baby Jane has all of them, and they’re all twisted. She’s both bad at them, but then also scary. Whenever we have a woman who steps out of the boundaries of where society puts them, we’re like, this is not just sad or weird, it’s terrifying — when we have a nurse who’s not the full nurse that we want her to be, or a daughter who is too whatever. Then we’re like, oh gosh, that’s horrifying.

Tommy Metz III:
Because it’s a breakdown — it’s an inside-the-house breakdown of norms.

Pete Wright:
Well, and look at how the production design is also sort of a mirror of the monstrosity that is age itself applied to these women. The creaky staircases, the broken dumbwaiter — everything in all of these movies is just falling apart.

Tommy Metz III:
And every door has nineteen locks on the inside and the outside, up and down.

Kynan Dias:
I think that’s really key. All three of these are haunted house movies, and so are some of the other ones — even Strait-Jacket, which is in a hospital. The house is haunted in this way. And I think that might be especially scary for us because it’s like, woman as house, just to be as blunt as that. She’s the housekeeper. That’s where she belongs. And so the metaphor in these three movies happens to also show: oh, it was once a pretty, beautiful, welcoming house, and now it is older and missing its heyday as well, just like the women are.

Chelsea Stardust:
And all generational, too.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah. I also like that these three have very different locales. This is a Hollywood movie as well. To start this off, I think maybe some of the other movies couldn’t do this as successfully, because they are exploitation films. They are exploiting older women more than What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is. But this one, at the beginning, is about entertainment. It’s about Hollywood and what we do to women. So I wonder what you think about a Hollywood movie that’s about how terrible Hollywood is for women.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s that Sunset Boulevard kind of idea. It’s fascinating — maybe I’m chasing this like a hound, so this might be very obvious and dumb — but it’s fascinating for Hollywood to be self-aware enough to make a film like this and then not fundamentally change. To be like, look at what a haunted house we are. Aren’t we terrible to these things? What’s Sydney Sweeney in next? It’s just so weird. Let’s give her the fifteenth opportunity.

Pete Wright:
I think what this movie does, too, is it gets to both critique the role of women as they age, and it is also fundamentally about a business model that is so broken. To Tom’s point, the fact that we start this movie when they are little girls — I mean, this is hagsploitation, but it’s really femsploitation. I don’t know what the word is for it, but the entire lives of these women are exploited. And that’s a thing we don’t get with the other two movies, necessarily — to a fault when it comes to Charlotte. I think this movie is saying, look at how broken the system is, and the result is we broke these people.

Chelsea Stardust:
I also love the commentary it’s making — kind of ahead of its time — on child stars transitioning into adulthood. Because you think of someone like Shirley Temple, who we didn’t really see as an actress as an adult, just as a kid. And then today you look at people like Drew Barrymore, what Drew Barrymore went through, but then was able to come out the other side of it, but isn’t really doing movies anymore. She has a show. It shows how difficult that transition is. Whereas in this, Baby Jane was the star, and then in adulthood she got roles because of her sister, which we find out — the only reason she was in that is because Blanche was putting her in the contract. And then it faded away. I love that additional commentary, because I saw it growing up with child stars who just stopped acting or couldn’t transition to adulthood for whatever reason. So I very much feel like it was ahead of its time with that little piece, too.

Kynan Dias:
So Baby Jane sings this letter to Daddy. No, don’t stop — you don’t have to say that my version was better than Bette Davis’s. It’s fine.

That is monstrous because it’s this, again, quote-unquote older woman still having childish feelings for her father. Which is fine — there’s nothing wrong with that — but we turn that into a monstrousness. The daddy is not quite in the film in the same way that he is in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, where that’s a literal ghost. So in many ways, Baby Jane is singing this letter to Daddy, and Daddy is Hollywood, or the limelight, or entertainment. Holding on to that childish crush becomes more about being in the spotlight than an actual relationship with her father, and holding on to that too hard. And then, how dare you try to do that — again, in a movie where we’re exploiting that.

Pete Wright:
Right. The only time we get to see the father really in anything of service to the film is when he is being verbally abused by his daughter’s power of popularity in public, which is kind of horrifying. All the adults in the crowd — “Boy, if she was my daughter, I would string her up,” or whatever it was. It’s horrible.

Tommy Metz III:
They’re not even siding with her. She turns the crowd against her, but she just doesn’t care, because she has no self-awareness outside of herself.

Kynan Dias:
Right. And one thing I like about this movie as a haunted house movie is that we just look right next door and we’re in an entirely different neighborhood. It is as crazy as Edward Scissorhands or something. Just that line there, where they could talk to Anna Lee as Mrs. Bates, and Bette Davis’s real daughter as Mrs. Bates’s daughter. It’s like, oh, over there they watch TV and go to the dry cleaners and what have you. And there’s just something about this woman, Blanche, who has never been able to marry or have children or whatever, who has corrupted this house and turned it into this anti-fountain-of-youth, sinking the entire neighborhood down. But it exists in a real world, which I think is surprising when you think back on the movie, because the house is so gothic and this whole milieu is so evocative. But no, they live in 1962. They’re trying to put men on the moon right next door. They have TV dinners.

I want to bring up the idea that Jane and Blanche, for all intents and purposes, even though they’re sisters, are living as wives. They’re living in this inverted husband-and-wife relationship — my old ball and chain, my old lady — and they’re both blaming each other for being in this relationship. So sometimes you’ll see people reading it as a coded queer relationship: these are two old gay men living together, or these are two old lesbians living together. But these are two women who never had families of their own, and so they’re taking out all their frustrations on each other while also using each other as surrogate spouses, even if they’re not doing that at the top of their intelligence. Any thoughts about the weirdness of their relationship?

Pete Wright:
It’s a weird relationship. The thing I think is really one of the things I love so much about the movie — what makes their relationship really subversive — is that this prison that they’re in in the house is a prison that Blanche actually built herself. And then she hands the guilt to Jane to live with for 30 years. So I couldn’t help but think: what if we had joined this story when they just moved into the house together? Is this the result of nature — a broken neurology? Clearly she is suffering from some sort of demented kind of path, and that, leading her to be exposed to more of her poisoned nostalgia, coming together and making it look vindictive, when actually maybe there was a time when they were partners.

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh, I love that.

Kynan Dias:
Well, that’s the Ryan Murphy miniseries that they’ll make, since they’re remaking One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and everything. They can go and do that.

Tommy Metz III:
In the line “all this time we could have been friends” — whether that’s true or not, she does leave the door open to it. But on the other side of that, if we’re taking — I guess you can’t take children as a complete simulacrum of adults — but they both are each other in the beginning. Blanche is very reserved, very weight-of-the-world-on-my-shoulders, while Jane is a mess and doesn’t care who she’s running over. Not literally — emotionally. She has no self-awareness of other people. So I think that there’s a possibility for that, but I feel like the movie sort of sets us on a path.

Chelsea Stardust:
And Blanche is very submissive in that opening too. You bring up a good point of how they are behaving as children seems to carry through, but I would love to see how that started. I’ve never thought about that before, and I really love that, Pete. That’s such a great thought.

Kynan Dias:
The ending is creepy because she goes back into her dance, and I’ll grant you that. But the more that I watch the movie or think about it, that last line that Tommy’s talking about — “all this time we could have been friends” — is so interesting. Because of their relationship, but also I think it points out how these are women who were pitted against each other and competing over scarce resources, whether that is career, or the money of who owns the house, or the love of their family and the love of their fans. I don’t know how it was read at the time, but it’s a very interesting proto-second-wave feminist idea for them at the end to be like, oh, we just killed each other, but we should have been together as women.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s interesting. That they could have been Thelma and Louise instead of Weirdo and Weirdo.

Pete Wright:
Just roll into the ocean.

Kynan Dias:
Well, I do want to say: Bette Davis here is 54 years old.

Pete Wright:
Oh God. Oh no.

Tommy Metz III:
Fifty-four.

Chelsea Stardust:
Fifty-four. She has a ton of makeup on, though. If you look at her, they really —

Tommy Metz III:
I know. Totally.

Kynan Dias:
Well, she looks less aged in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, two years later. Joan Crawford, we don’t know how old she is, partially because of the trouble with Hollywood backstories, et cetera, but she’s probably 57. So we have these women, and again, they weren’t necessarily going to get roles. A lot of what we know from Joan Crawford’s biography is really her daughter’s biography, but she seems to have been grateful for the chance to act in anything — even Trog, later on, and things like that.

If you don’t know Mommie Dearest, the biography, you’ve probably seen the movie, which is another hagsploitation film. But her taking over her daughter Christina’s place on the soap opera, playing a character who’s thirty years younger than her — she seems to have been potentially just really happy to continue to get to be in movies. So there are various levels of whether these people thought they were being exploited or not. But they might not have had any third-act careers at all. Any other thoughts about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Chelsea Stardust:
I just love this movie. It’s a comfort film for me. I’ve been watching it since I was a kid.

Pete Wright:
That says a lot, Chelsea. That’s telling.

Kynan Dias:
Comfort food, yeah. A little bird on a tray and watching your old movies.

Chelsea Stardust:
It’s true. I also love the ending of this movie. I know we touched upon it, but we do not find out that twist until literally the last five minutes, where Blanche says, I tried to kill you. It was me. And you’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? I remember the first time I saw this, I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then — there she is, the end. But also I just want to say real quick, justice for Elvira, who is taking action, trying to do something, knows something’s wrong, knows Baby Jane is up to something. It upsets me so much that she does not make it. She is someone who’s trying to advocate for this person, so Blanche does have someone in her corner — just not for long.

Kynan Dias:
Not very long. And that, again, in both of these first two movies: we have very few parts for Black people, let alone Black women, in the early 1960s. Maidie Norman, who is in this — she gets this high-profile part, but it’s regressive in all these ways. She’s the only character who gets killed, she’s the Black woman, and she’s punished for her agency. But because of this movie, whenever I see her in some other Hollywood movie, I’m like, oh, there she is. There’s Maidie Norman. That’s Elvira.

Okay, so moving on to Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. It sounds like Chelsea knows some of the true tea here, so I’d love to hear this. This is usually thought of as an extension of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, with a lot of the same cast together, but we have replaced Joan Crawford with Olivia de Havilland, who is most known for playing Miss Melly in Gone with the Wind. So it’s a very different role for her.

We have a Southern Gothic — even though What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is sort of living in that role without being in the South — a Southern Gothic version of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, where young Charlotte is having a relationship with a married man, and in 1927, at something like a debutante ball, he is found murdered, hacked to death, in a pretty graphic scene for 1964, with his hand and his head cut off. And then we cut to much, much later, where she has been living in her house and protecting her father Sam, played by Victor Buono from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, who she assumes to have killed her boyfriend John. She has become a recluse up in the top level of her house. But they’re building the highway right through here, because it’s the 1960s and that’s what we do. And so she has to have her cousin Miriam, played by Olivia de Havilland, come back from the big city to help her, and things go awry from there. This is a new one for me. Had any of you besides Chelsea seen Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte?

Pete Wright:
Not here.

Tommy Metz III:
Just knew of it.

Kynan Dias:
I don’t know what I’ve been doing with my life as a gay man of my age, why I didn’t immediately leap to a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and A Streetcar Named Desire mashup — why I don’t watch this every day. So I’m really glad to have finally seen it. But before we get into it, any axes to grind here?

Pete Wright:
There’s a lot to appreciate in the movie, but I think there are too many moving parts for the payoff, which really amounts to: the cousin wanted the money. We’ve got a 1927 decapitation, we’ve got a blackmailed widow, we’ve got the English insurance guy, we’ve got a highway commission, a dead housekeeper for sure, a gun loaded with blanks. It’s just hat on a hat on a hat on a hat for a money hoodwink kind of a story. And fundamentally, I think the time jump was too big, because by the end of the movie, who else cares about the intrigue but the crazy lady in the old house? I feel like, maybe give us five years, and give us the people who still really care about what happened. So I had a couple of issues, but the urn makes up for a lot. I’m a big fan of urns and their role in film.

Tommy Metz III:
For me — and potentially I was in a bad mood when I watched this, because I’m looking at some of my complaints — I have two, and maybe I was just not in the frame of mind. But I feel like it was very slow. There’s no reason for the movie to be two hours and twelve minutes, especially the opening before the jump. It just goes and goes and goes. And Bette Davis, I really like, but I wrote down, “Never found head and hand. Why is Bette Davis screaming every line so far?” I don’t know where I was in the movie, but at some point —

Kynan Dias:
You don’t want Bette Davis screaming lines?

Tommy Metz III:
Apparently that was her one thing. And now I’m like, well, she was upstairs. Those would be my two. I felt like it really made a meal of itself, and it took a long time. Even when the dad’s looking for her, and he’s doing those — not Dutch angle, but crossing the frame diagonally — and in real time we’re just going to watch him walk across the same piece of grass.

Kynan Dias:
And we have told him to be as slow as possible. Your character trait is slow walking.

Pete Wright:
That’s what you got. Slow walk.

Tommy Metz III:
But those are, again, quibbles.

Kynan Dias:
Chelsea?

Chelsea Stardust:
I second Pete and Tommy. There are a lot of moving parts, probably one too many for the payoff. Even though Baby Jane is like two and a half hours too, it doesn’t feel as long. You feel that runtime here. And the last would be the payoff in terms of Jewel, who we never get to know. So that reveal — we see her very briefly at the opening and then very briefly throughout the movie. It would have been better if she had more of a relationship with Charlotte or Miriam. If we would have seen that instead of heard about it with the letters and things like that. So I just wanted a little more for all the setups to pay off, basically.

Tommy Metz III:
That makes sense. It reminds me, now that you say that, of some of those Scooby-Doo mysteries that wouldn’t work. They’d be like, it was Carl. And you’re like, we never met Carl.

Pete Wright:
Who’s Carl?

Tommy Metz III:
He wasn’t even the groundskeeper. He’s just over there. This sucks.

Kynan Dias:
It suffers, I think, in comparison, watching it directly after What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, probably. And in this one, Olivia de Havilland is just not up to the same kind of fun that Bette Davis wants to have in this, so I think she’s a sore spot in the movie. I was reading later that she never really wanted to play a villain. And again, this is one of those cases where it’s like, hey, you have this or you don’t have anything. So she took this, and she was like, this is against my brand. If you’ve heard about her suing FX’s Feud, because Catherine Zeta-Jones plays her as kind of a catty little so-and-so, and Olivia de Havilland’s like, that’s not my brand — she was suing when she was like 105 years old. “You’re ruining my brand.” So that makes some sense when you read about her. I don’t think she really embraced it the same way. And when you have so many moving parts, there’s strangely not enough Bette Davis in the movie — the actor who is going for it. But when they let her go, or when they let Agnes Moorehead as Velma go, these are incredible performances.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, de Havilland really is, unfortunately, just sort of the shrinking violet at the center of the movie. She feels extremely bland and not making a choice until the reveal. And then it’s like, oh, where were you the whole movie? You’re fun. You’re smiling and you’re like, champagne, champagne, champagne. You should have started there.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah. And her sexy, low-cut dresses, for someone who was supposedly playing a shrinking violet in her fifties.

Pete Wright:
I do have this line of hers: “I was reverse-typecast, being asked to be an unsympathetic villain. Given the choice, I wouldn’t have deprived Joan Crawford of the honor.” That is so classy and diabolical. What an awesome way to poke that particular dragon.

Chelsea Stardust:
I’ll give you a little tea on that story.

Tommy Metz III:
Please.

Chelsea Stardust:
So I’m going to name-drop. I’ve spent some time with Bruce Dern. He did Marnie, but this was his first feature where you can see who he is as an actor. And there’s a documentary that’s about to be out, called Dernsy, all about him. He told the story of this, and I’m not going to tell the whole thing, because it gets a little vulgar. But basically what ended up happening is Bette Davis got Joan Crawford replaced, and Olivia de Havilland was her choice. And Joan did not even know until she showed up on set.

Kynan Dias:
I have seen that version of it, yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
And there were words exchanged. In this documentary I believe Bruce does tell this story, because I was there for the interviews and him telling the story. Bette Davis really laid into Joan about it, and so she just leaves the set. But she did not pull out — she was recast, and Bette Davis helped facilitate that. It’s pretty spicy hearing it from someone who was there, who witnessed it happen. Fascinating. I will tell you offline what was said to her.

Tommy Metz III:
Sitting in the Dark After Dark. That’s exciting.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. But I do think there is something to be said about changing the story for the integrity of Joan — people weren’t really talking about this stuff back in the day, like the tea we get now. I think there’s something to be said about her saying, oh, it wasn’t for me, or whatever. But Bette was the puppet master.

Kynan Dias:
It is interesting how we take sides in these things. A lot of my students will tell me, when we’re going to watch a Joan Crawford movie in class, “I hate Joan Crawford.” But they haven’t seen any of her movies. It’s because of her personal life and her abuse of her children, those types of things. Which is totally valid. But it’s also weird how we’re like, I like Bette Davis more than Joan Crawford, so I’ll take her story — all this stuff that has nothing to do with it. I like her better as an actor. That’s another thing: how we just want to compare them forever.

Pete Wright:
Fandom be fandom, man.

Chelsea Stardust:
And they’re very different actors.

Kynan Dias:
And they made one movie together.

So Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is interesting because we add this Southernness to it. Whereas Baby Jane is this prissy Shirley Temple type as a child actor, here we have a different set of expectations for her. She was going to be the prime daughter of this Southern family, and now she’s at the end of the family line. Turning that into a horror movie is very interesting, where now she feels trapped in this house, and trapped with this obligation and all this history of what was expected of her and what she should have done with her life. That’s the — oh shoot, I can’t think of the Eugene O’Neill play. The Mourning Becomes Electra of it, where it’s like the Furies are coming from outside to eat you alive, but in a horror movie — a relatively trashy horror movie. So I think that’s fun.

Tommy Metz III:
If in the first movie, in Baby Jane, the prison is Hollywood, for Sweet Charlotte the prison is generational wealth and sort of Southern lineage, legacy stuff. They’re equally trapped for the same kind of reasons.

Chelsea Stardust:
Can I run something by y’all that I thought about when I watched this? I’ve seen this movie many times, but this time there was something — let me know if you think I’m looking too much into it. There’s a line that Miriam says that leads me to believe she was abused by Charlotte’s dad. I should have written it down. I’m so mad I didn’t. They also say Miriam has never come back. She’s written to her and all this stuff, but she’s never come back. And then she decides to come back. It’s almost, to me, like she’s taking her revenge in other ways too. But then it’s just this line — I want to say it was something like, “You don’t know the things he’s done to me.” She said something that I was like — and I never thought about that before until this watch. It felt like, because of how Charlotte talks about her dad versus how Miriam talks about him, and that wanting to get approval — she said something, and it was the first time I ever thought about it. And then it made her motivations ring differently to me.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. It’s a different kind of trauma than beheading and behanding.

Kynan Dias:
I’m all for that kind of reading, Chelsea. I like that a lot.

Chelsea Stardust:
Okay. I was like, maybe the guys will see this too. I don’t know.

Kynan Dias:
I think a tactic that this movie takes that’s different from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is that we get to go inside Charlotte’s head. Some of the most catching imagery is stuff that they’re faking — horrible stuff that she’s imagining — but then it works, apparently, and we go into her head and see this crazy debutante ball thing at the beginning. Her father is monstrous-looking even in her eyes, but she’s dancing with him, and everyone in the crowd has these domino masks on and all sorts of stuff. I love ’60s high-production-value Hollywood stuff, as the system is starting to collapse, that just looks crazy — that looks like European art films but has that Hollywood gloss to it. I eat that up.

Pete Wright:
It’s Eyes Wide Shut before Eyes Wide Shut. Still trying to make Eyes Wide Shut parties a thing. How far does this movie — in particular, in comparison to the last one — veer into camp versus horror thriller for you all?

Tommy Metz III:
This one feels more grounded, I guess, to me, than Baby Jane. But I can’t tell if that’s my thought or that’s how I feel history has treated it. Because I would put Baby Jane hand in hand with a Mommie Dearest — not about quality of film, but about it being known for a really big performance that is supposed to be big, and the movie knows how big it is and is pushing it. Everyone’s just sort of on the same page.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, I think they know the brief in Baby Jane. The camp is there and they’re embracing it, and everyone has got it. But this — I agree with Tom — feels a little more grounded, with glimpses of that throughout it, but not as heavy. I mean, there’s a reason Baby Jane is a gay icon film, a queer icon film.

Pete Wright:
I think Charlotte is much more grounded. And then we have the blanks in the gun and the body in the swamp, and oh no, now he’s creepshowing all over the house. I feel like the earned finale leans hard into horror camp in a way that I don’t know if the movie understood at the time. But it’s not all the way there. And I’m all about Southern Gothic stuff. I really love a good Southern Gothic melodrama, and I kind of feel like this is a Southern Gothic melodrama that’s wearing a decapitated head.

Tommy Metz III:
I think I’m more comfortable with the word melodrama than camp. That’s the only speed bump that I’m having. That rings true.

Kynan Dias:
There are some shockingly grounded performances, I think. Agnes Moorehead, who’s the one who gets the Oscar nomination here, as Velma — this is a great performance. I’m a huge fan of hers, and this is some crazy Cajun helper woman who’s lived there, and she’s so fiercely protective. Again, it gets into this weird thing that all three of these movies have with class, where the servants are expendable. But that’s a really crazy, grounded character performance, where she’s doing research to get into this role and all of that. And this will be the last movie that she does, really, before she becomes incredibly famous for being on Bewitched, as the ultimate mother-in-law character. So this is really grounded and interesting and almost unrecognizable, I think. It’s weird how you could have that in the same movie as what they do to Joseph Cotten’s body, drowning him in a tuxedo and all of that.

Pete Wright:
You gotta go in style.

Kynan Dias:
Go in style. Right. So, two years later, Bette Davis is 56. Olivia de Havilland is 48 years old.

Pete Wright:
Oh no.

Chelsea Stardust:
Jesus.

Kynan Dias:
And they are using, I think in a different way than What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the idea of the caretaker, the nurse. So she is the evil nurse here, and how we punish women for being not-perfect caretakers. It’s like you’re either the platonic ideal of what it is to be a woman nurse, or you are this evil one who has secret drugs, who is poisoning you to death and gaslighting you and going behind your back and hitting you over the head with a chair. Like Annie Wilkes. Any other thoughts about Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte?

Tommy Metz III:
The stone urn is pretty dope. And I like that they gave you the — because that’s a pretty instant death. But after all of the machinations, they made sure to have her know that her instant death is coming. That she just happens to be ready for a kiss, looking up, and then you get urn vision. It’s pretty cool.

Chelsea Stardust:
I love the urn setup earlier with George Kennedy, who we don’t get enough of. I love them setting that up early so it doesn’t seem out of place when it actually happens.

Tommy Metz III:
Yep. This house is just lousy with urns.

Kynan Dias:
She’s a little lousy with urns.

Pete Wright:
So many urns.

Kynan Dias:
And I didn’t mention Mary Astor as Jewel, Bruce Dern’s wife. She’s so interesting here because she had retired. At this point, even though she’s younger than a lot of people, she had retired because she was a woman, even though she’d won an Oscar in the ’40s. I was reading that she came back for Bette Davis, and unlike Olivia de Havilland, she was like, oh, this is great. In the first pages of the script they’ve got a head rolling down the stairs, and she’s like, and I get to play this evil old woman dying on a porch? Hell yeah. She came back.

So I think it’s interesting to see — I don’t think Olivia de Havilland was alone among women of her generation who were potentially really horrified by the kind of roles they would be asked to play in this cycle. But not Mary Astor. Good for her.

All right, so I’m torn on whether we should call our next movie Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, which is the English title, or the American Who Slew Auntie Roo?. I kind of like both of them at the same time. Any votes here?

Tommy Metz III:
Whoever.

Pete Wright:
Whoever. Class it up.

Kynan Dias:
Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? All right. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? — this is Curtis Harrington’s 1972 movie, kind of a follow-up to his hagsploitation movie with Shelley Winters called What’s the Matter with Helen?.

Tommy Metz III:
So many questions.

Kynan Dias:
So many questions. I like a movie with punctuation in the title. So this is a little bit different. This is about Shelley Winters as Auntie Roo, as she prefers to be called. She is a rich American widow of a magician. She’s got that good magician scratch.

Pete Wright:
Sweet, sweet magician money.

Kynan Dias:
She lives in a big manor house at the edge of an English town. She is grieving over the death of her daughter, Katie, who has died in a tragic accident, falling off a banister by having too much fun in the house. And so every Christmas she takes ten orphans from the local town and gives them the time of their lives. That all comes to a head when — I was going to say she screws over these kids. No. When the orphanage screws over a brother-and-sister team, Christopher and Katie, and doesn’t invite them to Auntie Roo’s house, they sneak in anyway and end up triggering Auntie Roo’s madness, if that’s the way to read the movie. They end up thinking that she is the witch from Hansel and Gretel, who is trying to eat them alive. This is Mark Lester as the little boy Christopher, who is Oliver in Oliver!. I thought he only lived in Oliver!. I didn’t know he made any movies after this, so it was fun to see him being a bad little boy here.

Tommy Metz III:
Really orphan-cast.

Kynan Dias:
Orphan-cast, exactly. So, any axes to grind about Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?

Tommy Metz III:
This movie made me feel crazy. If I have an axe, it’s that I don’t think it’s a great movie — which you’re allowed to say, I’m just deciding I’m allowed to say. And also I feel like it might be two movies put into one. The Hansel and Gretel thing starts so late, and we were already settling into a Flowers in the Attic situation. So I was never exactly clear if the movie was exactly clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. But it’s a fun ride. It’s a crazy, weird, fun ride. And what is going on with Albie? Oh my god.

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh my god, Albie.

Tommy Metz III:
I want his prequel. Just tell me more about Albie, because that guy is all over the place.

Kynan Dias:
I think I’m with you, Tommy. A more modern version of this type of movie, like Tate Taylor’s Ma with Octavia Spencer — that’s a great performance and a great time, but that movie is trying too hard to be good, and it’s hurting its chance to be great. That’s what’s going on here. This movie thinks it is better than it is and isn’t embracing that it is trash. This could be a real classic if it had a better idea of what it’s here for.

Chelsea Stardust:
This is a movie I watch almost every Christmas, because it’s a Christmas movie.

Pete Wright:
It’s your Die Hard.

Chelsea Stardust:
I think my axe is sort of with the ending, because I’m Team Auntie Roo. These kids — I mean, she shouldn’t be keeping them there against their will. I recognize that. But I was like, girl, you kids have a great life now. And them projecting this Hansel and Gretel thing — that’s completely made up. That is them projecting it onto her. And I feel kind of bad for her. She should not be keeping that corpse, but —

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, tomato, tomahto.

Pete Wright:
Not sanitary.

Chelsea Stardust:
I was just sort of hoping for — she was just trying to cook that turkey, or whatever, with a pig. Just trying to have some pork. Kids, that’s why we need the oven hot. It’s not for you. You made a whole story about it.

Tommy Metz III:
Right. And that is a possibility. Or is that the answer? Because she says, “Wait, the pig — I thought she was going to eat us,” and he’s like, “Later.” Ándale, ándale. But are we ever supposed to think that, other than them being forcefully — a hostile adoption — that they are in trouble? Actual trouble?

Pete Wright:
I hope not.

Tommy Metz III:
Because there’s a reading that it’s not, other than the fact that she does have a skeleton and little coffins for days. That’s not a great sign. And the fact that she doesn’t have a grip on reality. So I was a little unclear. Were they in peril, or is this whole thing just about sociopathic kids?

Pete Wright:
That’s my read. These kids are the worst. And I’m absolutely Team Auntie Roo. You know from jump that these kids are going to be the problem. They trigger every bad thing that happens. So my axe: the voiceover has got to go. I think we get it by the end that this is a Hansel and Gretel thing. We get it. If you want that read, you can have it. You do not need the kid voice jamming it down your throat in the last half of the movie. I don’t need it at all. Everything else I am happy to defend, because Shelley Winters is my spirit guide. This is absolutely a three-star movie that I adore. I had never seen it, and I am so grateful to have it.

She is off the map in this movie. And I just kept wishing — if you just clocked that little bastard once in the side of the head. Just take him out for a minute. Give yourself a little concussion — it’s fine, that can heal. Just take that log and knock him out. Give yourself room to breathe.

Kynan Dias:
Right. Just for a minute.

Pete Wright:
This is a movie about grief that she needed to process, and more banisters.

Tommy Metz III:
Just build more banisters. Chutes and banisters.

Pete Wright:
I loved everything about that. And I think the movie has a lot to say about somebody who is not capable of compartmentalizing the part of herself that is the most damaged. I think her over-the-top approach to this part made it so much more than I expected. I really loved it, and I know that it absolutely has some issues, and she transcends all of it. Her nutjobness transcends all of it.

Kynan Dias:
Shelley Winters is one of the great Method actors. She doesn’t get enough credit, but she’s in the same class of actors as Marlon Brando and James Dean and Paul Newman and all them. She wins two Oscars in the ’60s, and then her career is going to be over if she’s not in these hagsploitation films. And then she can get into this, and then get to what I think is her best performance, in potentially not a great movie either — I’ll defend it, but you could say otherwise — The Poseidon Adventure, where she is so good as that character. You don’t get to get there if you don’t have these crazy movies that maybe don’t even know how good they have it to have Shelley Winters in them.

This is a Christmas movie, which is super interesting. So in some ways we have Auntie Roo doing all the things that you would expect of a grieving mother — or that society would expect of a grieving mother. Stiff upper lip, you live in Britain now, and you’re going to take this terrible grief and do all of this. But now it’s the kids who are looking at her and being like, ew, this woman is gross, in some monstrous way. I don’t know if people at the time were reading it the same way as us, because I think we’re all in agreement that we’re Team Auntie Roo. But she hasn’t quite gotten over this. It’s only on the outside, or something, and so all of these attempts to give us toys and learn our names and give us stuff is sickening and anti-mommy or something.

Pete Wright:
Well, the first two movies decided who the hag was in the hagsploitation for us. They decided that these women were terrifying and presented them to us. And in this movie, it’s totally flipped on its ear, because it’s the people who decided that she was to be feared that are to be feared. They were the threat, not Auntie Roo. Auntie Roo never actually hurt anybody. I mean, she let her daughter fall off a banister.

Kynan Dias:
But she’s weird, she’s strange. But where is the monstrosity, necessarily?

Pete Wright:
Was she a threat?

Kynan Dias:
It’s interesting how we don’t do old-age makeup with her. It’s like in Alfie, when she’s seducing Michael Caine — she’s heavy, basically, is it. She’s a little bit older than him and she’s heavy, and that’s what’s monstrous about her. I wonder if, in 1971, that’s enough. Shelley Winters is a normal-sized woman today, and they’re like, oh, this is crazy. And she still dresses like this grand, beautiful woman. Because they don’t do any of the makeup choices at all here, it just seems like it’s self-evident. They’re just like, look at her. Look at her. She’s a monster.

Chelsea Stardust:
She’s a monster. We don’t have to do anything.

Pete Wright:
Maybe it’s an act of confidence. Maybe they’re like, Shelley Winters is going to convey enough crazy that we don’t need to do anything else.

Chelsea Stardust:
She’s got this.

Kynan Dias:
She’s got this. At the same time, I do like this haunted house, which is not quite decayed. It’s kept up, but she has, in her trauma, built it into this puzzle piece for herself. She’s keeping her secrets even from people who live in the house, and she doesn’t have any friends. So she’s invented the system of keys and secret doors and dumbwaiters, et cetera, to put that up herself, which the other two haven’t. They’ve just let what was good decline. And now she is sort of constructing her prison.

Tommy Metz III:
Is that the connection with why magician? Why magician wife? Is that the connection of why she would have the idea of, let’s make a puzzle box and have all of these weird contraptions — because that’s the world that she grew up in? Because otherwise, I just kind of feel like the director was like, what props have you got? You got a bunch of weird skeletons and stuff? Okay, let’s see. He’s a magician. His name’s Mr. Ta-Da. Because there’s no other payoff. The kids don’t run into the disappearing door and close it and get away from her. It seems like a lot of setup for nothing that ever happens, unless that’s what we need to believe that she would have these kinds of things, or that they would both live in this weird house and have these kinds of things.

Kynan Dias:
Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. That makes a lot of sense. At the same time, we do get the kids getting to go through the magician’s stuff, which is very scary. You know, more heads.

Pete Wright:
More heads. We just need more heads.

Tommy Metz III:
So many heads.

Kynan Dias:
And that part is where it’s like, geez, can you imagine living here as kids? But they’re not supposed to be in there, first of all, these crappy kids. It’s their fault they’re getting scared.

Pete Wright:
They’re the worst. They did it. This is a self-own.

Tommy Metz III:
And we’re assuming that Albie followed them in there. He wasn’t just in there, like, “I’m just trying on my magic stuff.”

Pete Wright:
But if he’s in there, how did he get ahead of them? He came and got himself in gear and was behind them on the other side. How did he do that? What is that guy’s deal?

Tommy Metz III:
I think there’s a camouflage banister. You don’t understand.

Kynan Dias:
These are magician secrets, you guys.

I think another thing that’s interesting is her relationship with her servants, which is very different from either of the previous two films, the Aldrich films. We see that her servants do not care for her and that they’re exploiting her, where she seems to consider them her friends, if not her family, because she doesn’t have anybody around. So that’s another thing that tips it in her favor, where that’s really terrible. They’re —

Pete Wright:
Taking advantage.

Kynan Dias:
— creating this fake — they’ve got the Mike Flanagan Oculus team coming in and faking these séances, and really taking advantage of her grief, just for five pounds every couple of weeks.

Pete Wright:
I do kind of love that they have the guy come in — he’s an accomplice of Albie’s and he’s doing the readings and all of that — and then when he’s found out, he really doesn’t care. Like, okay, jig’s up.

Tommy Metz III:
That actor’s in a different movie. He’s in a very comedic, kind of broad, but legitimately funny movie. His turn is like, “I’m so offended, I will take these two bottles of brandy.” He’s legitimately funny, but it feels different. He’s reacting to his scarf being taken. “Who’s got that scarf?”

Pete Wright:
Ridiculous scarf.

Kynan Dias:
All right. Anything else about Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? before I throw some final statistics at you, some numbers?

Chelsea Stardust:
We love the numbers.

Tommy Metz III:
A real pleasure.

Pete Wright:
Shelley Winters was 26 years old in this movie, you guys.

Tommy Metz III:
I know. I said that the orphans are older than her.

Kynan Dias:
She was 26 years old. That’s right. Well, she is 51 years old in this movie, and they’re making it like, how dare this woman still feel bad about her child dying? How could she be? She’s an old lady now.

Also, thinking about this as a subgenre that’s helping some of the old actors from classic Hollywood stay afloat: these three movies, amongst all the casts, have eleven Oscars and 38 Oscar nominations. And they were putting them in these horror movies of various levels of trashiness.

Chelsea Stardust:
Wow.

Kynan Dias:
But that is a whole lot of talent. Some of them are emerging talent, like George Kennedy and Bruce Dern, et cetera. But a lot of these are old-school Shakespearean actors like Ralph Richardson, or Hollywood stars who faced a dead end, essentially, when 1959 comes around, and they were not going to get work the same way. So that’s quite a float for that generation.

Tommy Metz III:
It is telling — and incredibly obvious, probably — that when we are dealing with older actresses, we put them in horror movies. When we’re dealing with older actors, they’re old dogs on motorcycles, or they’re doing bank heists.

Kynan Dias:
Right. One final time. We never got to rob Vegas, and now we’re going to rob Vegas.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, eventually we just give up and call the movie The Old Man and the Gun.

Kynan Dias:
That’s right. Well, thanks for going with us on this journey and shining the spotlight on these women. Any last thoughts about the genre?

Tommy Metz III:
This was thrilling, because it was not on my radar at all. I’d never heard hagsploitation or psycho-biddies, and so this was thrilling. This is a real example of why this is such a great podcast. So thank you very much, Kynan.

Chelsea Stardust:
Great picks.

Pete Wright:
Awesome trio. For sure.

Kynan Dias:
Great. And so we are going to turn it over to our curriculum center for next month, which is Chelsea Stardust.

Chelsea Stardust:
Hello, hello. Okay. Apologies in advance to y’all. So November has a holiday in it: Thanksgiving. So we’re going to put the fun in dysfunctional — a celebration of fucked-up families. I have a feeling that these will have enough axes to take down your Christmas tree. So prove me wrong.

Tommy Metz III:
Call your shot.

Chelsea Stardust:
So our three picks are 1967’s Jack Hill film Spider Baby. The 1989 Brian Yuzna gem Society.

Kynan Dias:
Oh, Chelsea.

Pete Wright:
Wait, what year was that? That was 1997?

Tommy Metz III:
’84.

Chelsea Stardust:
1989.

Tommy Metz III:
Great, we were all wrong, but okay.

Kynan Dias:
The one movie I was trying to avoid this whole time.

Tommy Metz III:
Really? I’ve never even heard of it. Have you heard of it, Pete?

Pete Wright:
No.

Chelsea Stardust:
I’ll show you this cover.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, I don’t like that.

Chelsea Stardust:
This movie was actually a big inspiration for my movie, Satanic Panic.

Pete Wright:
Oh my god.

Chelsea Stardust:
And the cherry on top: 2003, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses.

Kynan Dias:
Oh, Chelsea, the second movie I was trying to — no, that sounds great.

Chelsea Stardust:
I had a feeling. I was putting this together and I was talking to my husband about it, and he literally said, “I do not know how Kynan’s going to feel about these. You’re going to traumatize him and everyone else,” because he is a listener of the podcast. But you know what? We’re going to go big. We’re going to check them off the list. I cannot wait to hear how these shake out. And I gotta say, apologies in advance for what you’re about to experience.

Tommy Metz III:
Fair enough.

Kynan Dias:
Fantastic. That’s very exciting, actually. Great.

Pete Wright:
Okay, so that’s it. We’re done, right? That’s the whole thing? Okay, it’s fine.

Chelsea Stardust:
Great picks, Kynan. Really good. Loved this.

Pete Wright:
Totally great picks. It feels like a hard left turn going into next month. After psycho-biddies, a hard, hard left turn.

Chelsea Stardust:
You expect nothing less from me, right?

Pete Wright:
But I’m here. I’m here for it. This is why. It’s great that you two are in the order that you are in our rotation, too.

Hey, thank you everyone for downloading and listening to this show this month. We’d love for you to do all the stuff you do with podcasts: like and share and review positively in all the places that take reviews. And if you want to get longer, ad-free episodes of the show, visit thenextreel.com/membership and you will find a place to join The Next Reel family of film shows. You’d get this show, but not just this show. You get Cinema Scope, you get The Next Reel main show, you get The Film Board — there’s lots of stuff. All month long, there’s movie talk coming out. So we would love you to hang out over there with us and become a part of The Next Reel family. On behalf of Tommy Metz III and Kynan Dias and Chelsea Stardust, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you next month, right here, sitting in the dark.