On October 31, 1962, Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? opened in the United States, premiering in Cincinnati before rolling out more widely the following week.
Davis designed the grotesque Baby Jane makeup herself, a cake-faced, ringletted look that has endured as one of cinema’s most unsettling figures.
Based on Henry Farrell’s 1960 novel and adapted by Lukas Heller, the black-and-white psychological thriller cast two of Hollywood’s most formidable and long-rivalrous stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, as aging sisters locked in a decaying mansion. The Halloween release date was fitting for a film that traded in isolation, resentment, and cruelty, arriving at a moment when both actresses were navigating the industry’s fading interest in older women.
The story centers on Jane Hudson (Davis), a once-celebrated child vaudeville star whose career collapsed as her sister Blanche (Crawford) rose to film stardom. After a car accident leaves Blanche wheelchair-bound, the two live together in isolation, with Jane increasingly unhinged and abusive. “But you ARE, Blanche! You ARE in that chair!” is Jane’s line.
Davis’s performance is a study in arrested development and spite, while Crawford plays Blanche with quiet calculation and endurance. The production was famously tense, and rumors of on-set feuding between the two women only heightened public interest.
Made for roughly $1 million, the film became a substantial commercial success, earning about $9 million in U.S. rentals and revitalizing both careers.
It received five Academy Award nominations, including Davis’s tenth and final Best Actress nod, and won for Best Costume Design (Black-and-White). Over time it has been recognized as a landmark of psychological horror and a sharp portrait of Hollywood’s disposability of women past a certain age.
The film remains a defining example of the “hagsploitation” or psycho-biddy cycle it helped inspire. Released on Halloween, it gave audiences a gothic domestic nightmare that still feels uncomfortably close to home.
