There’s a cult classic coming up this Friday night (or very early Saturday morning) on Turner Classic Movies. In the 1968 Spider Baby, a family of inbred ghouls is tended by a kind and rational caretaker (Lon Chaney, Jr.) until some greedy relatives and their shyster invade their spooky Victorian mansion and become cannibalized. Spider Baby was reportedly made for only $65,000 – and it shows. There’s the clunky and explicitly expositional beginning and ending narration and a TV sitcom look and feel. But no 1960s TV show featured a daughter kissing her skeleton father goodnight, along with cretinous uncle and aunts in the basement and negligee-clad cannibals.
Spider Baby was filmed in 1964, but was caught up in bankruptcy proceedings and not released until 1968. This explains the offensive black character, which might have passed as regrettably mainstream in the early 60s, but must have seemed odd to the more racially conscious audiences in 1968.
Chaney has fun with playing a normal human among the monsters, and there’s a sly reference to The Wolfman at the dinner table.
As Chaney’s horror career ended, Sid Haig’s was just beginning. Haig, in just his second feature, played a sex-craved Igor type. He now has over 130 screen credits, including character roles in Emperor of the North and Jackie Brown and lots of TV work. But Haig is most well-known for his horror, and it’s hard to top his portrayal of Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses. Yikes.
Spider Baby is also known as The Maddest Story Ever Told, The Liver Eaters, Cannibal Orgy and various combinations of those titles. Spider Baby has played on Turner Classic Movies before and is available streaming from Amazon, Vudu and Xbox Video.
