Psycho-Biddy, Qu'est-Ce Que C'est?

10/30/2026

Sitting in the Dark

0:00

1:08:08

Kynan has the curriculum this month, and two of us had never heard of it. Psycho-biddy. Hagsploitation. Grande Dame Guignol, if you want to be polite about it. You take an actress Hollywood has decided is done, you put her in a mansion that’s falling apart, and you sell the audience her face.Baby Jane survives the rewatch. The one complaint is that Blanche is so hopeless at getting help that the movie never gives you a door that might open, which means there’s nothing to yank away from you. What saves it is the twist. Blanche built that prison herself and let Jane carry the guilt for thirty years, and the longer we sat with that, the less Jane looked like a villain and the more she looked like somebody who got broken slowly. Sweet Charlotte has a harder time. There’s a 1927 decapitation, a blackmailed widow, an English insurance man, a highway commission, a dead housekeeper and a gun full of blanks, all in service of a cousin who wanted the money. The jump forward is too long, the reveal hangs on a character we barely meet, and Olivia de Havilland doesn’t make a choice until the last reel. Chelsea has a firsthand account of how Joan Crawford really left that set, and the urn makes up for a lot.Auntie Roo is the one that reverses the whole cycle. Shelley Winters never hurts anybody. Two orphans decide she’s a witch, lock her in a pantry, set it on fire, and walk away with her jewelry. The voiceover should have been cut. Everything else we’ll defend. All four of us came out Team Auntie Roo.Also in here: why the house is always the body, why older actors get heist movies and older actresses get horror, Chelsea’s firsthand Bruce Dern tea, and Kynan’s closing math on how many Oscars this trashy little cycle kept employed.
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