The Year Of The Crone

Is there anything scarier than a naked old woman?

Over the past few years, you may have noticed this idea emerging as a running joke among horror fans, critiquing films that depict old women as repulsive monsters. It’s not a new concept. Scary old ladies have been fictionalized in some form or another for well over 700 years (when a Hansel-and-Gretel-like story first made its rounds in the Baltic region). Movies too have long exploited the idea, most notably in the 1960s and ‘70s, when a subgenre known as hagsploitation (aka “psycho biddy” horror) breathed new life into the careers of several classic Hollywood stars. Actresses like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Shelley Winters were no longer being offered conventional leading roles. Instead, horror directors began casting them as villains (and occasionally victims), in stories about toxic family relationships and campy crimes of passion. Playing unstable spinsters and abusive crones, they starred in a run of schlocky thrillers like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and The Nanny.

Considering the overlap between ageism and the image-obsessed nature of current pop culture, with Botox and Ozempic going mainstream, it’s no surprise that hag horror is making a comeback. So far, though, the resulting films aren’t saying anything notably insightful about the experience of being an older woman. More often, they just use aging bodies to provoke disgust. Even Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a satire about Hollywood’s unreachable beauty standards, struggled to deliver any coherent social commentary, hamstrung by contradictory worldbuilding and leering images of its heroine’s transformation into a decaying crone.

Following in the footsteps of The Substance and Ti West’s slasher movie X — which put Mia Goth in full-body prosthetics to play its elderly, oversexed villain Pearl — 2025 brought us two high-profile riffs on hagsploitation. Taking cues from vintage psycho biddy classics, these films show conflicting attempts to move the genre forward, even as it's weighed down by an exploitative past.

In the Philippou brothers’ Bring Her Back, Sally Hawkins stars as a grieving mother who torments three foster children while trying to resurrect her dead daughter, calling back to the psychological roots of the genre. And in Zach Creggers’ Weapons, Amy Madigan plays a positively medieval style of witch: an abrasive and bizarre-looking old woman who uses mind control to prey on children. Both directors balance crowd-pleasing shock value with sharp characterization, but their films differ in their hagsploitative self-awareness. While the Philippou brothers make a conscious effort to modernize the genre, Cregger’s witchy villain has more regressive undertones — and leans into the idea of an aging appearance being intrinsically negative.

Zach Cregger’s Cringey Crones

Indie darling Zach Cregger clearly has a thing for this kind of hag role, having deployed one in his previous movie as well. Barbarian (2022) and Weapons (2025) both begin as darkly comedic thrillers before making an abrupt tonal shift and introducing an outlandish villain halfway through. In Barbarian, that character was The Mother (played by Matthew Patrick Davis in head-to-toe prosthetics), a Gollum-like naked woman with stringy hair, rotten teeth, and pendulous breasts, who kidnaps and forcibly breastfeeds the film’s adult protagonists.

Expanding on Barbarian's cynical humor and bold plot twists, Weapons is a dark fairytale about a class of children who go missing without a trace, prompting a grief-stricken backlash against their teacher Justine (Julia Garner). Cregger introduces her as the victim of a metaphorical witch hunt, ramping up the paranoid tension before unveiling Gladys as a literal, old-school witch — another villain, like The Mother, who provides a grotesque physical contrast to a young female lead.

Played by 75-year-old Amy Madigan, Gladys is pushy and manipulative, installing herself in a stranger’s household by pretending to be a distant relative. Standing out among an ensemble cast of average suburbanites, she’s a menacing caricature, disguising her ailing body with smeared lipstick and a lurid wig — a look directly inspired by the hagsploitation-adjacent classic, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Underneath all this, her “natural” makeup emphasizes age and illness: wrinkled skin, no eyebrows, drooping earlobes, and a bald cap with stringy braids suggesting extensive hair loss. Whether she’s dressed up or not, her villainhood shines through in her inability to conform to conventional feminine beauty. As a supernatural predator who survives by extracting the life force from young victims, she’s a prestige version of the witches from Hocus Pocus.

Gladys’ whole look is designed to freak us out, but what we’re actually seeing is a relatively plausible depiction of an old woman in poor health. Wrinkled skin and thinning hair aren’t actually a sign of monstrous inhumanity, and it’s telling that Ti West and Zach Cregger felt comfortable using this kind of body for a gross-out scare.

After highlighting the injustice of people scapegoating Justine, the film ends with an amusingly contrary conclusion. It’s not that witch hunts are intrinsically bad; it’s just that Justine’s community misidentified the witch. If they’d targeted the weird-looking old spinster instead, maybe things would’ve turned out OK.

Bring Her Back’s Classic Approach to Hagsploitation

Also featuring an abusive female villain who traps children in a domestic setting, Bring Her Back offers a different take on hagsploitation. The Philippou brothers explicitly describe the film as psycho-biddy horror, comparing Sally Hawkins to Bette Davis. Yet her character’s villainhood isn’t rooted in her age and gender — it’s all about her behavior and her wielding of maternal power. (Also, the threshold for crone status has shifted since the 1960s. Hawkins is only five or six years younger than Bette Davis was in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, but in 2025 we certainly wouldn’t categorize her as an old lady.)

Echoing the gaslighting themes of The Nanny (1965) — a British hagsploitation flick about a murderous conflict between an aging nanny (also Bette Davis) and a 10-year-old boy — Bring Her Back blends psychodrama with supernatural horror. It features some pretty disturbing gore, but its scariest moments have more to do with the power dynamic between Sally Hawkins’ character Laura and her two teenage foster children.

When the orphaned siblings Andy and Piper first arrive at her secluded property, Laura is thrilled to welcome Piper — who happens to be blind, like Laura’s deceased daughter Cathy. Meanwhile Andy earns a chillier reception. Over the coming days, Laura befriends Piper while tormenting Andy in secret: forcing him to kiss his father’s corpse at an open-casket funeral, getting him drunk so he’ll spill vulnerable secrets, and tricking him into thinking that he’s wetting the bed. In the background of this abusive power play lurks a third child known as Oliver, a mute, reclusive boy whom Laura has kidnapped for use in an occult ritual. Laura uses Oliver as the host for a demonic entity, which will supposedly resurrect her daughter’s spirit and implant it into Piper’s body.

Driven mad by grief, Laura represents a very different form of villainhood than Weapons’ Gladys, an inhuman predator who delights in her evil acts. Laura also, for want of a better word, looks normal. Styling Sally Hawkins as a mildly quirky middle-aged mom, the film doesn’t try to draw connections between her appearance and her actions. Instead, Laura’s villainy stems from her maternal power — to manipulate and eventually transform children.

Waiting For the Neo-Hagsploitation Movement

Offering divergent takes on hagsploitation, these two films suggest the genre faces several overlapping problems. Most obviously, there’s the inherent corniness and misogyny of depicting old women’s bodies as horrifying and/or funny. Then there’s the issue of casting. Does the hagsploitation revival translate to more roles for older actresses like it did in the ‘60s?

Bring Her Back is founded on classic hagsploitation tropes, but stars a woman in her late 40s. Meanwhile Weapons gives an entertaining villain role to a 75-year-old actress, but plays into sexist and ageist themes. And they both follow a run of films that used prosthetics to make their aging villains look as ancient (and therefore scary) as possible.

So far, we haven’t seen a neo-hagsploitation film that a) casts a genuinely old woman, b) gives her a meaty role, and c) avoids gawking in disgust at her appearance. In fact, we rarely see older women leading any kind of horror movie. At present, the best strategy is to get cast in a popular franchise when you’re young (Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween), and return for legacy sequels decades later. It’s either that, or spending hours in the makeup chair for a crone transformation — and neither option feels like a notable step forward from the ageism that sparked the original wave of hagsploitation movies 60 years ago.