We stare in horror at their once beautiful, now disfigured-by-fear faces, gloating in their torment, overdosing on schadenfreude as we watch them being subjugated, tortured and abused. We dine out on their disgrace, and get off on their shame. They are the screaming queens of cinema, glittering stars of yesteryear who descend into the nightmare world of sleazy horror flicks. We see them scampering about in torn negligees, or bloody one-size-fits-all kaftans, exulting in their strange zaftig glamour, as we gaze in dismay at their awkward cries of distress.

We see the first vague inklings of this genre of fright flicks in classics such as Sudden Fear (1952), starring a neurotic Joan Crawford taken in by a duplicitous Jack Palance, and Sunset Boulevard, when aging screen siren Norma Desmond (played to perfection by aging screen siren Gloria Swanson) seduces screenwriter William Holden and loses her mind at the same time.

For me the genre really began with Kind Lady (1951), a late noir thriller starring dowager Ethel Barrymore as a rich art collector besieged by ruthless con artists, including a delectably evil Angela Lansbury. Held hostage in her lavish home, Barrymore exudes acres of angst and rubs her hands raw from fretting hysterically. But the real fear is in her voice and her facial expressions. It’s a tour-de-force performance from a legendary actress who only got better with age.

Some grande dame heroines, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland, are alchemists who manage to spin gold out of their tarnished downward spirals. Others, like Tallulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters and Olivia’s insanely jealous sister, Joan Fontaine, wallow in their misery, causing us to shield our eyes from their scarifying decline. Others, like tough girls Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck, straighten their shoulders against misfortune and battle all kinds of devils, but it’s their inner demons we linger on, the turmoil that led them to this disarming fall from grace.

The first time I ever saw Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, I must have been a kid. For me she was that character. I had no idea that Bette Davis had had a stellar career in Hollywood for decades prior to that film. Of course, I was too young to understand that the movie was about Hollywood and how it curses its favorite creatures. For me it was simply a scary movie about a crazy lady who tortures her sister by feeding her dead rats. I remember when I did see one of her early pictures, Jezebel, on the afternoon movie. I could not believe it was the same person. Bette Davis was never more beautiful than she was in that film. I simply couldn’t reconcile the two sides of her career: the glamour puss and the garish ghoul. But Bette Davis could, and so could Hollywood. She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress for her hellbent Baby Jane.

Her co-star Joan Crawford experienced her own thrill of schadenfreude when she waltzed past Davis at the awards ceremony to give the prize to Anne Bancroft. The fact that the two had an on-going legendary feud only added spice to their appearing in the same film. Audiences relished seeing the two of them go at it. While Bette Davis may have won more accolades for her wildly grotesque tour-de-force acting, Joan held her own as the disabled Blanche, and allegedly got her revenge by padding her bosom during the film’s finale when she died on the beach. She stole the scene without having to say a word. Joan excelled in many horror films, most notably Strait-Jacket and Berserk, two of the campiest and slickest splatter fests of the 60s. She had no shame. That much is obvious when watching her wardrobe tests (now available on You Tube.) She relished the chance to get trashy and demented.

One suspects when seeing her in less successful schlock shockers such as I Saw What You Did and Trog that she did it merely for the thrill of working again, of being in front of the camera. One of her finest hours is the first episode of Night Gallery (Rod Serling’s less successful successor to The Twilight Zone) in which she played a rich blind woman who will stop at nothing to see again, paying a man a fortune in exchange for his eyes. The twist is that she will only be able to see for a short time, at night, and New York is about to experience a prolonged blackout. Spielberg directed the episode. His first job, I think. But it’s Joan’s show all the way.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, we were inundated with other examples of the genre. Tallulah’s Die, Die My Darling (also known as Fanatic) is the ultimate camp classic. Playing against type as a religious zealot, Bankhead is preposterously ugly. Her voice is a lethal weapon. It’s hard to believe she once dazzled London and New York on the stage, or ever caused Alfred Hitchcock to blush when filming Lifeboat. Darling has its flaws, no question (Donald Sutherland is insufferable in it.) But who can stop watching it once it starts? Tallulah Bankhead gives a mesmerizing performance. Her last film, as it turned out, since she died three years later after tackling the Black Widow on Batman.

The same thing happened to Miriam Hopkins, another of the old school Hollywood gals, and one of Bette’s favorite betes noires. Some may find her comeback role in the 1961 remake of The Children’s Hour (she had starred in the original film version of Hellman’s play, These Three (1936)) pretty frightening. It was hard to see any vestiges of the colorful beauty who had played Becky Sharp in 1935. But it’s her final film The Savage Intruder (1970) that earned her entrée into the pantheon of fagged hags. She plays an aging actress, an invalid in a wheelchair in her Hollywood home, beset upon by a bizarre retinue of scoundrels.

Ida Lupino was another Bette Davis rival, although mostly in the eyes of the studio heads. Audiences loved her for her unique talents. Unlike her sisters in the Hollywood factory, Lupino was her own woman. She not only acted but directed. She had a long career both in front of and behind the camera. But even Ida couldn’t resist the thrall of cheap thrills. She starred, alongside an enigmatic Ernest Borgnine, in the now classic The Devil’s Rain, 1975, about a coven of Satanists with extraordinary powers to melt their victims. The final relentless sequence is among the most ghoulish and hilariously horrible endings of all.

Those gay sisters Olivia and Joan, of course, are no strangers to the genre. Joan proved she could play the victim beautifully in Rebecca, falling prey to Judith Anderson’s evil schemes. Dame Judith went on to make a few bad movies herself, including the uninviting Inn of the Damned (1975). But it was at the end of Joan Fontaine’s career that she truly was victimized. In The Witches (1966), she is manhandled by a coven of devil worshipers led by another British dame, Kay Walsh. Say what you will about Miss Fontaine, but Joan always gave good gasp. Seeing her flee from a devil doll in her nightgown (several years before Karen Black did the same in Trilogy of Terror) is better than any Victoria’s Secret video.

Olivia always took chances in her career, being one of the first to challenge the unfair studio system. So it was no surprise when she stepped into The Snake Pit in 1948. Seeing the usually dignified de Havilland pulling her hair out in a madhouse was shocking stuff back then, but she went on to star in the even more shocking Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte opposite Bette Davis in 1964. Olivia didn’t sport any ghoulish makeup but her character bore an evil mask. Joan Crawford was slated to play the part, but backed out at the last minute. De Havilland makes it her own, however and gives the movie some much-needed class. Agnes Moorehead, who would go on to make a trashy horror film herself (Dear Dead Delilah, 1974), seems to think she’s in an Outer Limits episode as she tears up the screen in a blazingly de trop performance.

De Havilland lost her haughty glamour in the TV movie The Screaming Woman (1972), above, and graced the smarmy The Swarm in 1978, where the biggest threat to her beehive hairdo were killer bees from Africa.

Olivia did star in one of my all-time favorite thrillers, Lady in a Cage (1964), co-starring a young James Caan. Its creepy opening credits, with a black girl on roller skates kicking a bum, over a frenetic jazz score set the tone for a feverish fright flick that broke new ground in psychological suspense. Olivia looks as beautiful as ever, but she plays an invalid, reliant on her elevator and a suicidal gay son, who is besieged by a gang of psychotic hoodlums. Caan is evil incarnate, as he terrorizes her in his tight white jeans, exposing his hairy chest.

Katharine Hepburn had her own star turn in an elevator five years earlier in Suddenly Last Summer. Although Tennessee Williams’ play was not intended as horror, the Manckiewicz film seems to take its cues from the campy Drive-In horror pics of the 50s. Hepburn makes her first appearance descending in a stylized gilded cage, part of a bizarre avian theme underscored by her fondness for exotic plumes and hothouse plants. The shocking finale, in which we see Elizabeth Taylor lose it as she watches her husband get eaten alive by vengeful waifs (a Freudian sparagmos about the evils of fellatio?) was too funny to be frightening. No, the real horror in this flick is watching Montgomery Clift’s creepy, wooden performance, his face like a disfigured Cigar-store Indian’s, following his near fatal car accident.

Elizabeth Taylor, it is said, was nearby when that awful crash took place. She ran to Monty’s side. In some of her later films we see her running. It’s as if she wanted us to see her suffer. Why else would she choose to star in Night Watch, a stylish thriller from 1973 that paired her with her former co-star in Butterfield 8, Laurence Harvey. It’s one of her “lost pictures,” along with X,Y and Zee, The Blue Bird, and Hammersmith Is Out. (Thanks to You Tube and the internet, many of these previously obscure films are now readily accessible.) While nothing more than a new take on Gaslight, with a twist, Night Watch is highly effective and deserves acclaim if only for Taylor’s wardrobe, which includes several larger-than-life kaftans and form-fitting period pants-suits. Plus her purring paranoia is deliciously deceptive.

I wish I could say the same for performances by Lana Turner in such high camp as The Big Cube (a 1969 psychedelic LSD trip) and Persecution (1974) but they can’t hold a candle to her earlier work in haute trash like Portrait in Black and Madame X. Watching Lana Turner emote in The Witches’ Brew (1980) one feels like Johnny Stompanato, with a knife in one’s back.

The real queen of the screamers is Shelley Winters. During the 60s, she made two films in the aging spinster vein. The first The Mad Room (1969) has her playing a loony widow kept cooped up by a psychotic Stella Stevens. The next year she played Ma Barker in Bloody Mama, one of Roger Corman’s cheesy splatter flicks. In 1971 she went berserk again as a demented widow in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (a true rip-off of the Bette Davis canon). This time the distinguished actor Ralph Richardson co-starred. That same year she unreeled another “questionable” film, What’s the Matter with Helen? opposite a game Debbie Reynolds, below. You’d think that would have been sufficient, but she went on to make Poor Pretty Eddie (aka Redneck County Rape), Journey Into Fear, and Tentacles.

Gloria Grahame, Helen Hayes, Joan Bennett, Simone Signoret, Ruth Roman, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth all descended into the pit, filming chiller thrillers that defied easy categorization. Veronica Lake, of the lovely locks, combed the depths by slumming in the less-than-appetizing Flesh Feast. The great Ann Sothern, who had warmed the cockles of our hearts as Maisie, suddenly reappeared as a smothering mother of a gang-rape murderer (the aptly named John Savage) in the slasher The Killing Kind (1973).

The Baby Jane craze continued with a film starring Geraldine Page, who almost didn’t need to join in the fun as most of her onscreen performances were already pretty bizarre. But in 1969 she appeared in a frightful little film called What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? alongside Ruth Gordon, another actress who always seemed a bit off-kilter.

These cinematic excursions into the macabre don’t have to be strictly schlock fests. The Fan in 1981 gave us Bogart’s babe, Lauren Bacall, in a stylish slasher film co-starring Michael Biehn. It was the first time the killer was prettier than his prey. The film boasts several frightening sequences, although the scariest moment was a close-up of Bacall’s eyes.

The screaming queen frenzy sort of died out when Betsy Palmer appeared as the psycho killer in Friday The 13th. Sure there have been countless horror movies with big name stars since then, but the thrill is gone, the key guignol glamour is missing. Perhaps the novelty got washed away by too much blood and gore. I wouldn’t mind, however, seeing Meryl Streep or Debra Winger take a stab at the genre.

I had no idea when I started delving into this subject that it has such a devoted following. In fact, I thought I had coined the term “Hollywood Guignol,” but I see that a new book has just been published by McFarland Press entitled Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother, by Peter Shelley.

The $45 cover price is enough to make you scream.