The Spider Woman Strikes Back Put A Nail In Universal’s Horror Coffin

Having put their big four movie monsters through every conceivable situation, Universal spent much of 1946 desperately looking for a new franchise-launching villain. They tried selling the masses a possessed moggy (The Cat Creeps), a Victorian werewoman (She-Wolf of London), and — cruelly exploiting its leading man Rondo Hatton’s growth disorder — a facially disfigured murderer (The Brute Man, House of Horrors). First out of the block, though, was a blood-harvesting, faux-blind plant obsessive in The Spider Woman Strikes Back. Unfortunately, the film later snubbed by both its director and its star attraction set the tone for the low-rent B-movies that lay ahead.

It’s perhaps little surprise the confusing chiller, which celebrates its 80th anniversary today, landed with a thud. Reluctant filmmaker Arthur Lubin, who’d later find a bizarre niche in anthropomorphic equine comedies (Mister Ed, Francis the Talking Mule), was threatened with suspension if he didn’t take the project on. Under contract with the same studio, its star Gale Sondergaard — who that same year delivered an Academy Award-nominated performance in Anna and the King of Siam — also had little say in the matter.

Lubin clearly shows little enthusiasm for the genre; suggesting he wanted theatergoers to forget about his involvement as quickly as possible, the self-described failure is wrapped up in a paltry 59 minutes. Sondergaard, however, is the film’s saving grace, committing fully to a manipulative, Machiavellian character which, in other hands, could have had as many legs as her sacrificial arachnids. This isn’t a Sandra Bullock simultaneous Oscar/Razzie situation.

Confusingly, the Spider Woman here has nothing to do with the character Sondergaard played in Sherlock Holmes caper The Spider Woman three years earlier. Instead of Adrea Spedding, a “female Moriarty” who drives men to suicide, the baddie here is Zenobia Dollard, the fabulously named wealthy rancher who has a suspiciously high turnover of personal assistants.

The elaborate schemer is initially all smiles when she welcomes her latest employee/victim Jean (Brenda Joyce taking a break from playing Jane in the Tarzan films), an out-of-towner whose naivety is underlined by the fact she immediately reveals, “Nobody even knows I’m here.” There’s even a hint — an incredibly subtle one, of course, in the era of the Hays Code — of a sexual frisson between the pair.

However, Zenobia’s habit of serving up a nightly glass of warm milk to help Jean sleep isn’t as kind as first seems. The drink is laced with a knockout substance which allows her and mute servant Mario (the aforementioned Hatton) to draw blood from her body, feed it to the spiders consumed by her carnivorous plants, and create a botanical serum designed to off the cattle occupying her desired land, leaving its farmers with no option but to sell. Your average takeover plan this is not.

It’s a nightmarish, if slightly Scooby Doo-esque, scenario, but one the film seems strangely unwilling to explore. The Spider Woman Strikes Back leaves most of the striking back to the imagination. There are glimpses of Zenobia’s true malevolent nature — the menacing way she coos “you beautiful creatures” to her beloved plants, for example. And there’s an uneasy chill to the shadowy scenes in which she and Mario hover over an unconscious Jean.

Yet as a film designed to introduce a worthy successor to the likes of Dracula and The Mummy, it’s a strangely muted, scare-free affair. Only the climactic sequence, when Jean’s ex-boyfriend Hal (Kirby Grant) gets to play the hero by rescuing her from a burning basement, is likely to get the blood pumping. Publicizing the fact that Hatton, who tragically passed before its premiere, didn’t need any makeup, insensitive producers appeared to believe his appearance alone would be enough to shock viewers out of their seats (another reason Sondergaard apparently took umbrage with the project).

Who knows whether some of the horror was left on the cutting room floor? The movie was clearly butchered in the edit, with several of the dozen credited actors failing to show up on screen and several developments referenced — a last-minute bust-up between Jean and Hal, for instance — without any prior context. Nevertheless, they’d still have to do a lot of heavy lifting. The fact that one Louisiana theater felt compelled to issue a warning (“We cannot accept responsibility for teeth broken from chattering, curls lost when hair stands on end, chilled spines, jitters, nightmares, or any other conditions”) is almost as mind-boggling as the script.

In case you hadn’t guessed by now, Zenobia turns out to have her sight fully intact having used blindness as a tactic to fly completely under the crime-fighting radar. Sondergaard is as magnetic when exposed as the murderous fraud as she is the sweet, defenseless lady with a capital L. “You're dying Jean, just like the others... but you’ll live on in these beautiful plants,” she tells her weakened hired help shortly before the inquisitive Hal essentially does a Columbo-esque “just one more thing” and her plans literally go up in smoke.

It’s a first-rate performance in a third-rate film, and one which deserved a series of follow-ups with a more eager director and distinctly less ableism. Like all the sub-par Universal monster movies that emerged in its wake, though, The Spider Woman Strikes Back bombed and Zenobia was never seen again (shunned by the industry after her husband Herbert Biberman was convicted as a member of the pro-Communist Hollywood Ten, Sondergaard soon disappeared from view too). It might not have been the final nail in the studio’s horror coffin, but it was perhaps the most impactful.