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.
