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Writer/director Jack Hill’s 1967 film Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told (watch it Here) – which boasts a cast that includes Lon Chaney Jr. and Sid Haig – ranks up there as one of my all-time favorites, so I’m happy to see that it has finally, nearly sixty years after the film was originally released, been given the novelization treatment! Written by Dayna Noffke, the novelization has been published by Encyclopocalypse Publications and is available for purchase, in paperback and Kindle editions, at This Link.

Here’s the description of the novel, which has a page count of 210: In a crumbling mansion on the edge of nowhere, the Merrye children live a secret life, watched over by their devoted caretaker Bruno and cursed by a rare genetic condition that causes them to regress into violent, childlike states while retaining the strength and appetites of adults. Virginia catches...

Encyclopocalypse has published a novelization of Spider Baby in paperback, mass market paperback, and e-book.

Based on the cult classic from writer-director Jack Hill, the book is written by Dayna Noffke. It includes a foreword by cult film scholar Mike Watt, as well as reconstructed “deleted scenes” and annotations that expand the twisted lore of one of the cult classic.

“In a crumbling mansion on the edge of nowhere, the Merrye children live a secret life, watched over by their devoted caretaker Bruno and cursed by a rare genetic condition that causes them to regress into violent, childlike states while retaining the strength and appetites of adults.

“Virginia catches flies in her imaginary web—then slashes them to pieces with butcher knives. Elizabeth sulks and plots. And Ralph… well, Ralph scuttles in the shadows, twitching, grinning, watching. When distant relatives arrive to claim the family estate, Bruno can only hope the “children” remember their manners.

A remake of the classic horror film Spider Baby has wrapped filming. Earlier this year, we reported that the remake was in the works with Dustin Ferguson serving as director. Now, Ferguson has confirmed, via Horror Geek Life, that shooting has been finished on the project. Also revealed is the cast of the new film, which includes Ron Chaney — the grandson of Lon Chaney Jr., one of the stars of the original Spider Baby. Beverly Washburn, who appeared in the original movie, is also in the remake.

Along with Ron Chaney and Beverly Washburn, the remake stars Brinke Stevens, Robert Mukes, Peter Stickles, Traci Burr, Jennifer Moriarty, and Vida Ghaffari.

“We’ve reached an exhilarating milestone with the completion of the Spider Baby remake, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have worked with an extraordinary ensemble of genre stars such as Robert Mukes, Beverly Washburn, Brinke Stevens, and Ron Chaney,...

Never mind the holidays; dealing with family can be stressful any time of year. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, or just a mandatory visit to a forgotten aunt you haven’t seen in 15 years can all hold their share of tension and misery. But at least be thankful you’re not part of the Merrye clan, the family at the center of Jack Hill’s Spider Baby (1967), a quirky yet clever examination of the prototypical horror tribe that influenced the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

Filmed in 1964 but not given a limited release by American General Pictures until late ’67, it languished in general obscurity until a video restoration in the mid ‘90s shone a light on its peculiar charms. Filmed in 12 days on a budget of $55,000, Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (full title) is like watching The Addams Family shake the family tree and having incest,...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jack Hill's Spider Baby (1967) will be showing January 24 - February 23 and Pit Stop (1967) will be showing January 25 - February 24, 2017 in the United States.Quentin Tarantino, unsurprisingly a gushing fan of Jack Hill, once famously compared the exploitation specialist to venerable Hollywood icon Howard Hawks, presumably on the basis of his distinctly personal preferences and his unassuming, across-the-board genre dabbling. Of course, those genres explored by Hawks—from westerns to screwball comedies—were considerably different than those in which Hill excels, but the point is well taken: within his respective niches, Hill does it as well as anyone, with skill and without pretense. This includes quintessential Blaxploitation classics like Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), and some of the finest women-in-prison films ever made—yes, there are some very fine women-in-prison films—namely The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage...

Arrow Video resurrects Jack Hill’s first solo directorial effort, Spider Baby (1967) for lovers of cult oddities. Prior to becoming a lynchpin in the Blaxploitation film movement with his signature Pam Grier titles such as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), Hill knocked around as co-director on B-grade horror films, including Roger Corman and Stephanie Rothman projects. Unfortunately, this strange little number didn’t see release for several years due to its producers getting tied up in bankruptcy. Originally titled “Cannibal Orgy,” the theatrical release kept the extended title of Or the Maddest Story Ever Told (several other venues played it under the title The Liver Eaters). Not nearly gritty or violent enough to warrant such provocative monikers, its eventual name remains the most befitting. Featuring horror alum Lon Chaney Jr. and an eerie early role for (an almost unrecognizable) Sid Haig, Hill was obviously inspired at arming popular genre motifs with teeth.

Karl Schanzer, a longtime story analyst whose real-life experience as a private eye was an inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, died May 25 in Studio City. He was 81. Schanzer worked as a reader for Jeffrey Katzenberg at Paramount (where he found what would become the 1982 Eddie Murphy hit 48 HRs.) and as a creative executive at 20th Century Fox, among many studio positions. He also produced and created the story for Camouflage (2001), co-written by Billy Bob Thornton under the pseudonym Reginald Perry. (Thornton’s character in Sling Blade is named after Schanzer.) Born in Hartford, Conn., on Nov. 25, 1932, Schanzer

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