The rise of the hag: Hollywood’s fear of older women has gotten worse with age

Every awards season has its narrative. And this year’s is forming around a handful of actresses, all in their late fifties or older, giving bravura performances in films that deal with the thorny complexities of aging, acceptance, and desire. “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, spins an erotic fantasy out of the power exchange between a female executive and her much younger lover. Pamela Anderson’s rejection of beauty standards — and the subsequent reinvention of her public image — dominate coverage of “The Last Showgirl.” And Demi Moore became an Oscars frontrunner when she told women to “put down the yardstick” in her Golden Globes acceptance speech for “The Substance.” 

The back half of 2024 did see a rise in artistic interest in the inner and/or sex lives of middle-aged (and older) women — The New York Times ran a trend piece about it, leading its discussion of horny fiftysomethings in pop culture by evoking the image of Kidman mid-orgasm. But the admiring, even celebratory, tone of these paeans to hot actresses remaining hot well past Hollywood’s traditional expiration date masks the shadow side of this phenomenon: The wizened, terrifying hag. 

“Hagsploitation” movies, also known as “psycho-biddy” horror pictures, go back to the 1960s, when the success of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” launched a wave of exploitation films hinging on older actresses losing their minds in all sorts of campy ways. Today’s hags serve a different purpose, shaming older women — “this is what you really look like,” they hiss — back into suppressing their sexuality. As the swinging nurses and freewheeling hippie chicks of the ‘60s and ‘70s had their dark counterparts in the rape-revenge subgenre, so are the middle-aged awakenings of today being met with parallel depictions of hags.

What is a hag? A hag is an older woman who is not “well-preserved,” whose breasts sag and whose skin hangs loose and crepey over deteriorating muscles. She wears no makeup, makes no attempts to hide her wrinkles, and the sight of her is assumed to be so repellant that her naked body is both jump scare and punchline. Her value to patriarchal society, as a sex object or as a mother, has long since passed. She does not perform femininity on any level, and yet she continues to stubbornly exist. 

“The Substance” is notable for holding competing impulses — both the enforcement of, and liberation from, beauty standards — within the same film. Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) resents the male executives who have declared her irrelevant, but she is so entrenched in beauty culture that she doesn’t know any other way to exist. So she makes one last desperate bet in an attempt to maintain her power. It’s a losing one, of course. They always are. 

But while the film ultimately lands on the side of rejecting these pressures, it indulges in the same impulses it’s critiquing along the way. Director Coralie Fargeat films both Moore and her “younger, more beautiful, perfect self” Sue (Margaret Qualley) in extended nude scenes, and her camera divides Qualley into parts with the precision of a butcher. Fargeat’s gaze is subjective, and we’re meant to understand that Elisabeth’s self-hatred and inner conflict are being projected outwards in the film’s more grotesque scenes. 

This is particularly true when Elisabeth starts mutating in response to her/Sue’s “misuse” of the titular substance. And what form do these mutations take? Thinning hair, blotchy skin, the swollen and deformed joints that come from severe arthritis. A hag. Here’s where the theme begins to fall apart: Respect yourself, or you might get a rotten witch finger, the film seems to be cautioning — a message that still posits a hag’s body as something to be feared. 

Womanhood is also split into multiple aspects, all of them sinister, in the “X” trilogy, which began in 2022 with “X” and concluded in 2024 with “MaXXXine.” There’s also a doubling aspect to the female leads in “X” — here, Mia Goth plays both wannabe porn star Maxine and elderly farmer’s wife Pearl, the latter through layers of prosthetic makeup. Pearl also resents her younger counterpart for the attention she gets from men, and — without revealing too much — takes that resentment to extremes. 

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But there are no layers to “X”’s commentary. We are meant to be straightforwardly disgusted by the scene where Pearl attempts to have sex with her husband, to the extent that it’s shot like any other kill scene in the movie. Her sexuality and her madness are intertwined, and both make her monstrous. Do we feel sorry for her? Maybe. Do we identify with her, or want to be like her? Definitely not. 

The body of an elderly woman is also used for shock value in “The Front Room,” the most exploitative film covered here, in which a pregnant college professor (Brandy) who specializes in “the goddess” has her life overtaken by her husband’s hyper-religious stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter). The encroaching threat of step-grandma’s bigoted “traditional values” is fair enough. But the real horror here is incontinence — Solange s**ts the bed and wets herself quite often, a real sophomoric touch from director Sam Eggers (yep, Robert’s brother). 

The first time we see Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), the elder of two women at the center of the Danish film “The Girl with the Needle,” she’s naked, too. But this sinister anti-mother — again, without revealing too much — has diabolical intentions, which she hides in the angelic guise of an underground adoption agency. And while she is a villain, she believes that she’s doing the right thing. She’s a bridge between more straightforward hags and the reverent version of the archetype that shows up in “April,” a Georgian film that recently screened at Sundance and hits theaters April 25.

“April” opens with the image most of these films build to: A naked old woman with sagging breasts, trunk-like legs, and a bald head, portrayed by an actor in a full-body prosthetic suit. She wanders a black void in knee-high water, evoking the darkness and wetness of the womb. The camera lingers on the hag long enough that the shock value dissipates. Look a little longer, and you’ll notice one unnerving detail: She has skin-like membranes over her eyes. She’s a startling supernatural detail in an otherwise intimate, realistic film, and she is explicitly tied to the main character, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili). 

Nina is an OB-GYN with a stellar reputation at the hospital where she works — and a sketchier one outside of it, where it’s an open secret that Nina performs abortions on the side. Her job is threatened because of it, but Nina is devoted to her work, and is willing to absorb the hatred and violence — physical, sexual and institutional — of her community in order to protect its women. “No one will thank you, and no one will defend you,” a colleague (who’s also her ex) tells her. “I know,” she replies. 

Nina is an outcast who lives on the margins of society because she is providing an essential service, one that no one wants to acknowledge and no one else will do. This ties her to the witches of centuries past, who also served as scapegoats for their villages’ sins. As the camera roams the countryside, godlike and unnoticed, we hear the hag’s breath rattling on the soundtrack. Hag, witch, abortionist, healer, martyr— she embodies them all. 

By making Nina a principled, devoted servant of the most helpless women in society, one who helps free them from the bondage of motherhood — in another scene, Nina prescribes birth control pills to a teenage bride in secret — “April” reinvents the hag as a figure of liberation. She is a woman who exists outside of, and indeed in opposition to, the world of men. As a result, she is extremely dangerous, and extremely powerful. Maybe even something to aspire to.