1972, UK
Alternative title: Who Slew Auntie Roo?
Adding to the catalogue of Grand Dame Guignol films (and carrying on their titular tradition) Curtis Harrington’s Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is a 1920s re-imagining of Hansel and Gretel set in England.
Harrington, whose canon careened fascinatingly through avant-garde short films, melodramatic horror and episodic television, was no stranger to bat-shit crazy women, most of them older – Piper Laurie in Ruby, Simone Signoret in Games, Ann Sothern in The Killing Kind, Gloria Swanson in Killer Bees, Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters in What’s the Matter with Helen? – and Winters carved out a second career in these kinds of roles, returning to Harrington’s campy world of decaying glamour with Roo in ’72.
Winters plays Rosie Forrest, a wealthy former cabaret star whose magician husband disappeared mysteriously after their daughter Katherine plummeted to her death from a staircase.
Unwilling to accept her daughter’s death, she reported the child missing and hid her corpse in a nursery in the attic, where she sings to it in bed each night with blind motherly devotion.
Lonely and depressed, she frequently employs the medium Mr. Benton (Sir Ralph Richardson) to conduct séances to try to contact Katherine’s spirit, but Benton is in cahoots with her maid (Judy Cornwell) and butler (Michael Gothard of The Devils) in a ruse to cheat the grieving woman out of her riches.
This, combined with Rosie’s annual tradition of inviting 10 lucky orphans to her large estate to be spoiled over Christmas weekend, makes her out to be a sympathetic, if somewhat pathetic character who tries any way she can to find an outlet for her nurturing instincts.
The weird cabaret pantomime she performs in black lace for the children only reinforces this picture of desperation.
This Christmas is not like the others, because siblings Christopher and Katy Coombs (pouty child star Mark Lester of Melody and Oliver!, and Chloe Franks of the 1972 version of Tales from the Crypt) sneak their way into the festivities, only to have Rosie convince herself that Katy is Katherine reincarnated.
She immediately offers to adopt Katy, but is so obsessed with this new little girl that she ignores the bond that the two children have with each other and doesn’t consider that it may be painful for them to be separated.
She conspires to keep Katy locked away in Katherine’s room in the attic, and while Katy is enamoured with the array of toys and luxuries, Christopher is certain that Rosie – who the children have taken to calling ‘Aunt Roo’ – is a witch, fattening them up to eat them (and in case you missed the reference, Mark Lester narrates the famous folktale in snippets of voiceover throughout the film).
When the children try to escape, she falls over herself trying to block their way, shouting: “I will not be abandoned! Everybody tries to abandon me!”; while originally characterized as a sad, mournful widow, through the children’s eyes she becomes a tyrannical witch with emphatic vocal mannerisms to match.
Slowly losing her mind in the midst of this perceived betrayal, she embraces her daughter’s corpse, whose skull crumbles in her hands as she whimpers, “I have nothing, I have nothing…”
hexafu 