Every time I watch Jack Hill’s bizarre, mad-ass horror comedy Spider Baby (1964/1968) I fall in love all over again with Beverly Washburn. I know I’m not supposed to; according to every cult magazine and website out there, it’s her costar Jill Banner that I’m supposed to want. Don’t get me wrong, Jill Banner’s great… 

… as a creepy woman-child who thinks she’s a spider and eats bugs and captures men in a web of fishnet and hacks them apart with a pair of butcher’s knives – who wouldn’t find that attractive? Banner’s the hottie of the two actresses, cast as sisters, the last descendants of the inbred Merrye Clan, and she gets all the big scenes: hacking off Mantan Moreland’s ear and tying Quinn Redeker to a rocking chair so he can “play Spider” with her. It’s a startling film debut… but it’s Beverly Washburn who always steals my attention… and my heart.

You’re led to believe Washburn’s Elizabeth Merrye is the less insane of the two Merrye girls but it simply isn’t the case – it just takes her a while to warm up and when she does, brother, the result is positively atomic. Look at the way this kid handles a pitchfork! 

Nope, she’s clear around the bend and I wouldn’t have her any other way. I love how Elizabeth can turn from winsome to feral at the drop of a hat, running her prey to ground with the ferocity of a bloodhound, her teeth bared for tearing. While Jill Banner’s Virginia heads for the cutlery drawer, Elizabeth is making for the toolshed, unafraid to run the jagged edge of a hacksaw against a length of heretofore unmarked flesh while she coos to her intended victim, “I like you… pretty laaaaady.” Oh, the girl’s got sand… and there are bodies buried in it! She’s barking mad but the girl can’t help it. And I can’t help loving her for it. 

Spider Baby should have made Beverly Washburn a star but the producers went bankrupt and the film was almost impossible to see in its original form until very recently. (A special edition director’s cut DVD from Dark Sky Films is now readily available and tells the whole of the tale.) At the time she acted in Spider Baby, Washburn had been a Hollywood veteran of almost 15 years, beginning with an uncredited bit in The Killer That Stalked New York (1950). She was the perfect child actress, with bright, inquisitive eyes and that wonderful funny face. You may remember her as the village girl to whom Danny Kaye sings “Thumbelina” from the window of his jail cell in Hans Christian Anderson (1952)…

Oddly, she played a similar scene the following year in Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler (1953), in which Kirk Douglas’ troubled Jewish refugee entertains her with yet another hand puppet show.

Beverly Washburn had good roles in Shane (1952) and Old Yeller (1957) and acted for Jack Hill again in Pitstop (1969), alongside rising star Ellen Burstyn, her Spider Baby “brother” Sid Haig and her actual brother, stunt driver George Washburn. She played opposite comic Lou Costello in an uncharacteristically dramatic turn on the western series Wagon Train and also guested on such popular weeklies as The Patty Duke Show, Thriller, 77 Sunset Strip, Arrest and Trial and Gidget. In 1962, she recorded “Everybody Loves Saturday Night,” written for her by Pete Seeger!

Maybe you’ll remember Beverly
Washburn as the Starship Enterprise lieutenant who ages prematurely in second season
episode “The Deadly Years” from 1967.  She’s very good in the role of the luckless Arlene Galway, who is the only crew member to die from the mysterious aging disease. As a kid, I found this plot development both shocking and disturbing because she was cute (I’ve always been a sucker for a smart girl with a side part) and I would never have guessed the writers could be so cruel to someone who didn’t deserve such a fate. It still bothers me, come to think of it. I’m getting angry all over again.

Beverly Washburn largely retired from acting in the 1980s but has kept active and present on the fan circuit. A resident of Las Vegas, she recently turned up in the pilot episode of the recently-canceled Las Vegas series and can be seen in the Vegas-set movie Hard Four (2007), produced by and starring Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss’ son Ross Benjamin, alongside Ed Asner, Ed Begley, Jr.and Dabney Coleman. Recently, she donned surgical scrubs for a stint on the daytime drama General Hospital. I wish I’d known, I would have tuned in to find out if they stocked pitchforks in the operating room. That would be something to see.