What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) was the start of Aldrich's decaying mansion cycle. The uncanny coupling of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, two dowagers of over-the-top drama, legitimized that lowbrow outing. The next installment found Crawford replaced by Olivia de Havilland with an added attraction, Agnes Moorehead as a half-witted housekeeper. Hush . . . Hush features Davis as Charlotte, a half-loony Southern belle residing over a crumbling plantation. Suspected of the ghastly murder of her lover some forty years earlier, Charlotte lives in a state of crazed suspension, grotesquely illustrated by Davis's own cruelly wizened baby face. This Southern Gothic turns on the mossy menace to be found in an insular community filled with gossip, grudges, and Guignol. When overly attentive Cousin Miriam (de Havilland) arrives, the postbellum bedlam begins. The dark past and its attendant hallucinations ooze from the shadows, populating the manse with horrible frights. Are these ghostly traces real, or Charlotte's ruse?