Saturday Scream Queen: Susan Cabot

Susan Cabot's rough childhood, which saw her grow up in a string of eight foster homes, led, by some accounts, to her being cold, distant, and downright abusive to those around her in her personal life. Something which ultimately led to her demise.

Cabot's film career was an on-again, off-again affair. She was a contract player with Universal Picture in the early 1950s, but asked to be released form that contract in 1954 so she could do theater work in New York City. During this time, she appeared mostly in westerns.

In 1957, Roger Corman convinced her to return to the film business and she spent the next two years primarily appearing in films produced or directed by Corman. Among these is her very best performance in the chilling "Sorority Girl"--perhaps one of Corman's best and most heart-felt pictures. It's dressed up like an exploitation horror thriller, but it's really a far deeper picture about a sociopath's doomed struggle to find friends and fit into society.

Cabot ended her film career in 1959 with another starring turn as a sociopath in "The Wasp Woman", this time a decidedly villainous rather than piteous character. This mad scientist film set in a cosmetic company is slow-moving and mostly dull, but Cabot is, once again, quite good. Perhaps a reason she excelled at playing sociopaths is because she was putting a big part of herself up there on the screen?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Cabot was cold and abusive to those close to her. In fact, she was so abusive to her son that he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and given a suspended sentence after he bludgeoned her to death while she slept in 1986.

'The Wasp Woman' won't give you a buzz

The Wasp Woman (1960)
Starring: Susan Cabot, Michael Mark, Anthony Eisley, Barboura Morris, and William Roewick
Director: Roger Corman
Rating: Four of Five Stars

Cosmetics industry queen and aging "glamor girl" Janice Starlin (Cabot) undergoes an experimental treatment developed from the jelly of queen wasps. She regains her youth, but transforms into a marauding, flesh-eating wasp woman when the sun goes down.


"The Wasp Woman" is a film that the word 'tedious" was invented to describe. There isn't a scene or a shot that drags on, and, although the pace is picked up in the film's final 15-20 minutes, getting there is an experience almost as boring as watching wasps build a nest.

The film does features decent acting and a few genuinely scary moments (such as the transformation scene that leads into the climax), but its first and second acts are in so desperate need of trimming that this movie can't be considered worth your time.

(Trivia: Susan Cabot retired from acting after making this film and became the mistress of the King of Jordan. He dumped her when he discovered she was Jewish. She was later beaten to death by her midget son. Yes... truth can be stranger than fiction.)