The Rule of Jenny Pen: A Geri-Horror Masterclass

There is a growing trend within the horror genre in which aging is being employed as a mechanism of terror. Geriatric horror—or, abridged, geri-horror—is taking the inevitably of aging (frightening in its own right) and factors closely associated with growing older (dementia and cognitive decline, physical deterioration, isolation and loneliness, communities for the elderly such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities) and examining them through the context of the horror genre.

Geri-horror is the natural successor to the hagsploitation movement in film of the 1960s and 1970s in which former Hollywood starlets would play deranged old women. The formula was simple: glam it down and camp it up. This subgenre—also known as “hag horror” or “grand dame Guignol"—captured Hollywood's seeming disdain for older women at the time yet, in an ironic, subversive twist, gave some of these actresses the best roles of their later careers. Think Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) or Davis (again), Olivia De Haviland, and Agnes Moorehead in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) or Crawford (again) in Straight-Jacket (1964) or Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969) or Shelley Winters in both Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and What's the Matter with Helen? (1971).

In geri-horror, expectations that elderly people are kind and harmless are upended. Take Minnie and Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for example, who turn out not to be frail elderly neighbors but satanic cultists and master manipulators in the plot to bring the Antichrist into being. Keeping with the satanism theme, there’s the entire community of senior citizens in the film The Brotherhood of Satan (1971) who are turning the children of a small California desert town into Satan worshipers or the eccentric Ulmans, played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, in Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009) who lure a young babysitter into a sinister trap. In 1988, The Legend of Hell House director John Hough employs silver screen legends Yvonne DeCarlo and Rod Steiger to play the unhinged parents of a weird, murderous family in the slasher American Gothic. Earlier, Lassie actor Arthur Space and television actress Mary Jackson played deranged proprietors of a sham resort where vacationing college girls were lured, fattened up, and then (literally) served up on platters in the lurid Texas Chainsaw Massacre cannibalism precursor, Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972).

At other times in geri-horror, old age itself is the source of the horror. In the film adaptation of Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story (1981), a group of elderly men calling themselves the Chowder Society are plagued by guilt-ridden nightmares stemming from an impulsive act in their collective past. In the film Late Phases (2014), werewolves preying upon the residents of a retirement community become a metaphor for struggling to relocate a physically challenged parent against their will into a retirement community. This one is stacked with a fantastic over-60 cast that includes Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island), Rutanya Alda (Mommie Dearest, Girls Nite Out, Amityville II: The Possession, The Dark Half), Caitlin O’Heaney (Savage Weekend, He Knows You’re Alone), Karen Lynn Gorney (Saturday Night Fever), and Tom Noonan (Wolfen, The Monster Squad). In M. Night Shyamalan’s pandemic-era Old (2021), the acclaimed director adapts the French-language graphic novel Sandcastle written by Pierre Oscar Lévy from France and drawn by Frederik Peeters from Switzerland, taking the body horror route to show aging as grotesque and inescapable—much in the way 2024’s The Substance does. Shyamalan’s other geri-horror contribution—2015’s The Visit—offered up a pair of sinister grandparents whose increasingly bizarre and disquieting behavior is cleverly couched within the Alzheimer’s symptom of “sundown syndrome.” Dementia takes centerstage in Relic (2020), an Australian gem of a cinematic metaphor about how the disease not only wreaks havoc on the victim but also on those closest—often caregivers.

In yet other works, aging is a badge of honor—and a weapon in confronting horror. In She Will (2021), Alice Krige plays an aging actress who goes to a healing retreat after a double mastectomy, where she discovers that the process of such surgery opens up questions about her very existence, leading her to start to question and confront past traumas. Likewise, Jamie Lee Curtis stepped back into her iconic role as terrorized babysitter Laurie Strode for David Gordon Green’s trilogy Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2023)—only this time her PTSD has fueled her preparedness, making her an AARP card-carrying survivalist and Final Grandma. This theme of “Don’t Fuck with Old People” is carried out again in Don’t Breathe (2016) and VFW (2019).

Requisite history lesson aside, The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)—directed by James Ashcroft and written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent, based on the short story of the same name by Owen Marshall—is the latest, and perhaps most fully realized contribution to the geri-horror subgenre to date. This haunting, malicious New Zealand-lensed psychological tale of elder-on-elder abuse features Academy Award winner Geoffrey Rush as Stefan Mortensen, a judge who suffers a stroke, mid-sentencing, from the bench. He finds himself admitted to a nursing home (or “care home” as is the geographic idiom) for rehabilitation. His character, seemingly friendless, is the epitome of an entitled elite—dismissive toward women, caustic, and outright rude at times. The post-stroke wheelchair he finds himself in does little to humble him. Enter multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner and two-time Academy Award nominee John Lithgow as Dave Crealy, a fellow resident who’s as kooky as he is dangerous. Before becoming a resident, Crealy was the longtime handyman at Royale Pine Mews and that familiarity with the facility and its grounds gives him a different type of entitlement. He’s a geriatric bully—commandeering other residents’ food when the well-meaning if inattentive staff isn’t looking, aggressively shoving other residents out of the way during a dance activity, and—worst of all—paying nocturnal visits to his fellow residents’ room in the middle of the night to terrorize them with an eyeless hand puppet he calls Jenny Pen. The scenes in which Lithgow demands a pledge of allegiance to the titular doll that includes “licking its asshole” (thankfully, just the underside of Lithgow’s wrist) are chilling to the bone. Ashcroft wisely uses Lithgow’s towering 6’4” frame to powerfully frame the power dynamic between him and his frail elderly counterparts.

Crealy’s cruelty to the nursing home’s other residents varies from the humiliating (dumping a urinal full of pee onto Mortensen’s crotch while in bed) to the downright sadistic (tugging violently on the newly-inserted catheter of Mortensen’s roommate Tony Garfield (George Henare) or leading a demented woman who spends the majority of her screen time looking for the family about to pick her up and take her home any minute out of the gated grounds where tragedy befalls her). Although Mortensen reports the abuse, the nursing home’s administration does little to investigate, dismissing his concerns as part of his adjustment disorder. As Mortensen’s rehab fails to progress, he gradually loses his voice to the endemic ageism that sees the institutionalized elderly as ignorable. Still, Mortensen is determined to bring Crealy’s reign of terror to an end—using whatever means necessary. The film gradually builds in a tense game of cat-and-mouse before the two geriatric foes finally square off.

Ashcroft and company do a superb job of portraying life in a nursing home—from the near-drowning Mortensen experiences when left unattended in a bathtub when the aide leaves to retrieve towels to the way the center’s staff is portrayed as generally caring more about completing tasks than listening to what their elderly charges try to tell them. There is an intrinsic sadness hanging over Royale Pine Mews even as festive activities take place in the background and the residents’ care needs seem tended to adequately enough. It’s here—in the loneliness and social isolation at the end of one’s life, when autonomy is slowly lost and hope abandoned—that the geri-horror aspects of The Rule of Jenny Pen really kick in. There can be no happy ending because even if the villain is defeated, the audience knows that there is no escape for Mortensen from the decay aging brings.

Circling back to our de facto history lesson at the beginning of this review, The Rule of Jenny Pen is also notable for subverting the rules of the hagsploitation subgenre—here enlisting two Hollywood males of a certain age (Rush, 73 and Lithgow, 79) and placing them in the psycho-biddy cinematic scenario usually reserved for women. Ashcroft ably proves that the horrors of growing old in an ageist society aren't reserved just for women. It’s just another bit of the understated brilliance of this film that will likely go on to have a long shelf life.