By the late 1960s, Hollywood had become something of a self-devouring empire. The studio system was gone, the old-guard moguls were dead or retired, and their stars were being plundered—mercifully or sadistically, by cineastes—by a brash new generation weaned on television, exploitation films and irony. Born out of that awkward renaissance was Savage Intruder, aka Hollywood Horror House, a cheap independent feature that would provide legendary actress Miriam Hopkins with her last appearance in a feature film and became one of the oddest Hollywood endings ever.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
The movie had started life titled simply The Comeback. It was a wonderfully appropriate title. Donald Wolfe, director, producer and writer had only directed one other feature some nine years previously, and now he was looking for his comeback too. It was a nakedly commercial idea: a washed-up actress enjoying her senility away from the public's eyes in her crumbling Hollywood mansion, attended by a bizarre cast of hangers-on who both care for and take advantage of her. Wolfe knew how to package and market such a film.
Wolfe conceived of the script as something along the lines of Sunset Boulevard meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and he sold it as such—loud and clear. He shamelessly referenced the incredible success of Baby Jane and didn't hesitate to remind his potential leading lady of how Bette Davis revived her career with that picture. Wolfe wasn't being ironic; he wanted his actors to get the concept. After spotting Miriam Hopkins on television's The Flying Nun, Wolfe knew he'd located his leading lady. Hopkins still commanded the presence of a movie star, and her name meant something to moviegoers who remembered her from the '30s.
Hopkins took the job sight unseen. Wolfe agreed to pay her whatever she wanted, and that was all she needed. Nearly seventy now, Hopkins was no fool when it came to work, and she'd learned long ago that words in Hollywood meant nothing unless followed with a paycheck. In The Comeback she would portray Katharine Packard, once a screen goddess who now drank herself into oblivion each night while stewing in bitterness and delusions of grandeur; fixated on a long gone past as everyone in the world she once knew passed her gated estate without so much as a second glance.
Filming began in November 1969, and historians will take particular pleasure in how freely the production wandered through real Hollywood spaces. The opening moments linger on an unadorned, music-less montage of the Hollywood Sign in advanced decay—its warped letters filling the frame like a tombstone for vanished glamour. From there, the camera drifts through genuinely seedy bars, lived-in Hollywood street scenes, and even captures portions of the 1969 Hollywood Christmas Parade, with Miriam Hopkins perched on a float alongside Santa Claus himself, a surreal collision of civic cheer and personal ruin.
The key element of the production, however, was a walled and gated Hollywood mansion long rumored to have belonged to silent-era actress Norma Talmadge. Although the closing credits identify the house as such, the designation has always been suspect. Believed by many over the years to be The Cedars at 4320 Cedarhurst Circle, the house was originally built for director Maurice Tourneur and later owned by actress Madge Bellamy and sometimes reported to have been owned by Talmadge as well. Whether or not the connection is historically accurate, the film trades heavily on the idea of silent-era royalty and lost prestige.
Ambience was everything. The villa was constructed during the late 1920s but had begun falling apart by the late 1960s. Still grandiose by sheer size and remoteness, its deterioration was a beautiful visual parallel to Katharine Packard's existence: peeling paint, dark hallways, unkempt gardens would illustrate decrepitude and neglect more seamlessly than any built backdrop.
Besides the mansion, interior filming included Producers Studio on Melrose and Bronson, just across from Paramount Pictures, Hopkins old stomping grounds.
Wolfe filled out the supporting cast with a collection of aging Hollywood actors, creating an air of unplanned reunion. These included Minta Durfee Arbuckle, Florence Lake, and Gale Sondergaard, who had won the first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1936 for Anthony Adverse. Hopkins had not seen Sondergaard in over two decades; the two actresses shared an unstated sadness in being two former prestige actresses now relegated to appearing in a second-rate independent film made at the outskirts of the industry.
For the role of Vic Valance, the woman-hunting psychopathic serial killer, Wolfe chose David Garfield, who was billed as John David Garfield, son of the late Warner Bros. pin-up, John Garfield. Hopkins had known Garfield's father slightly in political and social groups during the 1930s. Garfield, who up until that point had essayed several small stage, television and film roles without ever striking a chord with audiences. In The Comeback he portrayed a fresh type of villainy; young, homeless and violent, a fiend who stalked not virginity but women of the past.
Academy Award nominated Miriam Hopkins as Katharine Packard
John David Garfield as the serial killer Vic Valance
Academy Award winner Gale Sondergard as Leslie Blair
The finished film bears all the marks of its chaotic production and Wolfe’s limited resources. Retitled Savage Intruder—and later Hollywood Horror House for the video release—it occupies the uncomfortable territory between Gothic melodrama, early slasher film, and unintentional camp. It is not remotely in the league of Sunset Boulevard or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and it is certainly not worthy of Hopkins’ talent or Sondergaard’s. Yet it is impossible to dismiss outright, because it is so nakedly fascinated with Hollywood decay.
The film’s most notorious scenes underline that fascination. In one, Packard appears drunkenly seated on a float in the Hollywood Christmas parade, a grotesque parody of public adoration. When a reporter asks her opinion of the event, she snarls that Hollywood used to be a great town full of glamour; but “now it is full of hoodlums and queers.” In another sequence, she wanders into a psychedelic hippie drug party, where a little person drug dealer offers her LSD. Packard sniffs, “The only trips I take are to Europe.” These moments are shocking not just for their dialogue, but for what they reveal: a generational clash played for exploitation, with Hopkins cast as both relic and spectacle.
Miriam Hopkins with Santa Claus talking to a television reporter at the 1969 Hollywood Christmas Parade
The film’s release history is equally shadowy. As far as can be determined, Savage Intruder never received a legitimate release of any kind in America. The film was not reviewed in Variety, The New York Times, or any other contemporary publication. However, the movie is rumored to have been screened privately at Hollywood parties between 1970 and 1973. It then supposedly emerged into the video marketplace as Hollywood Horror House. Its complete absence from the trade press means it probably received either an ultra-low-budget one-theater release or none whatsoever.
In later years, critics encountering the film for the first time struggled to categorize it. Writing for The All-Movie Guide, Fred Beldin called it “deliciously seedy and sadistic,” citing its LSD flashbacks, convincing bloodshed, and near-nude scenes involving Hopkins. He acknowledged that it was “too sluggishly paced to be a lost classic,” but found it nonetheless “an unsettling obscurity” worth seeing for its period atmosphere and nasty disposition. That assessment may be the film’s most accurate epitaph.
The mansion used in Hollywood Horror House at the time of its making.
Above: John David Garfield and Miriam Hopkins in a scene from Hollywood Horror House. Right: The opening credits featuring the deteriorating Hollywood Sign.
It is doubtful that Miriam Hopkins ever saw Savage Intruder, and it is probably better that she did not. She fulfilled her contract, cashed her check, and moved on with her life, leaving behind a film that used her image but never truly understood her legacy. Still, there is something quietly tragic that this should be her final feature film—a grim, exploitative footnote to one of the most vibrant careers of Hollywood’s golden age.
In the end, Savage Intruder / Hollywood Horror House, is less a “comeback” than a cautionary tale. It reflects a moment when Hollywood was eager to recycle its past but unwilling to honor it, when old stars were invited back not for their artistry but for their shock value. For historians, the film remains a fascinating artifact: a low-budget horror picture haunted by real ghosts, captured in a decaying mansion that stood in for an industry devouring its own memories.
Editor's Note: For readers who would like to explore Miriam Hopkins beyond her haunting final screen appearance in Savage Intruder/Hollywood Horror House, her full, complicated, and often defiant Hollywood story is told in depth in my book, Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel. Drawing on interviews, archival research, studio records, correspondence, and contemporary accounts, the book traces her rise from Broadway ingénue to pre-Code star, her collaborations with Lubitsch, Wyler, and Mamoulian, her battles with the studio system, Bette Davis, and her fiercely independent life off-screen—restoring Hopkins to her rightful place as one of classic Hollywood’s most intelligent and unconventional leading ladies. CLICK HERE FOR AMAZON PURCHASE
You can watch the completely restored Hollywood Horror House for free on TUBI
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