Betta St. John—Kidnapped for a Sacrifice
Women in History Month 2023
Betta St. John celebrated her 93rd birthday last November. I discovered St. John during my ongoing Hammer Film Productions kick, and man some of their non-horror is just as good their best horror. St. John plays Jean Edwards, a nanny-type to Mandy Miller’s Candy Brown, in Hammer’s early Snorkel (1958). Candy’s mother has just committed suicide, but she thinks her step-father Paul Decker (Peter van Eyck) did it. Not only that, she thinks he also killed her father years before. If you’ve seen the movie, you already know the truth in the first ten minutes—a great opening. Jean is torn between believing Candy and being slyly wooed by Candy’s step-father and possible double murderer. Snorkel has the most karmic ending I’ve ever seen.
St. John starred in some very well-known films–Destry Rides Again (1939); The Robe (1953); and The Saracen Blade (1954), directed by William Castle–Too bad we never saw a horror team up with St. John and Castle. Later in her career, however, between 1957 and 1960, she experienced a spurt of genre films, including Tarzan and the Lost Safari (1957), The Snorkel, Corridors of Blood (1958) with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, Tarzan the Magnificent (1960), The City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel 1960) with Christopher Lee, and one episode of The Invisible Man (1958-1960).
In Tarzan and the Lost Safari she plays Diana Penrod who is kidnapped for a sacrifice to a lion god. She plays Susan in Corridors of Blood and has second billing in between Karloff and Lee. In Tarzan the Magnificent she plays Fay Ames, a totally different character from Lost Safari, and is killed by a lioness. And in The City of the Dead she is once again kidnapped for sacrifice, this time to the devil. While not quite a scream queen, Betta St. John probably leads the race in the kidnapped to be sacrificed category.