Gothic fiction whose best-known work was the 1960 Hollywood horror novel "What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?" Farrell's novels spawned a subgenre of "Grande Dame Guignol" in the cinema, represented by such films as the 1962 film based on Farrell's novel, which starred Bette Davis versus Joan Crawford; this subgenre of films was dubbed the "psycho-biddy" genre. Many modern writers of horror (or indeed other types of fiction) exhibit considerable Gothic sensibilities—examples include the works of Anne Rice, Stella Coulson, Susan Hill, Poppy Z. Brite and Neil Gaiman as well as some of the sensationalist works of Stephen King Thomas M. Disch's
Bette Davis adopted a five-day-old baby girl they named Margot Mosher Merrill (born January 6, 1951), after the character Margo Channing. Davis and Merrill lived with their three children - in 1952, they adopted a baby boy, Michael (born January 5, 1952) - on an estate on the coast of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Davis, after semi-retirement in the mid-1950s, again starred in several movies during her time in Maine, including "The Virgin Queen" (1955), in which she played Queen Elizabeth I. The family traveled to England, where Davis and Merrill starred in a murder-mystery film, "Another Man's Poison" (1951). When it received