‘To you, that’s weird. To me, it’s just a day job,” says Elise Rainier, professional psychic. In the first Insidious film, in 2010, Elise died in the final act. But, this being a supernatural horror franchise in which death means never having to say you’re gone for ever, she was resurrected as a ghost in the 2013 sequel before the series looped back in time for a 2015 prequel in which, still alive and kicking, Elise is brought on to tackle an earlier case of demonic possession.

Now, in Insidious: The Last Key, Elise has been promoted to protagonist for yet another prequel, complete with flashbacks to her origin story. “There’s something evil in that house,” she says, before metaphorically rolling up her sleeves and getting down to her paranormal Miss Marple duties, which inevitably means going down into the basement to face her demons.

So far, so par for the course. Horror cinema, from Cat People (1942) to It Follows (2014), has hardly been lacking in strong female characters. The difference here is that Elise is played by a septuagenarian, Lin Shaye (sister of New Line Cinema’s CEO Robert Shaye, who produced the Nightmare on Elm Street films). Shaye was hitherto best known for playing grotesque crones in Farrelly brothers comedies, but has also racked up some impressive horror credits. Reviews of The Last Key have been sniffy, as they usually are for this type of film, but I found it refreshing to watch an intrepid seventysomething heroine confronting the forces of evil head-on. “An unfortunate reality of Hollywood is that women, once they reach a certain age, start to lose out on roles,” said the director, and co-creator of the Insidious franchise, Leigh Whannell, in a recent interview. “And the same thing just doesn’t happen to men. You see actors working well into their 50s and 60s, still getting the girl. Lin is really aware of how lucky she is.”

Early in Ryan Murphy’s 2017 TV anthology series Feud, Joan Crawford (played by Jessica Lange) notes that “everything written for women seems to fall into just three categories: ingenues, mothers or gorgons”. In 1962, when Feud begins, Crawford is reluctantly settling for gorgon, playing opposite Bette Davis, her near-contemporary, in Robert Aldrich’s delirious gothic melodrama What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In a heartbreaking echo of Hollywood’s real-life attitude to its ageing female talent, they’re playing washed-up actors driven mad by their own obsolescence, bound together by self-loathing, agonisingly aware of their vanished sex appeal.

Lin Shaye in Insidious: The Last Key. Photograph: Focus Features

Yet Crawford and Davis were only 56 and 54, almost spring chickens by today’s standards. A decade earlier, 51-year-old Gloria Swanson had played the reclusive silent movie star Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), a prototype for what the writer Alison Nastasi called in a 2012 article, the “psycho biddy” subgenre. “There’s nothing tragic about being 50,” says William Holden’s character. “Not unless you try to be 25.” But it was OK for him: well into his second half-century, Holden would still be mowing down Mexicans in The Wild Bunch (1969), romancing teenage girls in Breezy (1973), or running a TV news division in Network (1976). Because being 50 always was tragic for the grandes dames of Hollywood, who had little choice but to go full-on gorgon if they wanted to carry on working.

Against all expectations, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a hit, but afterwards the only roles offered to its stars were more of the same. Thus “hagsploitation” was born. Davis refined her “batty spinster” routine, haunted by memories of her beau’s severed head, in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). She juggled pathos and nuttiness as The Nanny (1965) for Hammer and worked an eye patch, again for Hammer, as the monstrous matriarch of The Anniversary (1968). Crawford, fired from Sweet Charlotte, demeaned herself further by brandishing an axe in Strait-Jacket (1964) and getting stabbed to death in I Saw What You Did (1965), both for the B-movie maestro William Castle, before ending her career ignominiously with the low-rent British caveman movie Trog (1970).

Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Shelley Winters, who continued to chew the scenery throughout the 70s, took grotesquerie in her stride, singing lullabies to the mummified corpse of her daughter in Curtis Harrington’s Hansel and Gretel update, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971). According to her costar, Debbie Reynolds, Winters got a little too much into character as a guilt-ridden murderer’s mother in the throes of a stabby nervous breakdown in the same director’s What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971) and had a real-life breakdown during filming. One day, Reynolds checked the rubber prop knife she was due to be stabbed with and found it had been replaced with a real blade.

Always as much character actor as leading lady, Winters embraced hagdom more readily than her more glamorous counterparts. Crawford’s replacement in Sweet Charlotte was 48-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who had already been terrorised by home invaders in the surprisingly vicious Lady in a Cage (1964), though her career low point was probably being stung to death by killer bees in The Swarm (1978) as disaster movies replaced hagsploitation as the last refuge of the fading Hollywood star. De Havilland’s sister, Joan Fontaine, made her final screen appearance at the age of 49 as a schoolteacher traumatised by African masks and English occultists in Hammer’s The Witches (1966). Sixty-three-year-old Tallulah Bankhead joined the British studio’s monstrous regiment as the religious fanatic who terrorises her dead son’s girlfriend in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965). On seeing herself on screen, Bankhead said: “God, do I look awful! Ugh!”

Today’s film fans may relish these performances as gloriously camp, but in the 60s, horror films and B-movies were seen as a humiliating step down for the onetime screen queens. And once hagsploitation had run its course, even the juicy psycho-biddy roles dried up, apart from the odd last hurrah from Piper Laurie whooping it up in Carrie (1976) and Ruby (1977) or Joan Bennett and Alida Valli as bossy witches in Suspiria (1977).

What’s the Matter with Helen? starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

In the 80s, older women almost vanished from horror, just occasionally popping up to remind us how ghastly they are, as in The Shining (1980), in which Jack Torrance is thrilled by a sexy nude female ghost, but horrified when she turns into a gurning hag. After the first Friday the 13th (1980), Mrs Voorhees was replaced in the sequels by her son as psycho-killer-in-chief, and horror movies filled up with fresh-faced cannon fodder fated never to grow long in the tooth. A rare exception was the 20-year-old heroine (Lori Singer) of Warlock (1989), cursed by the eponymous supernatural villain to age a decade every day. “Why couldn’t he just kill me?” she groans at her grey hair and increasingly decrepit complexion. “Nothing could be worse than this!”

But since the 90s, horror has been creeping into the mainstream, losing something of its B-movie stigma in the process. It’s no longer considered demeaning when a 75-year-old screen legend such as Gena Rowlands plays a hoodoo harridan in The Skeleton Key (2005). The haunted-house movie has always tended to be a female-centric subgenre, and as films about ghosts and demonic possession have proliferated, so have roles for older women. Some of the scariest movies of the millennium have had female stars in their 30s and 40s, taking their cue not from hag-horror but from the subtler neuroses of Deborah Kerr in The Innocents (1961).

Spanish film-makers have led the way, providing middle-aged female protagonists in Jaume Balagueró’s The Nameless (1999), Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), JA Bayona’s The Orphanage (2007), Guillem Morales’s Julia’s Eyes (2010) and Alejandro Hidalgo’s The House at the End of Time (2013), but Essie Davis in The Babadook (2014) and Vera Farmiga in The Conjuring (2013) have also made their mark.

Helen Mirren in Winchester.

It is too early to tell whether Elise Rainier is in the vanguard of a heroic-old-lady horror trend, and, as long as Hollywood is dominated by male film-makers who find it hard to summon interest in creating roles for women they don’t want to have sex with, post-menopausal actresses will continue to be rare birds in all genres other than tasteful heritage-style drama showcasing the talents of Dames Judi Dench or Maggie Smith.

But there are signs we may at least be in for an intriguing blip in cinema history as ageing horror fans gravitate towards protagonists they can more readily identify with. Next month, 72-year-old Helen Mirren stars in the haunted-house movie Winchester. And in October, 59-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis will be reprising her role as Laurie Strode in a reboot of the film that made her famous. “Same porch. Same clothes, same issues. Forty years later,” she tweeted. “Headed back to Haddonfield one last time for Halloween.”

Insidious: The Last Key is in cinemas now