Commercially and moderately critically successful on release, the film’s success most prominently came from the popularity of its lead stars – Bette Davis and Joan Crawford - and their famous Hollywood rivalry, while it was also nominated for five Academy Awards, with Bette Davis marking her tenth and final nomination.

Critically it was praised and is praised in the years after its release for its combination of camp, black comedy and its creation of the psycho-biddy subgenre, while its behind the scenes real life feud of its stars only served to further identify it as being a “cult classic”.

Modern reviews of the film are generally positive, with its Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 92% praising it for its “powerhouse acting” and “melodrama”, but more significantly than anything else – whereas it was praised in 1962 as a core sample of the horror genre and for its nature as an “unsettling, claustrophobic thriller’, as Spencer Coile writes for Film Inquiry, today its popularity is now more commonly derived from its impact on pop culture, its overwhelmingly camp performances and sensibilities as well as its popularity and influence on and within the LGBTQ+, Drag and Horror-Buff communities.