April 27, 2016

By Joseph Maddrey

This is going be one of those posts where a geeky old curmudgeon complains about how “kids today just don’t understand.” Sorry about that… but a few years ago, I was at a horror convention where legendary producer/director Roger Corman was the guest of honor. Although the convention was huge, Corman’s Q&A was sparsely attended. In typical old-guy fashion, I turned to the person sitting next to me and started complaining. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but David Cronenberg said it better: “If Corman hadn’t done those movies, maybe today’s young filmmakers would be making westerns instead of movies like THE FOG or FRIDAY THE 13TH.”

Ironically, Roger Corman started out his career by making westerns. His directorial debut was a film called FIVE GUNS WEST (1955), an ensemble western that influenced bigger hits like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and THE DIRTY DOZEN. But Corman saw the writing on the wall. In the mid-1950s, the western genre was ridiculously overexposed, so the young filmmaker turned to science fiction and horror, and spent the next decade laying the foundations for the horror genre as we know it today. Here are the highlights:

DAY THE WORLD ENDED (1955)

George Romero once said that if he’d made NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD for American International Pictures, it probably would have been a typical 1950s sci-fi story with “a scientist in the group, explaining what was going on.” In other words, it would have been DAY THE WORLD ENDED, Roger Corman’s first real foray into the genre. A reflection of atomic-age anxieties, DAY THE WORLD ENDED revolves around a handful of characters in a postapocalyptic world, who find themselves under siege by an army of mutants. Writer Lou Rusoff’s characterizations are woefully thin, but the film advances the core idea that George Romero would build his career—as well as his zombie mythology—on. Corman reflects, “My belief, in general, is that civilization moves forward: Old civilizations end and new civilizations start. From this overall concept of the movement of civilizations it seemed natural enough to speculate that the atomic age could make such a theory a reality.”

See also: IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956), which pits a young Lee Van Cleef against an alien cucumber.

NOT OF THIS EARTH (1957)

Corman cites this as his favorite of the ten-day-schedule films he made for AIP in the ‘50s, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s an offbeat little picture—part sci-fi, part gothic horror, part black comedy—about a telepathic alien vampire who arrives on earth for a feeding frenzy after his home planet is decimated by nuclear warfare. In contrast with DAY THE WORLD ENDED and IT CONQUERED THE WORLD, the infusion of dark humor makes this outing seem less pretentious. Witness, for example, the scene where a smarmy door-to-door salesman (played by Dick Miller) tries to sell a vacuum cleaner to the bloodthirsty alien. Corman wisely repeated the formula—with the help of writer Charles B. Griffith—creating a string of pictures that stood apart from the b-movies of the day due to their intelligence and irreverence.

See also: ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (1957), which was routinely featured on a double bill alongside NOT OF THE EARTH.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

The legend spawned by this quickie horror film has dwarfed the film itself. According to Corman, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS—a film about a nebbish young man who befriends a bloodthirsty alien plant in a Skid Row flower shop—was the result of a friendly wager. The filmmaker told biographer Ed Naha, “One of the fellows at the studio showed me a storefront set that wasn’t in use and asked me if I wanted it. I said that I didn’t have a project at the time but if he could leave the set standing for a week or two, I was sure that I could come up with something. He didn’t think I could. I told him that, not only could I come up with a movie in that period of time, but that I could shoot it in two days!” Corman made good on his bet. He called on Chuck Griffith to write a script in one night, then corralled his actor friends (including a young Jack Nicholson) and shot the film in two days and one night. The inevitably frantic energy of the shoot is apparent in the finished film, which has a madcap quality that has prompted some to call this THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW of its day.

See also: A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959), which is sometimes regarded as the first film in a thematic trilogy that also includes THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961).

HOUSE OF USHER (1960)

As a director, Roger Corman is unquestionably best-known for his adaptations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. HOUSE OF USHER was the first film in an eight-picture series, and it established a template for the Poe films that followed. It also reestablished the commercial viability of gothic horror pictures in the U.S. (England had Hammer, America had Corman.) Although Poe’s story was well-known—and, more importantly for cheap filmmakers, in the public domain—HOUSE OF USHER works because the filmmakers made it their own. Corman wanted to interpret the Poe’s 19th century story through the filter of modern psychoanalytic theory, and he wisely hired Richard Matheson to write the screenplay. Production designer Daniel Haller and cinematographer Floyd Crosby helped them to realize their concept of the titular house as a monstrous Id, with long hallways to dark openings representing a child’s fearful fascination with forbidden sexuality. And then, of course, there’s Vincent Price, who Corman saw as “the last descendant of a civilization that has been driven to the brink of decadence by an excess of culture”—in other words, a perfect tour guide for the forthcoming decade in America.

See also: PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961), THE RAVEN (1963), THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964)… Really, all of Corman’s “Poepictures.” And THE TERROR (1963), which was partially constructed out of leftovers from THE RAVEN.

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)

I first learned about this movie from an essay by Stephen King, who made it sound more mindblowing than any movie could ever possibly be. (King also proposed an alternate ending to the film, which is frankly better than what’s on screen.) That said, X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES is a remarkable genre film. It captures a particular moment in history, when American culture was undergoing a metamorphosis and the rebellious young director of HOUSE OF USHER became the iconoclastic director of THE WILD ANGELS (1966) and THE TRIP (1967). Professor James Xavier, played by Ray Milland, seems to be a stand-in for Corman himself—a man who has willfully surrendered familiar ideas about reality and, as a result, is able to look deeply into the spirit of a new age. Reflecting on the story by Ray Russell, Corman says, “I realized it was the concept that was important: a researcher moving through science toward a religious mystical experience. The themes of X-RAY EYES [were] rather similar to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, made five or six years later, in that there is at the end of the odyssey an hallucinogenic, mystic vision of light and motion. Kubrick’s trip was through space; X’s was interior.” Indeed, it’s tempting to view X as the forerunner of a subgenre of metaphysical horror films, including ALTERED STATES (1980), JACOB’S LADDER (1992) and ENTER THE VOID (2009).
So why doesn’t Corman get more love from horror fans? There is the obvious explanation that he has been overshadowed by his more famous protégés, including Francis Ford Coppola, Nicolas Roeg, Robert Towne, Peter Bogdanovich and Joe Dante. There is also the fact that Corman was always a habitually restless storyteller. Screenwriter Daryl Haney explained to Corman biographer Beverly Gray: “If he knows too much about something, he begins to lose interest. I think there’s a certain amount of seeking novelty on Roger’s part. And he has to move on. If he lingers too long, he becomes restless.” In other words, he is temperamentally better suited to the role of producer—and since the early 1970s, that’s where he has focused his energy.

At the age of 90, Corman remains restless. He continues to oversee several films a year, and like many of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers, he is still drawing inspiration from the few dozen films he made fast and cheap nearly half a century ago. That is the stuff of legend.

*Header image: American International Pictures, 1970