ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS: Roger Corman

If box-office figures are anything to go by, modern filmgoers love a good bit of blood and gore. Horror films such as Eli Roth’s Hostel, the Saw franchise and the innumerable American remakes of Japanese fright flicks like The Grudge and The Eye have all done big business in recent years and the genre has seen budgets increase and Hollywood stars attracted to it as a result. But it wasn’t always like this. Way back in the 50s and early 60s, in between its two boom periods in the 20s and 30s and 70s and 80s, the genre was dismissed as the stuff of B-movies, a playground for cheapo flicks which could produce a tidy profit from a tiny budget. One man who excelled in this arena was Roger Corman, whose The Pit and the Pendulum is the subject of this week’s Entertainment Essentials.

Known today primarily for being the producer who handed big breaks to the likes of James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Corman has also proven himself a highly talented director. His early, sci-fi tinged B-movies boasted absurd titles like Swamp Women, Naked Paradise and Attack of the Crab Monsters and are admittedly hardly great works of art. But they do stand as entertaining slices of hokum, and the fact they were highly profitable (a direct consequence of the low budgets which were being worked with) attracted the interest of burgeoning studio American International Pictures, who handed Corman a (slightly) bigger budget and asked him to create a horror film.

The result was 1960’s House of Usher. Based on the short story by master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe, it was directed by Corman, written by legendary horror scribe Richard Matheson and starred Vincent Price as the doomed Roderick Usher, a paranoid patriarch whose fear of repeating the sins of his murderous ancestors leads to madness and death. Costing just $270,000 to make (by way of contrast, Hostel 2 cost $10million), it proved an unexpected success (the cheapness of the production again meaning profits were high) and inspired AIP to hire Corman, Matheson and Price for a second modestly-budgeted Poe film, this time an adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum.

However, there is a major problem with the second in Corman‘s seven-film Poe cycle: it’s barely Poe at all. Because the writer’s original tale stretches to only a few meagre pages and doesn‘t really have much by way of plot, Matheson created an original story in which Price plays Nicholas Medina, a frail old man who as a child witnessed his Inquisitor father bury his mother alive and fears he may have accidentally subjected his own wife Elizabeth to the same fate. Soon, Elizabeth’s brother arrives at Medina’s castle to discern what has happened to his sister and, as he attempts to solve the mystery, Matheson gradually cranks up the tension with a series of ghostly goings-on.

A song often played by Elizabeth is given an eerie airing, her old room is vandalised despite no-one having access to it and her voice can be heard wailing through the corridors at night. Photographed by Floyd Crosby and scored by Les Baxter, these scenes - and indeed the film as a whole - have a great stripped-back menace to them, and they are complemented well by a collection of flashbacks in which Corman, still on a small budget, innovatively experiments with expressionism. Wide-angle lenses, titled camera angles and blue and red-tinted film stock are used to create a dreamy but still oppressive atmosphere which brilliantly reflects Medina’s fevered state of mind, as well as the tone of Poe’s story.

Finally, all the hauntings drive Medina insane and his madness makes for a ghoulishly twisted end to a glorious slice of filmmaking. But sadly Corman, Matheson and Price could never quite match it. Their final Poe adaptation, 1964’s Tomb of Legeia, is praised in some quarters but mostly forgotten along with 1962’s The Premature Burial and anthology Tales of Terror. Disappointingly, Poe’s most famous work, The Raven, was turned into an overlong 1963 farce which bears little relation to its source, meaning 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death is the only other Poe cycle film that can be favourably compared with the first two.

Still, despite this, Corman, Matheson and Price contributed massively to horror cinema with their Poe films, with a scare in Pit being named as one of the most significant moments in post-60s American horror by Stephen King. Of course, time is rarely kind to the horror genre, and some may find Pit and its brother films laughable, over-the-top and cheap by today's glossy standards. But horror is not the domain of big budgets and A-list actors. It's the B-movie world of creaking walls, cobwebbed dungeons and subtle suggestion. Corman grasped this better than anyone and proved that when it comes to scaring the pants off you, less really is more.

READING, WATCHING, LISTENING TO

Find out what has been entertaining the Entertainment Manchester staff this week...

THE WRITER

READING: With the latest Indiana Jones film out next month (hurrah!), I'm going through a bit of a Steven Spielberg phase, so my entry into this edition will be slightly (well, very) 'Berg-centric. In terms of books, I'm currently reading Warren Buckland's 'Directed by Steven Spielberg', an in-depth analysis of Spielberg's directorial style (average shot length, camera position etc). I’m on the Jaws section at the moment and it’s very dry and serious stuff, but don’t let that put you off. Buckland really knows what he’s talking about and this (along with Joseph McBride’s stunning biography) is the first port of call for anyone studying Spielberg.

WATCHING: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I tried to watch Duel the other day, but my elderly DVD player was having none of it, so the last film I watched was CE3K, which I haven't seen for a while but is still a masterpiece. It's the slow build-up that makes it work. What so many imitators of Spielberg's blockbusters fail to recognise is that you've got to tease the audience, make them want to see the mothership, the shark or the dinosaur, not just hand it to them on a plate. Spielberg does that brilliantly here and because of it he really allows you to become Roy Neary, rather than just passively observe him, as he desperately seeks the meaning of that mash potato Devil's Tower.

LISTENING TO: I've been listening to pretty much nothing but John Williams soundtracks in recent weeks, some of which have been the obvious ones (Indy, Close Encounters - especially his ethereal music for the mothership scenes), but mostly the lesser praised stuff such as Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds. It’s perhaps a shame that neither album has the immediacy of some of Williams’s more well-known work and that they don‘t quite play as well in isolation as a Raiders March or Flying, but both are full of reflective, haunting music which perfectly fits the sombre mood of the films.

THE EDITOR

READING: My Life by Fidel Castro. It's not exactly an autobiography but is still his life story, as told by him in a series of interviews with Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet. One of the most divisive political characters of the 20th Century, Castro certainly has a story to tell and it's not one that you often get to hear in a Western world where he is so demonised by America. I haven't got far enough into it to make any judgements myself, but he's clearly a charismatic, passionate and fiercely intelligent man, and having recently finally stepped down, it seems a perfect time to hear what he has to say for himself.

WATCHING: On Tv over the last few weeks I've watched a couple of new American imports, one very good, one not so good. The very good one is Mad Men, rather deceptively hailed as being from 'the writer of The Sopranos', when 'a writer of The Sopranos' would have been more accurate as it isn't by David Chase, but Matthew Weiner, who was quite heavily involved in the stunning last series of that classic TV show. Mad Men isn't quite at that level, but it's very classy stuff nonetheless. Dirty Sexy Money though, despite a cast featuring Peter Krause, Donald Sutherland and one of the Baldwins (William probably), didn't really seem to have anything below the glossy and shallow surface.

LISTENING TO: Dangerous Game by Mary Weiss, one of the most underappreciated and remarkable albums of last year. Weiss was the lead singer in legendary girl group The Shangri-Las, but pretty much retired from the music industry when they imploded in 1968. Astonishingly, she reemerged last year with an cracking debut solo album backed by garage rockers The Reigning Sound, and while her voice has aged, her attitude and energy remains intact. Also impressive and retro is Chris Rea's latest album-book, The Return Of The Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes, an immaculately-presented three-album set that tells the fictional story of a 60s guitar instrumental group called The Delmonts and their progression into blues-rockers The Hofner Bluenotes. If that sounds a bit pretentious, it isn't because the music is awesome.