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.