KING OF THE B’S: DIRECTOR ROGER CORMAN
For my birthday, I received a ticket to the dark side. A set of cult-director Roger Corman’s ‘60s movies based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s that most exquisite of cinematic pleasures, a complete personal vision—raw, intense, and immediate. It’s also strangely disturbing. Not because the fake blood and cardboard sets kid anyone that the wholesale slayings and suffering are real. But because Corman has the power to fleetingly stir in me imaginings which, as a law-abiding citizen with a house and growing record collection to support, I normally repress with ease. Imaginings of omnipotence and powerlessness, immortality and death, unbridled sex and unfettered violence. And in feeling these thoughts, if only for seconds, I gain more self-awareness than a thousand Sex and The City episodes will ever yield.
Corman, aka “King of the B’s,” directed throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. While adults stayed at home to watch the nascent medium of TV, Corman catered to cinema’s new target audience, the teenager. His often fantastical stories of loners and outlaws are shot-through with the emotional and social upheaval real America faced then and since. These are no dumbly exploitative texts. Almost uniquely at the time, many Corman films have an unsettling feminist streak, with gun-toting Western dolls, Viking amazons, and gothic femme fatales ascendant. His most personal movie, The Intruder, was one of the first features to tackle the elephant in the room that was racism in the US. Apart from the fifty-plus movies he directed, the Stanford- and Oxford-educated Corman distributed hundreds more, including some by Truffaut, Fellini and Bergman, then largely excluded from the US market.
Yes, as we lie in bed with the Poe series playing on my laptop, my girlfriend and I howl at the sheer hysteria of it all. At the psychedelic, flagrantly sexual set designs; at Vincent Price’s doomed heroes; and at the volcanic vixens he must battle. But beneath the laughter we both feel the presence of a hidden hand, finely in tune with the human condition and able to strike our deepest inner chords.