Frankenstein Unbound
Joe Buchanan has come unstuck in time. He is a scientist in New Los Angeles, and the year is 2031. He is a narrator in Frankenstein Unbound, and the year is 1990.
The Undead
Shot over roughly one week in a converted supermarket decked out with makeshift forest foliage and an overload of (toxic) fake fog for about $75,000 of Roger Corman’s own money, The Undead is no doubt a bare-bones quickie, even by Corman standards.
The Masque of the Red Death
Smart, sinister, colorful (back to this in a minute), nuanced, expansive, repellent, beckoning, dastardly, placating, and inspiring, Roger Corman’s 1964 The Masque of the Red Death isn’t only the apotheosis of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, but of mid-1960s horror as well.
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
The first thing we lay eyes on is… an eyeball! No enveloping head. Just an eyeball attached to an optic nerve, floating in a beaker, a precious organ isolated, helpless. What has it seen?
The Pit and the Pendulum
Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t exactly a lover of plausibility. He may not have been a lover of anything, despite popular culture’s love of him, preferring to wander dark streets at ungodly hours and converse with ravens while dreaming up unique ways to die. Fanfare for the common dyspeptic man.
Ernest R. Dickerson
The DP and director on the fantastic potential in image-making/-seeing, learning to photograph the world, and the possibility of a Demon Knight sequel.
Gremlins
Joe Dante, who got his start in show business cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, has always placed a premium on the momentary turbulence that exists between shots.
The Comedy of Terrors
After the relative success of American International Pictures’ 1963 release of Roger Corman’s The Raven, the studio quickly reunited the same fearsome trio of Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff for The Comedy of Terrors.
The Velvet Vampire
It was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) that inspired Stephanie Rothman to make movies. She studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California, became the first woman to be awarded a Directors Guild of America fellowship, and went on to work as a valued assistant for exploitation titan Roger Corman (also, as it happens, a big Bergman fan).