A Tribute to Roger Corman (1926-2024).

I wasn't expecting to write this.  Not in the strictest sense, anyway.  All that happened is one of the bright lights of the Entertainment world went out not too long ago.  In a sense, I guess you can say it was expected.  They say it happens to everyone sooner or later.  At the same time, it's like you never can be ready for when it happens to any artist whose life and work you've come respect.  That's how it was for me, anyway, when I learned of the recent passing of Hollywood producer, director, and film distributor Roger Corman.  For the longest time, he seemed like something of a permanent fixture in both my childhood and life.  I suppose that's the reason why it came as such a shock to know he'd finally passed on.  When an artist can leave a big impact on the way you watch and think about not just films, but also storytelling in general, then it's like something vital has been lost from the Entertainment scene.  I almost want to compare his death to that of a lighthouse being shut down.  It leaves a  lot of blank spots on the map that results in an incomplete picture of the terrain, and that can come with a whole lot of costs.  I'll elaborate on where my thinking is going with this idea as we get further along in this tribute.  For now, it's enough to say that Corman's insights into the nature of filmmaking or of telling stories are a key factor in his legacy.  Beyond that, I think the best place to start a tribute like this is with his personal impact.

I first became acquainted with Corman's work through what I'm guessing could be considered the usual route to becoming one of his small, yet devoted cadre of fans.  In the strictest sense, my liking for Roger's films didn't start with the director himself.  It all began when I first learned about the work of Corman's star pupil, the actor known as Vincent Price.  What's gratifying this is that people still know a lot about this guy, and with good reason.  He's one of the last remaining aspects of the Golden Age of Hollywood whose reputation and legacy have still managed to live on more than half a century after his death.  That's because Price seems to have been one of those actors who are able to leave an indelible impact on whichever generation of audiences is willing to give him a chance.  It all seems to be down to a combination of his skills as a performer, and the type of stories that helped make him famous.

For whatever reason, Price just seems to have been one of those actors who was somehow a natural fit for the Tale of Terror.  It was the Horror genre which helped give him his first real start in showbiz, and then later turned him into the cinema icon that he's regarded as now.  In particular, in addition to Corman, it was the work of Gothic pioneer author Edgar Allan Poe who helped to cement Price's career, and gave him space on the same shelf with actors like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre.  It was the author of The Raven who helped bring my attention to the efforts of these twin titans, or partners in fear.  Which is to say that I learned about Corman at the right time due to the best possible coming together of all the right influences.  This is back when I was just starting to gain an interest in books as a major source of entertainment.  I'd just learned of Poe through a Steven Spielberg produced cartoon, if you can believe it.  It might have been the stuff that Saturday Mornings used to be made off, yet I suppose it says a great deal about how such offerings can become works of art.  That show aired an episode of Poe's most famous poem, and when my parents found out about that, they were great enough to encourage my enthusiasm for all things that go bump in the night by telling me that Edgar Allan Poe was not only a real life person, he'd also written more where The Raven came from.

So sorting all these events out in my memory, I realize now that it was the Spielberg parody that came first, then I found out all about the author who inspired that particular TV episode.  From there, it was like finding the magic key that gradually opened up as much of the world of literature as was and still is possible for me, and it all started with Poe.  Looking back now makes me realize that first the man who wrote of Black Cats and Casks of Amontillado and later Price and Corman are the ones who more or less shaped my own outlook on what the Horror genre is, and what it is trying to achieve.  The first picture of Corman's that I ever watched was his House of Usher (1960), and I've got to admit, it really did a number on my Imagination.  That was the first actual Horror film I ever saw to truly freak me out on a fundamental psychological level.  Like, I can still recall the emotional ringer I put myself through in deciding to watch it.  Maybe it's because I'd barely finished being 8 years old, not even 10 when it happened.  All I can say for sure is that it was the first major Gothic story made for the screen that kind of made me sit up and pay attention.  It was like the moment of completion in a slow process of what I can only describe as imaginative realization.  It might have started with films like Disney's Fantasia and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  Both works are good entry points for this type of story.

If it was authors like Washington Irving, Arthur Conan Doyle, and then (with the help of Corman and Price) E.A. Poe then films like House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum seem to have wound up being the artistic efforts that helped solidify my own definition of what Horror is as a genre.  What's interesting to note about the way I see this type of story is just how out of step it often is with contemporary tastes.  I do not, under any circumstances, mean anything bad by that.  Instead, I'm talking here about this idea of the Tale of Terror as something capable of reaching greater artistic heights than just the mere grindhouse gross-out level of films like the Saw franchise or the Terrifier series.  I understand that such offerings are kind of like the major trendsetters at the moment.  So it's like this is what people expect, and hence what they want from the modern Gothic genre.  Whether or not this counts as "all well and good" it is, at the very least, the current setup of the moment.  It will be interesting to see if this particular aesthetic taste is able to shift around with the passing years.  If you go back and pay attention to all of the major personal influences I just listed above, however, you'll see that one of the things they have in common is that while none of them is too squeamish to shy away from the buckets of blood, they also operate under a very different worldview.

It's a particular mindset or outlook that seems to realize while the visceral element has its place, the truest effect of the Gothic story lies in an entirely different realm from it.  This is where I think Corman was able to demonstrate just how smart, and hence how underestimated he was and sometimes still is as a director of Horror pictures.  In a documentary on Vincent Price, Corman once made a very cogent observation about that nature of this higher level of fright.  "Just as Sigmund Freud, a little later in the century, was working on a scientific basis towards the concept of the Unconscious.  I thought Poe, as an artist was doing the same thing.  Writing Horror films from the Unconscious mind.  And I thought Vincent was able to understand that and to portray that (web)".  This is the director doing nothing less than explaining both himself and his own working methods as an artist in the Gothic mode.  It's worth pointing out because it was a note he kept coming back to and re-sounding time and again in his career.  For instance, later on, in an interview he gave for a documentary called Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (it was produced and directed by one of Roger's former proteges', some guy called Martin Scorsese, if that matters) we see him make a return to the exact same statement, making clear it's his manifesto.

Corman says that "It's hard to say how the concept of the Unconscious plays out for the viewer.  I think the filmgoer is probably not aware of exactly what is happening, but they're aware of the result.  If you're playing with the filmgoer's Unconscious, they react to it without really knowing why they're reacting to it".  These are not the words of some poverty row hack.  These are the considered remarks of a very self-aware artist.  Someone who cares about his craft enough so that he's willing to give it the kind of consideration that you just don't see from today's filmmaker's.  It bears all the trademarks of someone who takes the genre he's working in seriously.  Corman's thoughts on the matter bear a helpful resemblance to the outlook of another Horror legend, this one with a still considerable degree of fan recognition to his name.  Christopher Lee once announced that he was taking a hiatus from making the type of Horror films that helped put his name on the map.  The reason's he cited for doing so was because he had too much respect for the genre to allow himself to tarnish its best qualities at the hands of behind the camera hacks who thought that all was needed was to pour as much blood on the camera as possible.  Perhaps its debatable now whether Horror can ever be taken with the degree of seriousness that guys like Lee, Price, and Corman gave it.  Yet it's a viewpoint I happen to share and applaud.

Which is to say I've read and watched my way into what I can only describe as the best kind of literary heights that the Story of Fear can reach whenever any artist who likes the format is willing to put in the work necessary to achieve this peculiar level of Art.  Can the final results be crude?  It always has to be considered a possibility when your writing a story about things that go bump in the night.  Can it be gruesome?  Again, it's all just part of the bells and whistles of the territory.  At the same time, experience has taught me that the best Horror has to offer are those examples where the final product rises above the levels of a Nightmare on Elm Street.  Instead, strange as this may sound, I want to say that Horror is a genre that has proven itself capable of reaching the kind of level of quality that was often familiar to and utilized by the likes of William Shakespeare.  The final results may still contain a great deal of Schlock in its genetic material, yet if the quality of the writing is up to snuff then even production limitations can become valuable assets.  It may sound strange to equate a film like The Pit and the Pendulum on the level of a story like Hamlet.  However, it's pretty clear this is the type of story Corman and Price were working with.  With a their adaptation of The Pit what Vincent and Roger cooked up together was nothing less than a classic instance of what is now known as the Elizabethan Revenge Drama, the kind stories that were made popular in Renaissance England by the likes of authors like John Webster or Thomas Dekker.  It was also the kind of narrative that Shakespeare put his definitive stamp on, and that Poe later revived for American readers.

It's this hidden layering of classical narrative tropes and typology that underpins and supports an otherwise unassuming Drive-In B picture like Corman's The Pit, and which makes it something like an natural cinematic heir and descendant of all those old tales of murder, revenge and supernatural happenings that even someone like the Bard knew had its place in the grand scheme of the Arts.  In addition to this, it helps to keep in mind the relativity of historical aesthetic perspective.  A film like House of Usher may seem old fashioned and schlocky to modern audiences.  However, if you'd shown it to guys like Shakespeare, Milton, Webster, or even Spenser, odds are even they would have all called it a marvel of artistic revolution.  So far as any of their perspectives were concerned, they were right.  They would all have been aware of something that Corman was smart enough to recognize, and this might just be his greatest achievement.  It's the realization that the Gothic tale is Romantic at its heart, and this means a greater degree of Imaginative willingness is required on the part of the audience.  It was something that Shakespeare demanded on the part of the groundlings who came to view his plays in droves during the early modern era, and Corman seems to have taken this fundamental realization and applied it to his own Poe adaptations.  Now some might object that this isn't really all that fair.

Films are a passive medium, the picture on the screen should be required to do all the heavy lifting for the viewer without them having to even consider a single element of what goes on up on the screen.  With all due respect, however, this has got to be the most naive argument I've ever heard.  For one thing, films are known to contain a great deal of subtext.  It's the kind of tell-tale element that doesn't begin to show itself until repeat viewings bring it to the viewer's awareness.  The ability to see what's happening isn't enough to verify meaning.  Further consideration is required to understand the full meaning of any film, whether anyone is comfortable with such arrangements or not.  For another thing, it's impossible for any narrative, whether on page or screen, to be understood without a certain degree of literacy in the attic.  Apparently that's the only way you can understand the context of, say, the folklore of tales such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm, or the subtle, Gothic small town satire laced throughout Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow, to say nothing of the targets that Jon Swift attacks in the pages of Gulliver's Travels.  Without literacy, in other words, nothing in a book like Huck Finn makes a bit of sense, and that can sometimes be where the danger starts.  For better or worse, whether it's "fair" or not, all fiction is a matter of interpretation, which requires cultural literacy.

Quality of visuals won't do any good here.  It takes a willingness to read between the lines, the kind that can arrive at an understanding of the thought and hence the themes behind the dab of blood on the wall or the monster that comes shambling on-stage from the shadows.  I bring all this up because of a very modern mistake that believes you can tell the exact meaning of an image just by looking at it.  This extreme level of naivety falls apart once you realize that no one is born knowing what a dog, a star, or even a planet is without first being told about it.  Which is just to point out a very obvious (albeit often retrospective) fact.  It's the truism that life isn't the sort of thing that's willing to explain itself for humans.  It forces us to learn about it through constant trial and error observation.  Just as you can't tell if a dog is either dangerous or a life-long, well loved member of the family without getting to know them, so the artistic experience of fear is a lot more complex than just spraying zombie guts at the screen and expecting everyone to have the same visceral reaction.  The mistake a lot of us seem to make with any story set in the Horror genre is to believe we know all there is to know about fear, and what it takes to scare an audience.  If I had to take a guess, then it seems our main understand of what Horror is supposed to be remains determined by the popular explosion the genre experienced during the 80s.

If this surmise is true, then it means our understanding of Gothic fiction remains at a very basic level, even after the passage of so many years.  We still adhere to the kind of narrative patterns and plot processes laid out by the likes of Freddy and Jason.  The funny thing is if you go back and look at the kind of work written by guys like Poe, M.R. James, and Arthur Machen, then you soon realize just how much the highest achievements the genre was ever able to make have pretty much nothing in common with the whole 80s splatter punk aesthetic.  Characters like Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde still manage to be household names with good reason.  Yet the approach of each character to the creation of fear amounts to not one but several worlds of difference from the kind of approach most of us have come to expect from the genre.  Now you may try to argue that times and tastes change.  Maybe we just grow up, or else it's because we demand more from the storytellers who try to make our flesh creep.  However, if that's the case, if anything like a true desire for more out the Tale of Terror exists among the audience, then why and how on Earth is it that this demand can be sated as easily as that by nothing more than Art the Clown?  There's got to be more to it than cheap thrills.

I think the real truth here is there's been an ever-present threat that the Horror genre as a whole has had to deal with for a long time now.  It's the fact that it's so easy to cheapen this type of story with nothing more than buckets full of fake blood and guts.  It's become so easy to believe that's all the Gothic Romance amounts to because we've allowed ourselves to be lulled into the kind of mindset that just naturally expects this from any offering the genre can give us because we've grown accustomed to the people behind the camera knowing they can always just phone the final product in without having to give any of it a moment's thought.  The characters in this story are flat, two-dimensional card board cut-outs?  No problem!  Just bring in the guy in the rubber monster suit and have him coat the entire cast in filth made up of red dye number five.  That should take care of everything.  Far too often I think the people who watch these films fall into the trap of letting this kind of narrative decay happen without protest.  However, the truth is such results tend to be a matter of false audience expectations, rather than an objective look at what the genre is and remains truly capable of.  A closer observation reveals that the true face of Gothic fiction is something far grander than the school of Freddy and Jason. 

It's a realm where the Imagination can find ways of taking some pretty great flights of inspiration, at least whenever the writer has some idea of what he's doing.  This is the artistic shelf space where the work of Horror can sometimes achieve its highest dramatic effect.  Stephen King calls its the level of Terror, as opposed to the Gross Out.  He also maintains that the Gothic narrative is always at its best whenever it reaches for just those Terrific heights.  If that's the case, then it helps to understand the nature of this elevated form of Scary Tale.  For one thing, while it will always have room for the bucket of blood, it also operates under the knowledge that gore and gross out aren't the soul reason for the Tale of Terror's existence.  Its settings can be anywhere from an isolated old house way out in the country, a thoroughly modern office building in the middle of a big city, a spectral netherworld as seen through the eyes of ghosts, or even the surface of a totally made up alien planet.  What matters is that the kind of artistic effect that the great Horror story goes for is one that always tries to elevate the genre's game.  

It seeks to go beyond the farcical nature of Chucky or Art the Clown.  Instead, it always seems to be aiming for a spot on the map that Ray Bradbury once referred to as The October Country.  He once described it as "that country where it is always turning late in the year.  That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.  That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun.  The country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts".  The kind of figures, in other words, who belong more to the world of dreams and nightmares that make up the folklore of our lives, more than they do to the waking world.  The kind of creatures of the night who stalk the streets like shadows of shadows passing.  That, to me, is the best snapshot I can give in terms of a clearer picture of what the Horror genre is meant to be.  It's still a place of terror and frights, yes, no doubt about that.  The genre wouldn't really be itself without it.  At the same time, it is guided by the experience of a particular, I almost want to say peculiar type of thrill.  

This is something more than you'll be able of find by hanging around the grounds of Camp Crystal Lake.  It's the sort of good artistic chill that isn't content just to scare you.  Rather, this other form of Gothic narrative wants to use its scares in such a way as that it might just awaken the mind of the audience to the genre's own strange, yet genuine sense of wonder.  I have said on numerous other occasions that the Story of Fear can trace its lineage all the way back to the Fairy Tale.  That if you go back farther enough, you'll soon discover that the Monster Hiding Under the Bed is really just the Troll Under the Bridge.  There comes a point, in other words, where the titular Horror of this type of narrative sooner or later reveals itself to be nothing more than just another inhabitant of the land of once upon a time.  A fictional creature or shade that has as much in common with Edmund Spenser's Faeryland as it does the Haunted Castles and Dungeons of Poe or Hawthorne.  Then again, what else have either of those two later writers done than to take those same Magic Casements, and paint them up in shades best suited for the autumn style of writing?  In doing so, it's interesting to note that the one thing they don't change is the age old possibility that the genre has for tapping into a sense of wonder.

This is an effect that I have seen many of the best stories in the Gothic branch office achieve more than once.  I've seen it happen enough times to the point where I can now say this counts as a legitimate feature of the format, and not any kind of accidental bug that just crawled into the machinery of the format by accident.  Instead, the ability of the Horror tale to achieve this sense of wonder seems to have been built-in from the very start.  It appears to be a carry over from the days when the genre's most famous tropes where still an indelible and indistinguishable part of the Fairy Story.  What this tells me is that while the Things that Go Bump in the Night might have inevitably branched off into their own style of writing, that sense of common ancestry never truly left it, even if our memories of this Fantastical heritage has become so dulled by time as to be almost forgotten.  The curious part is how this doesn't seem to have been a hindrance to the Gothic tale, or the way it can have of still reaching all the way back to those wells of wonder, even in a seemingly disenchanted age such as ours.  If this proves anything, then it's that the Unconscious Memory of the human species is often wiser than its individual subjects.  This is something that Corman seems to have understood on that instinctive, Unconscious level.  I'm willing to bet that's why he was so good at telling scary stories for others.

Corman seems to have been one of the few American Gothic storytellers with at least something of a clear vision of the sort of heights of the genre could achieve, and sometimes he proved himself more than capable of rising to the occasion and proving just that.  For what it's worth, I've seen enough of the guy's films to know that, yes, he was capable of making a good picture every now and then.  When it comes to his filmography in general, Corman seems to have been one of those directors who tends to operate on a tiered level of filmmaking.  It's no secret that a lot of his films were made to pay the bills, and it shows in some of them.  If I had to assemble a makeshift chart of how to divide Corman's films into categories, they would be three-tiered.  The first and lowest level would be labeled as Projects to Pay the Bills.  Corman was by no means the first indie filmmaker in Hollywood (that honor belongs to the likes of Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, and the founders of studios like United Artists).  However, he was the first one to demonstrate that you could make it as a film artist even if you worked in more or less complete separation from the L.A. studio system.  Corman proved this was true even if it meant you had to rely on your own wits to see your dream projects through to completion.

Another thing Roger was either smart enough, or else always just plain realistic about was the fact that sometimes, in order to make the films you cared about, you had to take on a lot of directing for hire jobs.  The good news is this doesn't have to mean the same thing as selling your soul.  It does however mean that whatever good or great pictures you manage to churn out are bound to come off as a brief  oasis of fresh air in an otherwise unremarkable or else plain embarrassing sea of mediocrity.  That's probably the best description I can give for Corman's work for hire projects.  It's on this bottom shelf that you're apt to find long forgotten Drive-In fair such as She Gods of Shark Reef or The Wasp Woman.  I should point out that even films of this caliber can have their place if it's possible to spot that someone behind the camera was willing to give the final product at least some modicum of artistic effort.  This is the case with films like I Was a Teenage Werewolf.  Such efforts display a surprising ability to reach beyond the level of pure schlock contained in both their title and premise, and thus manage the rare yet admirable feat of elevating Drive-In cheese into something approaching genuine art.  This is something Corman excelled at.  However, you can tell these efforts from all of his hired hand work.

The major difference between all these bill paying efforts and a film like Teenage Werewolf is that all it takes is just a few minutes of viewing to realize that The Wasp Woman never had a chance of rising even to the rarified level of the former script.  One of them is a surprisingly thoughtful enough examination of male teenage anger issues that can sometimes have a certain level of values resonance even today.  The other just revolves around the gimmick of placing a giant, fake rubber insect head on an actor and not bothering to consider any creative potential beyond that.  Cronenberg's The Fly it is not.  These are the kind of efforts that even the director was willing to dismiss as unimportant.  There were at least two other types of films where that wasn't so much the case.  This brings us to the second level of the Corman's filmography.  Here's the part where things start to get a little bit interesting yet tricksy.  This is because it can sometimes be difficult for casual viewers to spot the difference between a film where Roger was just sort of phoning it in, and another where it's possible to see the thought and effort put into the final product.  A surprising amount of the director's work that tends to get mocked by most viewers has a legitimate claim to belong on this shelf space.  Some of their shortcomings aren't even his fault.

An otherwise charming little B flick like It Conquered the World (1956) has what can only described as one of the most notoriously ridiculous monster designs in the history of Sci-Fi Horror.  I think I remember someone somewhere (it might have been either a critic or a former cast member of that film) saying it was just this giant carrot from the back of the beyond.  While it's the sort of reveal that tends to illicit laughs rather than screams from audiences (even back then) it helps remember that Corman's initial plan was to play everything low key and indirect.  The audience was meant to catch only the briefest glimpses of the monster and nothing else beyond that.  The director's vision was predicated on the in this case perhaps wise choice to let the audience see just enough to let their worst imaginings do all the heavy lifting, and no more.  It's the kind of gimmick that does wonders for films like The Blair Witch Project.  For all I know, a variation of that effect could have worked here.  That's something none of us can know any more, however.  The studio demanded a monster to put on their poster for whatever mistaken reason, and so we're stuck with the sight of the otherwise legendary and awesome Lee Van Cleef having to wrestle with a with a giant carrot.  That idea could be way cool in and of itself.

It's just the sight of one of cinema's most iconic outlaw gunslinger's walking up to this space vegetable with just a wimpy looking blowtorch and then slaying the beast by just sticking it in the thing's eye.  Like I said, the whole thing appears to have been the studio's idea.  It was a mandate Corman either followed, or get taken off the project by someone else who would phone it in.  So, he stuck with it, and the result is one hell of a schizoid picture.  It's just possible to see the glimmering hints of the kind of film Roger originally wanted to make.  From what I can tell, he seemed to be working his way toward the kind of story idea that would later come to incredible life in the series Breaking Bad.  It's the idea of this lone man letting a lifetime of disappointments cripple his better angels and send him down a dark path of destruction.  The only difference is that this time a monster was supposed to be involved.  It's not the most original idea out there.  Cronenberg, for instance, did it better with The Fly, like I said.  The funny thing is how it is at least arguable that Corman helped keep the blueprint for this sort of narrative alive, even if the final results were less than stellar.  It's sort of the odd thing about his pictures.  Sometimes even his lesser efforts can leave some measure of positive impact.

At other times, its more the case of a fair to decent enough film that maybe deserves at least bit more credit than it usually gets.  For instance, it came as a pleasant surprise to learn from The Criterion Collection, of all people, that Corman was a lifelong feminist, and that it was a point he tried to get across in films like It Conquered the World, or Teenage Doll.  Even in pure schlock fests like Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, it is the female cast members who act as the driving forces of the plot.  Hell, at one point, it's a girl who winds up saving one of the male characters from death at the tusks of a wild boar.  It was a surprisingly consistent staple for a filmmaker in the 1950s, and its to Roger's credit that this aspect of his work is getting the recognition it deserves.  There's one other laudable aspect of his films, and that was his stance as a staunch civil rights advocate.  His best showing of this aspect of his career is seen in a film called The Intruder, yet that belongs very much in the top tier shelf level of Corman's efforts.  The good news is this moral stance is on prominent display even in his second best films.  Let's put it this way.  If anyone reading this considers themselves a fan of the icon that is Pam Grier, then Roger is one of the many artists out there who were willing to let her have her voice up on the screen.  Another way to say it might be this.  If Corman hadn't given her first big breakout starring roles, then either Tarantino's Jackie Brown doesn't exist, or else it is a very different thing altogether from the film we now have.  Beyond all of these personal strengths, sometimes Roger was capable of churning out a B film of enough quirky quality in its creativity as to be worth watching on its own, warped, wacky, yet somehow endearing terms.  Even I have to admit the charm of a space carrot.

That brings us to the director at his best.  The third and final shelf of Corman's filmography contains the films that showcase the man at his absolute best.  These are the pictures where a simple yet careful viewing shows us what it's like to realize that the filmmaker was capable of rising to the level of a genuine (albeit perhaps forever underappreciated) artist.  It just appears to be something he was always capable of.  The one precondition necessary for this to be true was that the creative idea had to be something that challenged his Imagination.  Whenever that happened, you got results like The Masque of the Red Death, The Wild Angels, or The Intruder.  Of all the films Corman ever did, it was this Noir inflected story of prejudice in a small town that seems to have been the one he remained proudest of.  Besides all that, you've the entire collection of Poe Picture adaptations that he made with Vincent Price.  It's these assorted handful of efforts that cement Corman's reputation as both a pioneer in the Horror genre, as well as a classic film director in his own right.  These works, to my mind, belie his reputation as just "The King of the Bs".  If I had to take a guess, I'd say it's a combination of shifting tastes mixed in with chronological snobbery and bad word of mouth which has saddled him with such notoriety.

It's still a shame, because as I've argued above, even his genuine B level efforts have some level of genuine artistry in them.  The problem is the ability to see these aspects with any sort of clarity takes a certain level of patience and concentration that this age of digital blockbusters seems to discourage.  The upshot is that it isn't just Corman who's had to suffer from such critical negligence.  Pretty much the entire catalogue of films and artists from the Golden Age of Hollywood up to the 1970s have seen their reputations and prestige fall into disfavor.  In the case of films like Song of the South that's understandable.  For films like Casablanca, however?  Call me crazy, I just think that's kind of a sad state of affairs.  Something tells me Corman might have thought the same.  In a way, then, I guess that kind of  explains the final aspect to this whole article.  I meant it when I said this was to be a tribute to one of the great unsung directors of Tinsel Town's past.  At the same time, however, I suppose you could say that it's meant as a clarion call of sorts.  An effort to defend all the best that cinema's past has to offer for modern audiences.  Not just the classics, either, but also forgotten names like Corman's.

With that in mind, I leave off this tribute in the best way I can think of.  Enclosed with this article is a short film adaptation by indie filmmaker Ben Wickey.  So far as I can tell, he appears to be one of the many heirs to the stop motion animation style pioneered by the likes of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass.  For anyone who was ever a fan of their particular Holiday themed style of storytelling, Wickey might be able to deliver on a lot of that old school charm.  The major difference is he puts all those same techniques to work in service of a distinct and palpable Gothic sensibility.  It's not just any random Horror show that Wickey has decided to put on either.  It's nothing less than an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables.  If I'm being honest, in terms of both execution and fidelity to the source material, this might just be my favorite adaptation of Hawthorne's novel.  It's a charming, shocking, and therefore winning performance on the part of the director and his talented crew and they all deserve a lot of recognition and accolades.  However, even if this sounds all well and good, it still raises one very important question.  What the hell has any of this to do with Roger Corman?

The answer is pretty simple, or at least it can be once you realize that in fashioning his stop-motion opus, Wickey is doing nothing less than drawing on Corman's entire work and aesthetic in order to create his film.  This can be seen in the intricate details and homages to the King of the Bs that Wickey packs into his film.  Among the most notable are the title sequences which are a deliberate callback to the type of trippy, surrealist, early to mid 60s counterculture era title sequences that Roger used for the credit sequences for some of his best films.  These would include his adaptations of House of Usher, and Pit and the Pendulum.  The effect was originally achieved by filling up a black plastic tub filled with clear water, and then slowly dropping in all sorts of paint colors (mostly red, blue, yellow; but above all blood red) to create this slow building kaleidoscopic effect.  Like you were watching these eerie patterns emerge from nowhere, and slowly but surely start to coalesce into these trippy, Gothic mélange.  In his DVD commentary track for Pendulum, Corman said he came up with this slow-building visual idea as a way of suggesting the Unconscious Mind.  His intention seems to have been the desire to give audiences as close an idea of what that unseen mental process was truly like.

Corman went on to claim that in addition to creating this creepy, abstract expressionist idea of what the Imagination might be like, he also wanted to create the suggestion that we were kind of watching these abstract shapes and colors morph and meld into one another in order to create the movie we were about to see.  In other words, he tried to create the subliminal suggestion that the audience was watching Poe's narrative emerge from the depths of this primordial, psychedelic, Gothic Cauldron of Story.  A partial explanation for why Roger would want to try and create that kind of weirded out effect is to point out that first of all, it was the 60s.  A lot of creative types were starting to discover the LSD scene, and this seems to have been an early expression of it.  At the same time, the funny thing is how such obtuse creative choices somehow manage to work, especially in a generic Horror mode of expression.  It just manages to sell the idea that we are immersing ourselves into this strange other realm of the uncanny.  Whenever I maintain that Corman deserves to be thought of as an artist, or that he helps to suggest an idea of the Horror story reaching somewhere among its highest yet forgotten peaks, it's usually films and sequences like this that I'm pointing to.  The good news is Wickey seems to feel the same way.

That's why all of the setups, lighting, and shot compositions that Wickey composes for his animated feature all seem to be drawn from, or else have stepped fresh and pristine out of any number of Roger's best efforts.  Or perhaps another way to say it is that it's like looking at a missing Hammer Horror picture.  The kind of films that gave guys like Christopher Lee his first start in the movies, in other words.  It's of that good a quality.  The final aspect of Wickey's film that signals it's debt to the former American International Pictures auteur is the indie director's choice to fashion one of the novel's key characters into the exact likeness of Vincent Price.  This is an obvious enough creative choice when you consider that Price was more or less the main star in all of Roger's best work.  His was the face that was most often associated with the AIP style of Horror.  So much so that whenever anyone bothers to remember who Roger was, it's most often in his association with Price.  In that respect, it's sort of no wonder that Wickey chose to essentially try and resurrect Tim Burton's favorite actor of all time for one last bravo performance.  It's to his credit that by using nothing more than a simple puppet, Wickey is able to capture the look, gazes, and mannerisms of the famous Horror icon down to a T.

If I had any complaints to make about it, it's that the director of this adaptation didn't consult someone who was able to mimic Price's distinct, almost baroque style of speaking.  In fact, I want to say there was this one guy who made (probably he even still makes) a living by performing as Price himself.  Here's the part where I plant a "Kick Me" sign on my back, because for the life of me I can no longer remember this guys name.  I just know he does a pitch perfect vocal performance as Price, and that he would have been perfect for the role of Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon.  Beyond that, it's also worth noting that the character of Matthew Maule, the catalyst character whose death sets the whole plot in action does seem (to this viewer's eyes, anyway) to bear a distinct resemblance to Corman in terms of facial features.  Indeed, it's possible to imagine a version where, if Vincent and Roger where still alive and kicking, Wickey might have tried coaxing the B King into voicing the figure of Maule opposite Price.  Yeah, it's just a bit of fun fan speculation, yet that seems to be what good art is capable of.  By tapping into the spirit of Corman's AIP films, he is able to recall that type of storytelling and acting back to life. 

All the creepy charm that made Price a household name for at least three generations of kids well into the 80s and 90s is given a second form in just this one, simple puppet figure.  It's done with enough skill to the point that it becomes easy to hear the original actor the model is based off of in your head.  It makes me kind of sad that Price never got the chance to voice this character.  This is true not only because Price was familiar with Hawthorne's source material from previous work, but also because there would have been a sense of going back to one's roots for the great cinema villain.  Much like with the respect that Burton was able to pay to Price with his own short film a long time ago, so Wickey has been able to do the same here with an adaptation of one of the first major Horror novels in American history.  Without going way too much into spoiler territory, I can say that the character modeled on Price is given the kind of send off that old Vince would have been proud of.    It's done well enough to the point where I'd have to say Ben Wickey is responsible for giving us one final posthumous Corman opus.  It's the best tribute I can think of for one of the unsung titans in the history of cinema.