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B movies (1980s to the present)
Encyclopedia
Cinematic exhibition of the B movie
, defined as a relatively low-cost genre film, has declined substantially from the early 1980s to the present. Spurred by the historic success of several big-budget movies with B-style themes beginning in the mid-1970s, the major Hollywood studios moved progressively into the production of A-grade films in genres that had long been low-budget territory. With the majors also adopting exploitation
-derived methods of booking and marketing, B movies began to be squeezed out of the commercial arena. The advent of digital cinema
in the new millennium appeared to open up new opportunities for the distribution of inexpensive genre movies.
collapsed or were subsumed by larger companies as the field's financial situation changed in the early 1980s. Even a comparatively cheap, efficiently made genre picture intended for theatrical release began to cost millions of dollars, as the major movie studios steadily moved into the production of expensive genre movies, raising audience expectations for spectacular action sequences and realistic special effects. Intimations of the trend were evident as early as Airport (1969) and especially in the mega-schlock of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake
(1973), and The Towering Inferno
(1974). Their disaster plots and dialogue were B-grade at best; from an industry perspective, however, these were pictures firmly rooted in the tradition of star-stuffed extravaganzas like The Ten Commandments
(1956) and Around the World in Eighty Days
(1956). The Exorcist
(1973) and, though not effects-driven, George Lucas
's American Graffiti
(1973) were the first serious steps in Hollywood's transformation into an industry built around high-budget B-themed movies. But the tidal shift in the majors' focus owed largely to the enormous success of three films: Steven Spielberg
's creature feature
Jaws
(1975) and Lucas's space opera
Star Wars
(1977) had each, in turn, become the highest-grossing film in motion picture history. Superman, released in December 1978, had proved that a studio could spend $55 million on a movie about a children's comic book character and make a very handsome profit. Not an all-time record-breaker like Jaws and Star Wars, it was merely the biggest box-office hit of 1979. Blockbuster fantasy spectacles like the original, 1933 King Kong
had once been exceptional; in the new Hollywood, increasingly under the sway of multi-industrial conglomerates, they would rule.
It had taken a decade and half, from 1961 to 1976, for the production cost of the average Hollywood feature to double from $2 million to $4 million—actually a decline if adjusted for inflation. In just four years it more than doubled again, hitting $8.5 million in 1980 (a constant-dollar increase of about 25 percent). Even as the U.S. inflation rate eased, the average expense of moviemaking would continue to soar. With the majors now routinely saturation booking in over a thousand theaters, it was becoming increasingly difficult for smaller outfits to secure the exhibition commitments needed to turn a profit. Revival house
s were now the almost-exclusive preserve of the double feature. One of the first leading casualties of the new economic regime was venerable B studio Allied Artists
, which declared bankruptcy in April 1979. In the late 1970s, American International Pictures
(AIP) had moved into the production of relatively expensive comedies and genre films like the very successful Amityville Horror
and the disastrous, $20 million Meteor
in 1979. That same year, the studio was sold off to Filmways
, a company with a history in TV production, and was dissolved as a moviemaking concern by the end of 1980. Capitalizing on the popularity of Hercules
, in 1960 Roger Corman
had made Atlas for a total of $75,000. In 1982, Universal
released a movie in the same tradition: fantasy plus muscles. The lead role was to be played by an Austrian-born actor with a great reputation as a bodybuilder but entirely unproven as a major film star. Adjusting for inflation, the cost of Atlas was about $400,000 in 1982 dollars. Production cost on Conan the Barbarian was an estimated $20 million. Hercules had opened in 600 theaters, an astonishing figure at the time. Conan opened in 1,395, making it one of more than twenty movies that year to open at over 900 theaters.
Despite the mounting financial pressures, distribution obstacles, and overall risk, a substantial number of genre movies from small studios and independent filmmakers were still reaching theaters. In September 1980, Corman released his most expensive movie to date: Battle Beyond the Stars
, with screenplay by John Sayles
and art direction by James Cameron
, cost his New World Pictures a grand total of $2 million. By comparison, the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back
, which came out three-and-a-half months before the Corman epic, was originally budgeted at $18.5 million and wound up costing $33 million, triple the cost of Star Wars just three years before. Horror was the strongest low-budget genre of the time, particularly in the "slasher
" mode as with The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), directed by Amy Holden-Jones and written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown
. The film was produced for New World on a budget of $250,000. At the beginning of 1983, Corman sold New World; New Horizons, later Concorde–New Horizons, became his primary company. In 1984, New Horizons released a critically applauded movie set amid the punk scene
written and directed by Penelope Spheeris
. Vincent Canby's admiring review ends with a definitive compliment: "Suburbia
is a good genre film."
Writer-director Larry Cohen
continued to twist genre conventions in pictures such as Q
(aka Q: The Winged Serpent; 1982): "the kind of movie that used to be indispensable to the market: an imaginative, popular, low-budget picture that makes the most of its limited resources, and in which people get on with the job instead of standing around talking about it." In 1981, New Line Cinema
put out Polyester
, a John Waters
movie with an estimated $300,000 budget and an old-school exploitation gimmick: Odorama. In October that year, a gore-filled yet stylish horror movie made for less than $400,000 was premiered at a theater in Detroit. The writer, director, and co–executive producer of The Book of the Dead, Sam Raimi
, was a week shy of his twenty-second birthday; star and co–executive producer Bruce Campbell
was twenty-three. Retitled The Evil Dead
, it was picked up for distribution by New Line in 1983 and became a critical and commercial hit. Comparing it to Night of the Living Dead, one reviewer said "it achieves a similarly claustrophobic intensity on a microscopic budget. It's a shoestring tour de force."
One of the most successful B-movie companies of the 1980s was a survivor from the heyday of the exploitation era, Troma Pictures
, founded in 1974. Troma's most characteristic productions, including Class of Nuke 'Em High
(1986), Redneck Zombies
(1986), and Surf Nazis Must Die
(1987), take exploitation for an absurdist spin. Troma also built on another B-studio tradition: re-releasing the often embarrassing early films of actors turning into major stars. In 1986, the company acquired and distributed two unreleased films, Sizzle Beach U.S.A. (shot in 1974) and Shadows Run Black (shot in 1981), capitalizing on performances by Kevin Costner
, who had recently appeared in the popular Silverado (1985) and was set to headline The Untouchables
(1987). Troma's best-known production is The Toxic Avenger
(1985), whose hero, after plunging into a vat of toxic waste
while attempting to escape a loathsome gang of tormentors, mutates into a hideous creature with enhanced physical strength and revenge on what's left of his mind. After the film's successful release, the character, affectionately known as Toxie, became the symbol of Troma and an icon of the 1980s B movie. One of the few successful B-studio startups of the decade was Rome-based Empire Pictures
, whose first production, Ghoulies
, reached theaters in 1985. Despite other profitable ventures such as Re-Animator
(1985), financial difficulties forced the company's American founder to sell it off in 1988.
The growth of the cable television
industry in the 1980s helped support the low-budget film market, as many B movies quickly wound up as "filler" material for 24-hour cable channels or were made expressly for that purpose. The broadcast version of the midnight movie remained popular: the nationally syndicated Movie Macabre package starring Cassandra Peterson
—aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark—was essentially a brassier copy of The Vampira Show
, presenting mostly low-budget horror films interspersed with Elvira's satiric commentary and abundant display of cleavage. The video rental market was also becoming central to B-film economics: Empire's financial model, for instance, relied on seeing a profit not from theatrical rentals, but only later, at the video store. A number of Concorde–New Horizon releases appeared only briefly in theaters, or not at all.
and Dick Tracy. Three more—the science-fiction thriller Total Recall
, the action-filled detective thriller Die Hard 2
, and the year's biggest hit, the slapstick kiddie comedy Home Alone
—were also far closer to the traditional arena of the B's than to classic A-list subject matter. The growing popularity of home video and access to unedited movies on cable and satellite television
along with real estate pressures were making survival more difficult for the sort of small- or non-chain theaters that were the primary home of independently produced genre films. Drive-in screens were rapidly disappearing from the American landscape: between 1987 and 1990, the number in operation fell from 2,507 to 910.
Surviving B-movie operations adapted in different ways. Releases from Troma now frequently went straight to video
. As if in farewell, the company brought a title to the big screen in 1991 that summed up much of the preceding three-and-a-half decades of B movies: Chopper Chicks in Zombietown
. Empire's founder, Charles Band, started a new production company, Full Moon
, specifically to address the direct-to-video market. New Line, in its first decade, had been almost exclusively a distributor of low-budget independent and foreign genre pictures. With the smash success of exploitation veteran Wes Craven
's original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), whose nearly $2 million cost it had directly backed, the company began moving steadily into higher-budget genre productions. In 1994, New Line was sold to the Turner Broadcasting System
; it was soon being run as a midsized studio with a broad range of product alongside Warner Bros.
within the Time Warner
conglomerate. The following year, Showtime launched Roger Corman Presents, a series of thirteen straight-to-cable movies produced by Concorde–New Horizons. A New York Times reviewer found that the initial installment qualified as "vintage Corman...spiked with everything from bared female breasts to a mind-blowing quote from Thomas Mann
's Death in Venice
."
At the same time as exhibition venues for B films vanished, the independent film movement was burgeoning; among the results were various crossovers between the low-budget genre movie and the "sophisticated" arthouse picture. Director Abel Ferrara
, who built a reputation with violent B movies such as The Driller Killer
(1979) and Ms. 45
(1981), made two works in the early nineties that marry exploitation-worthy depictions of sex, drugs, and general sleaze to complex examinations of honor and redemption: King of New York
(1990) was backed by a group of mostly small production companies and the cost of Bad Lieutenant
(1992), $1.8 million, was financed totally independently. Ferrara followed these two movies with Body Snatchers (1993), a major-studio remake of the sci-fi classic and an acknowledgment of his debt to the B's of an earlier generation. Larry Fessenden
's micro-budget monster movies, such as No Telling (1991) and Habit (1997), reframe classic genre subjects—Frankenstein
and vampirism
, respectively—to explore issues of contemporary relevance—animal experimentation, ecological destruction, drug addiction, and fin-de-siècle urban romance. Written and directed by Jeremy Horton, 100 Proof
(1997) is based on the true story of a killing spree that occurred in Lexington, Kentucky
, a decade earlier. Praising its authentic depiction of the impoverished milieu in which it is set, critics variously described its style as evoking a home movie or a reality-style TV police series. Joe Leydon of Variety
, capturing the way it crossed the line between genre and art film, called it a "diamond in the rough, or at least a shiny bit of jagged rhinestone."
David Cronenberg
, one of the leading B-movie auteurs of the 1970s, had stepped up in financial grade with Scanners
(1980), a $3.5 million production that Time
critic Richard Corliss
associated with his earlier, low-budget films as well as George A. Romero
's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and John Carpenter
's The Fog
(1980) as "hip parables of contemporary moral malaise." Cronenberg's crowning achievement in that vein would come a decade and a half later: Like that of Scanners in 1980, the budget of Crash
, $10 million, wasn't comfortably A-grade by 1996, but it was hardly B-level either. The film's imagery was another matter: "On its scandalizing surface, David Cronenberg's Crash suggests exploitation at its most disturbingly sick," is how Janet Maslin
's New York Times review begins. The review ends with an explanation of the film's rating: "Crash has the NC-17 rating (No one under 17 admitted) that it fully deserves. It includes frontal nudity, many sexual encounters and coolly grotesque situations linking sex and violence in graphic, sickening ways." Financed, like King of New York, by a consortium of production companies, it was ultimately picked up for U.S. distribution by Fine Line Features
. In more ways than one, this result resonated perfectly with the way the film scrambled definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire—specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor's arthouse division.
and another initiating a series, as well as a remake
of a 1971 film
), a child-targeted cartoon
, a comic book adaptation
, a sci-fi series installment
, a sci-fi remake
, and a King Kong remake
. It was a slow year for Corman: he produced just one movie, which had no American theatrical release, true of most of the pictures he had been involved in recently. Bloodfist 2050, directed by long-time B filmmaker and Corman collaborator Cirio H. Santiago
, went straight to DVD in the United States. Ultrawide openings at many thousands of theaters were becoming the norm. In May 2007 alone, three fantasy blockbusters—Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (third in a series based on an amusement-park ride), Spider-Man 3
(third in a series based on a superhero comic book), and Shrek the Third
(third in a series of "family" cartoons)—each opened on over 10,000 screens. As big-budget Hollywood movies further usurped the genre territories that were traditionally the domain of the B's, the ongoing viability of the familiar brand of B movie was in grave doubt. Critic A. O. Scott
of the New York Times warned of the impending "extinction" of
On the other hand, recent industry trends suggest the reemergence of something that looks very like the traditional A-B split in major studio production, though with fewer "programmers" bridging the gap. According to a 2006 report by industry analyst Alfonso Marone, "The average budget for a Hollywood movie is currently around $60m, rising to $100m when the cost of marketing for domestic launch (USA only) is factored into the equation. However, we are now witnessing a polarisation of film budgets into two tiers: large productions ($120–150m) and niche features ($5–20m). The rationale is that the likelihood of success is maximised by coupling ultra-large budget and highly marketable features (e.g., Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
), with multiple low-cost bets (e.g., Little Miss Sunshine
). Fewer $30–70m releases are expected."
Little Miss Sunshine was produced by Fox Searchlight, the major studio's pseudo-indie
subsidiary, for $8 million. With its quirky, "indie"-style comedy, the film hardly meets any conventional definition of a B movie beyond its relatively small budget, but the sorts of movies embraced by the term have shifted drastically before. Classic film noir
's combination of visual beauty and verbal wit, for instance, was hardly common coin in exploitation-era B filmmaking. Further expanding the field, Fox launched a new subsidiary in 2006, Fox Atomic
, to concentrate on teen-oriented genre films (horror in particular, at first, then increasingly comedy, as well). The genre focus was similar to that of Sony
's Screen Gems
division and the Weinsteins
' Dimension Films
, but the economic model was deliberately low-rent, at least by major studio standards. According to a Variety
report, "Fox Atomic is staying at or below the $10 million mark for many of its movies. It's also encouraging filmmakers to shoot digitally—a cheaper process that results in a grittier, teen-friendly look. And forget about stars. Of Atomic's nine announced films, not one has a big-name." In sum, this was an updated version of a Golden Age big studio B unit targeting a market very similar to the one Samuel Z. Arkoff
and James H. Nicholson
's AIP helped define in the 1950s. Despite its low budgets and consequently low benchmarks for profitability, Fox Atomic's output was seen as unsuccessful by its parent company, which shut it down in 2009.
In a development hinted at by the Variety quotation above, technological advances are greatly facilitating the production of truly low-budget motion pictures. Although there have always been economical means with which to shoot movies, including Super 8
and 16 mm film
, as well as video
cameras recording onto analog
videotape
, these mediums could hardly rival the image quality of 35 mm film
. The development and widespread usage of digital cameras
and postproduction methods allow even low-budget filmmakers to produce films with excellent (and not necessarily "grittier") image quality and precise editing effects—though technical excellence is no guarantee of aesthetic value or even cinematographic competence. As Marone observes, "the equipment budget (camera, support) required for shooting digital is approximately 1/10 that for film, significantly lowering the production budget for independent features." Comparing circumstances in 2006 to those just a couple of years earlier, he argues that the "quality of digital filmmaking has improved dramatically."
Independent filmmakers, whether working in a genre or arthouse mode, continue to find it difficult to gain access to distribution channels, though so-called digital end-to-end methods of distribution offer new opportunities. The so-called day-and-date strategy, in a which a film is released simultaneously in theaters as well as DVD and/or cable, may offer a way for the true low-budget B movie to regain some of the audience it has lost. In a similar fashion, the popularity of Internet sites such as YouTube
have opened up entirely new avenues for the presentation of motion pictures made on a shoestring. Abel Ferrara, envisioning his first digital film, says, "I want to do it on the Internet...and put it out in 10-minute increments. I know that watching films on computer is the future—it's a direct connection to the audience."
Many of these developments have come together to create a boom in a relatively new form of low-budget genre picture. The fan film, typically an unauthorized production set in the imaginary universe of a popular genre movie or TV series, may be thought of as the most widespread present incarnation of the B movie. "Arguably the first fan film was Hardware Wars
, a short spoof from 1977 depicting toasters and egg-beaters fighting in space," according to journalist Curt Holman. "In the first decade of the new millenni[um], fan films have grown exponentially in quantity and improved significantly in quality and ambition...[t]hanks to digital cameras, affordable editing software and online distribution." In 2002, Lucasfilm
created a yearly award ceremony for noncommercial fan films, arranging to screen them online via AtomFilms (purchased in 2006 by MTV Networks
). Star Wars: Revelations (2005), a 40-minute drama directed by Shane Felux for a production cost of $20,000, has apparently been downloaded by millions. Similar projects are designed as "episodes" set in the TV-based Star Trek
and Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes. A parallel development in fan culture has been inspired in part by the direct-to-video market, whose products garner little notice and less respect in mainstream culture. According to scholar Linda Ruth Williams, the "new B-movie culture runs on the convoluted equation that cheap means bad which means good. Such products garner far more respect from fans because they manage to press the same buttons on one million dollars (or less) rather than one hundred million (or more)."
Since 2006, The Asylum
—a production company founded in 1997—has specialized in low-budget pictures also inspired by the big-budget films that have largely usurped the B movie's place in the theatrical market. The company makes what one critic dubbed "mockbuster
s", straight-to-video knockoffs of major studio action pictures: Transformers, for instance, is transformed into The Asylum's Transmorphers
. Another commercial relative of the fan film is the overt B-movie homage. Quentin Tarantino
and Robert Rodriguez
's Grindhouse (2007) nods to a wide variety of exploitation styles popular from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Criticizing the film, notwithstanding its "posture of cool," as yet another "blockbuster B-movie," Adario Strange places it in historical context: "Despite themselves, Tarantino and Rodriguez have the right idea. As the tools for filmmaking have become cheaper and more malleable, now is the time for rough, ugly, experimental films to shine again as they did in the '70s. The problem for these directors is that they are just too rich, too well-connected and too self-aware to produce films that are truly spit and chewing gum, bleeding-edge like Eric Nicholas' Alone With Her
, Vincent Gallo
's The Brown Bunny
or Shane Carruth
's Primer
—films most Americans will never see."
B movie
A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....
, defined as a relatively low-cost genre film, has declined substantially from the early 1980s to the present. Spurred by the historic success of several big-budget movies with B-style themes beginning in the mid-1970s, the major Hollywood studios moved progressively into the production of A-grade films in genres that had long been low-budget territory. With the majors also adopting exploitation
Exploitation film
Exploitation film is a type of film that is promoted by "exploiting" often lurid subject matter. The term "exploitation" is common in film marketing, used for all types of films to mean promotion or advertising. These films then need something to exploit, such as a big star, special effects, sex,...
-derived methods of booking and marketing, B movies began to be squeezed out of the commercial arena. The advent of digital cinema
Digital video
Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...
in the new millennium appeared to open up new opportunities for the distribution of inexpensive genre movies.
The B movie loses its place: 1980s
Most of the B-movie production houses founded during the exploitation eraB movies (The exploitation boom)
The 1960s and 1970s mark the golden age of the independent B movie, made outside of Hollywood's major film studios. As censorship pressures lifted in the early 1960s, the low-budget end of the American motion picture industry increasingly incorporated the sort of sexual and violent elements long...
collapsed or were subsumed by larger companies as the field's financial situation changed in the early 1980s. Even a comparatively cheap, efficiently made genre picture intended for theatrical release began to cost millions of dollars, as the major movie studios steadily moved into the production of expensive genre movies, raising audience expectations for spectacular action sequences and realistic special effects. Intimations of the trend were evident as early as Airport (1969) and especially in the mega-schlock of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake
Earthquake (film)
Earthquake is a 1974 American disaster film that achieved huge box-office success, continuing the disaster film genre of the 1970s where recognizable all-star casts attempt to survive life or death situations...
(1973), and The Towering Inferno
The Towering Inferno (film)
The Towering Inferno is a 1974 American action disaster film produced by Irwin Allen featuring an all-star cast led by Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.A co-production between Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros...
(1974). Their disaster plots and dialogue were B-grade at best; from an industry perspective, however, these were pictures firmly rooted in the tradition of star-stuffed extravaganzas like The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments (1956 film)
The Ten Commandments is a 1956 American epic film that dramatized the biblical story of the Exodus, in which the Hebrew-born Moses, an adopted Egyptian prince, becomes the deliverer of the Hebrew slaves. The film, released by Paramount Pictures in VistaVision on October 5, 1956, was directed by...
(1956) and Around the World in Eighty Days
Around the World in Eighty Days (1956 film)
Around the World in 80 Days is a 1956 adventure film produced by the Michael Todd Company and released by United Artists. It was directed by Michael Anderson. It was produced by Michael Todd, with Kevin McClory and William Cameron Menzies as associate producers. The screenplay was written by James...
(1956). The Exorcist
The Exorcist (film)
The Exorcist is a 1973 American horror film directed by William Friedkin, adapted from the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty and based on the exorcism case of Robbie Mannheim, dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl and her mother’s desperate attempts to win back her...
(1973) and, though not effects-driven, George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
's American Graffiti
American Graffiti
American Graffiti is a 1973 coming of age film co-written/directed by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford...
(1973) were the first serious steps in Hollywood's transformation into an industry built around high-budget B-themed movies. But the tidal shift in the majors' focus owed largely to the enormous success of three films: Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
's creature feature
Monster movie
Monster movie is a name commonly given to movies, which centre on the struggle between human beings and one or more monsters...
Jaws
Jaws (film)
Jaws is a 1975 American horror-thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. In the story, the police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant man-eating great white shark by closing the beach,...
(1975) and Lucas's space opera
Space opera
Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities. The term has no relation to music and it is analogous to "soap...
Star Wars
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the...
(1977) had each, in turn, become the highest-grossing film in motion picture history. Superman, released in December 1978, had proved that a studio could spend $55 million on a movie about a children's comic book character and make a very handsome profit. Not an all-time record-breaker like Jaws and Star Wars, it was merely the biggest box-office hit of 1979. Blockbuster fantasy spectacles like the original, 1933 King Kong
King Kong (1933 film)
King Kong is a Pre-Code 1933 fantasy monster adventure film co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and written by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman after a story by Cooper and Edgar Wallace. The film tells of a gigantic island-dwelling apeman creature called Kong who dies in...
had once been exceptional; in the new Hollywood, increasingly under the sway of multi-industrial conglomerates, they would rule.
Revival house
A revival house or repertory cinema is a term for a cinema that specializes in showing classic or notable older films . Such venues may include standard repertory cinemas, multi-function theatres that alternate between old movies and live events, and some first-run theatres that show past...
s were now the almost-exclusive preserve of the double feature. One of the first leading casualties of the new economic regime was venerable B studio Allied Artists
Monogram Pictures
Monogram Pictures Corporation is a Hollywood studio that produced and released films, most on low budgets, between 1931 and 1953, when the firm completed a transition to the name Allied Artists Pictures Corporation. Monogram is considered a leader among the smaller studios sometimes referred to...
, which declared bankruptcy in April 1979. In the late 1970s, American International Pictures
American International Pictures
American International Pictures was a film production company formed in April 1956 from American Releasing Corporation by James H. Nicholson, former Sales Manager of Realart Pictures, and Samuel Z. Arkoff, an entertainment lawyer...
(AIP) had moved into the production of relatively expensive comedies and genre films like the very successful Amityville Horror
The Amityville Horror (1979 film)
The Amityville Horror is a 1979 American horror film based on the bestselling 1977 novel of the same name by Jay Anson. It is the first movie in the Amityville Horror franchise....
and the disastrous, $20 million Meteor
Meteor (film)
Meteor is a 1979 science fiction Technicolor disaster film in which scientists detect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and struggle with international, cold war politics in their efforts to prevent disaster. The movie starred Sean Connery and Natalie Wood.It was directed by Ronald Neame...
in 1979. That same year, the studio was sold off to Filmways
Filmways
Filmways, Inc. was a television and film production company founded by American film executive Martin Ransohoff in 1958...
, a company with a history in TV production, and was dissolved as a moviemaking concern by the end of 1980. Capitalizing on the popularity of Hercules
Hercules (1958 film)
Hercules is a 1958 Italian epic fantasy feature film based upon the Hercules myths and the Quest for the Golden Fleece. The film stars Steve Reeves as the titular hero and Sylva Koscina as his love interest Princess Iole. Hercules was directed by Pietro Francisci and produced by Federico Teti...
, in 1960 Roger Corman
Roger Corman
Roger William Corman is an American film producer, director and actor. He has mostly worked on low-budget B movies. Some of Corman's work has an established critical reputation, such as his cycle of films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 2009 he won an Honorary Academy Award for...
had made Atlas for a total of $75,000. In 1982, Universal
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
released a movie in the same tradition: fantasy plus muscles. The lead role was to be played by an Austrian-born actor with a great reputation as a bodybuilder but entirely unproven as a major film star. Adjusting for inflation, the cost of Atlas was about $400,000 in 1982 dollars. Production cost on Conan the Barbarian was an estimated $20 million. Hercules had opened in 600 theaters, an astonishing figure at the time. Conan opened in 1,395, making it one of more than twenty movies that year to open at over 900 theaters.
Despite the mounting financial pressures, distribution obstacles, and overall risk, a substantial number of genre movies from small studios and independent filmmakers were still reaching theaters. In September 1980, Corman released his most expensive movie to date: Battle Beyond the Stars
Battle Beyond the Stars
Battle Beyond the Stars is a Roger Corman-produced science fiction film, directed by Jimmy T. Murakami and released in 1980. The film, intended as a "Magnificent Seven in outer space," is a pastiche of The Magnificent Seven, the Western remake of Akira Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai...
, with screenplay by John Sayles
John Sayles
John Thomas Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter and author.-Early life:Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York, the son of Mary , a teacher, and Donald John Sayles, a school administrator. He was raised Catholic and took to labeling himself "a Catholic atheist"...
and art direction by James Cameron
James Cameron
James Francis Cameron is a Canadian-American film director, film producer, screenwriter, editor, environmentalist and inventor...
, cost his New World Pictures a grand total of $2 million. By comparison, the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back is a 1980 American epic space opera film directed by Irvin Kershner. The screenplay, based on a story by George Lucas, was written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan...
, which came out three-and-a-half months before the Corman epic, was originally budgeted at $18.5 million and wound up costing $33 million, triple the cost of Star Wars just three years before. Horror was the strongest low-budget genre of the time, particularly in the "slasher
Slasher film
A slasher film is a type of horror film typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe...
" mode as with The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), directed by Amy Holden-Jones and written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown
Rita Mae Brown
Rita Mae Brown is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel Rubyfruit Jungle. Published in 1973, it dealt with lesbian themes in an explicit manner unusual for the time...
. The film was produced for New World on a budget of $250,000. At the beginning of 1983, Corman sold New World; New Horizons, later Concorde–New Horizons, became his primary company. In 1984, New Horizons released a critically applauded movie set amid the punk scene
Punk subculture
The punk subculture includes a diverse array of ideologies, and forms of expression, including fashion, visual art, dance, literature, and film, which grew out of punk rock.-History:...
written and directed by Penelope Spheeris
Penelope Spheeris
Penelope Spheeris is an American director, producer and screenwriter. She is best known as a documentary film director whose works include the trilogy titled The Decline of Western Civilization...
. Vincent Canby's admiring review ends with a definitive compliment: "Suburbia
Suburbia (film)
Suburbia, also known as Rebel Streets and The Wild Side, is a 1984 film written and directed by Penelope Spheeris about suburban punks who run away from home. The kids take up a minimalist, punk lifestyle by squatting in abandoned suburban tract homes...
is a good genre film."
Writer-director Larry Cohen
Larry Cohen
Lawrence G. "Larry" Cohen is an American film producer, director, and screenwriter. He is best known as a B-Movie auteur of horror and science fiction films - often containing a police procedural element - during 1970s and 1980s...
continued to twist genre conventions in pictures such as Q
Q (film)
Q is a 1982 horror film written and directed by Larry Cohen and starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree.-Plot:...
(aka Q: The Winged Serpent; 1982): "the kind of movie that used to be indispensable to the market: an imaginative, popular, low-budget picture that makes the most of its limited resources, and in which people get on with the job instead of standing around talking about it." In 1981, New Line Cinema
New Line Cinema
New Line Cinema, often simply referred to as New Line, is an American film studio. It was founded in 1967 by Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne as a film distributor, later becoming an independent film studio. It became a subsidiary of Time Warner in 1996 and was merged with larger sister studio Warner...
put out Polyester
Polyester (film)
Polyester is a 1981 comedy film directed, produced, and written by John Waters, and starring Divine, Tab Hunter, Edith Massey, and Mink Stole...
, a John Waters
John Waters (filmmaker)
John Samuel Waters, Jr. is an American filmmaker, actor, stand-up comedian, writer, journalist, visual artist, and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films...
movie with an estimated $300,000 budget and an old-school exploitation gimmick: Odorama. In October that year, a gore-filled yet stylish horror movie made for less than $400,000 was premiered at a theater in Detroit. The writer, director, and co–executive producer of The Book of the Dead, Sam Raimi
Sam Raimi
Samuel Marshall "Sam" Raimi is an American film director, producer, actor and writer. He is best known for directing cult horror films like the Evil Dead series, Darkman and Drag Me to Hell, as well as the blockbuster Spider-Man films and the producer of the successful TV series Hercules: The...
, was a week shy of his twenty-second birthday; star and co–executive producer Bruce Campbell
Bruce Campbell
Bruce Lorne Campbell is an American film and television actor. As a cult movie actor, Campbell starred as Ashley J. "Ash" Williams in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series of films and he has starred in many low-budget cult films such as Crimewave, Maniac Cop, Bubba Ho-tep, Escape From L.A. and Sundown:...
was twenty-three. Retitled The Evil Dead
The Evil Dead
The Evil Dead is a 1981 horror film written and directed by Sam Raimi, starring Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, and Betsy Baker. The film is a story of five college students vacationing in an isolated cabin in a wooded area...
, it was picked up for distribution by New Line in 1983 and became a critical and commercial hit. Comparing it to Night of the Living Dead, one reviewer said "it achieves a similarly claustrophobic intensity on a microscopic budget. It's a shoestring tour de force."
One of the most successful B-movie companies of the 1980s was a survivor from the heyday of the exploitation era, Troma Pictures
Troma Entertainment
Troma Entertainment is an American independent film production and distribution company founded by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz in 1974.The company produces low-budget independent movies that play on 1950s horror with elements of farce...
, founded in 1974. Troma's most characteristic productions, including Class of Nuke 'Em High
Class of Nuke 'Em High
Class of Nuke 'Em High, also known as Atomic High School, is a 1986 film made by cult classic B-movie production group Troma Entertainment. It was directed by Richard W. Haines and Lloyd Kaufman under the pseudonym Samuel Weil...
(1986), Redneck Zombies
Redneck Zombies
Redneck Zombies is a 1987 very low budget independent horror comedy trash film directed by Pericles Lewnes and released by Troma Entertainment.-Plot:...
(1986), and Surf Nazis Must Die
Surf Nazis Must Die
Surf Nazis Must Die is a 1987 American comedy film directed by Peter George and starring Gail Neely, Barry Brenner, and Robert Harden. It was produced by The Institute, a production company formed by Peter George, Craig A...
(1987), take exploitation for an absurdist spin. Troma also built on another B-studio tradition: re-releasing the often embarrassing early films of actors turning into major stars. In 1986, the company acquired and distributed two unreleased films, Sizzle Beach U.S.A. (shot in 1974) and Shadows Run Black (shot in 1981), capitalizing on performances by Kevin Costner
Kevin Costner
Kevin Michael Costner is an American actor, singer, musician, producer, director, and businessman. He has been nominated for three BAFTA Awards, won two Academy Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Costner's roles include Lt. John J...
, who had recently appeared in the popular Silverado (1985) and was set to headline The Untouchables
The Untouchables (1987 film)
The Untouchables is a 1987 American crime-drama film directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Mamet. Based on the book The Untouchables, the film stars Kevin Costner as government agent Eliot Ness. It also stars Robert De Niro as gang leader Al Capone and Sean Connery as Irish-American...
(1987). Troma's best-known production is The Toxic Avenger
The Toxic Avenger
The Toxic Avenger is a 1984 comedy horror film released by Troma Entertainment, known for producing low budget B-movies with campy concepts. Virtually ignored upon its first release, The Toxic Avenger caught on with filmgoers after a long and successful midnight movie engagement at the famed...
(1985), whose hero, after plunging into a vat of toxic waste
Toxic waste
Toxic waste is waste material that can cause death or injury to living creatures. It spreads quite easily and can contaminate lakes and rivers. The term is often used interchangeably with “hazardous waste”, or discarded material that can pose a long-term risk to health or environment.Toxic waste...
while attempting to escape a loathsome gang of tormentors, mutates into a hideous creature with enhanced physical strength and revenge on what's left of his mind. After the film's successful release, the character, affectionately known as Toxie, became the symbol of Troma and an icon of the 1980s B movie. One of the few successful B-studio startups of the decade was Rome-based Empire Pictures
Empire International Pictures
Empire Pictures was a small scale theatrical distribution company that was formed in 1983 by Charles Band.The company produced a number of low-budget horror and fantasy features including Trancers and The Dungeonmaster...
, whose first production, Ghoulies
Ghoulies
The Ghoulies films are an American horror-comedy series released throughout the 1980s and 1990s and centered on a group of demons usually summoned by Satanic worshippers.-Ghoulies:...
, reached theaters in 1985. Despite other profitable ventures such as Re-Animator
Re-Animator
Re-Animator is a 1985 American science fiction horror film based on the H. P. Lovecraft story "Herbert West–Reanimator." Directed by Stuart Gordon, it was the first film in the Re-Animator series. The film has since become a cult film, driven by fans of Jeffrey Combs and H. P...
(1985), financial difficulties forced the company's American founder to sell it off in 1988.
The growth of the cable television
Cable television
Cable television is a system of providing television programs to consumers via radio frequency signals transmitted to televisions through coaxial cables or digital light pulses through fixed optical fibers located on the subscriber's property, much like the over-the-air method used in traditional...
industry in the 1980s helped support the low-budget film market, as many B movies quickly wound up as "filler" material for 24-hour cable channels or were made expressly for that purpose. The broadcast version of the midnight movie remained popular: the nationally syndicated Movie Macabre package starring Cassandra Peterson
Cassandra Peterson
Cassandra Peterson is an American actress best known for her on-screen horror hostess character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She gained fame on Los Angeles television station KHJ wearing a black, gothic, cleavage-enhancing gown as host of Movie Macabre, a weekly horror movie presentation...
—aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark—was essentially a brassier copy of The Vampira Show
Maila Nurmi
Maila Nurmi was a Finnish-American actress who created the campy 1950s characterVampira. She portrayed Vampira as TV's first horror host and in the Ed Wood cult film Plan 9 from Outer Space...
, presenting mostly low-budget horror films interspersed with Elvira's satiric commentary and abundant display of cleavage. The video rental market was also becoming central to B-film economics: Empire's financial model, for instance, relied on seeing a profit not from theatrical rentals, but only later, at the video store. A number of Concorde–New Horizon releases appeared only briefly in theaters, or not at all.
B's in the arthouse: 1990s
By 1990, the cost of the average U.S. film had passed $25 million. Of the nine films released that year to gross more than $100 million at the U.S. box office, two would have been strictly B-movie material before the late 1970s: Teenage Mutant Ninja TurtlesTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (film)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a 1990 American live-action film adaptation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise directed by Steve Barron. The film was followed by three sequels: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze in 1991, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III in 1993, and...
and Dick Tracy. Three more—the science-fiction thriller Total Recall
Total Recall
Total Recall is a 1990 American science fiction action film. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Ronny Cox & Mel Johnson, Jr.. It is based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”...
, the action-filled detective thriller Die Hard 2
Die Hard 2
Die Hard 2 is a 1990 action film and the second in the Die Hard film series. The film was directed by Renny Harlin, and stars Bruce Willis as John McClane...
, and the year's biggest hit, the slapstick kiddie comedy Home Alone
Home Alone
Home Alone is a 1990 American Christmas comedy film written and produced by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus. The film stars Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister, an eight-year-old boy, who is mistakenly left behind when his family flies to Paris for their Christmas vacation...
—were also far closer to the traditional arena of the B's than to classic A-list subject matter. The growing popularity of home video and access to unedited movies on cable and satellite television
Satellite television
Satellite television is television programming delivered by the means of communications satellite and received by an outdoor antenna, usually a parabolic mirror generally referred to as a satellite dish, and as far as household usage is concerned, a satellite receiver either in the form of an...
along with real estate pressures were making survival more difficult for the sort of small- or non-chain theaters that were the primary home of independently produced genre films. Drive-in screens were rapidly disappearing from the American landscape: between 1987 and 1990, the number in operation fell from 2,507 to 910.
Surviving B-movie operations adapted in different ways. Releases from Troma now frequently went straight to video
Direct-to-video
Direct-to-video is a term used to describe a film that has been released to the public on home video formats without being released in film theaters or broadcast on television...
. As if in farewell, the company brought a title to the big screen in 1991 that summed up much of the preceding three-and-a-half decades of B movies: Chopper Chicks in Zombietown
Chopper Chicks in Zombietown
Chopper Chicks In Zombietown is a 1989 comedy horror movie released by Troma, featuring Billy Bob Thornton.The film is about an all-female motorcycle gang named the 'Cycle Sluts', who cruise into the isolated town of Zariah looking for a good time...
. Empire's founder, Charles Band, started a new production company, Full Moon
Full Moon Features
Full Moon Features is a motion picture production and distribution company headed by B-movie veteran Charles Band. It is known for the direct-to-video series Puppet Master and Subspecies, as well as the innovative VideoZone featurette at the end of films through 1989 to 2000.-Full Moon...
, specifically to address the direct-to-video market. New Line, in its first decade, had been almost exclusively a distributor of low-budget independent and foreign genre pictures. With the smash success of exploitation veteran Wes Craven
Wes Craven
Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven is an American actor, film director, writer, producer, perhaps best known as the director of many horror films, particularly slasher films, including the famed A Nightmare on Elm Street and Wes Craven's New Nightmare, featuring the iconic Freddy Krueger character, the...
's original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), whose nearly $2 million cost it had directly backed, the company began moving steadily into higher-budget genre productions. In 1994, New Line was sold to the Turner Broadcasting System
Turner Broadcasting System
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. is the Time Warner subsidiary managing the collection of cable networks and properties started and acquired by Robert Edward "Ted" Turner starting in the mid-1970s. The company has its headquarters in the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia. TBS, Inc...
; it was soon being run as a midsized studio with a broad range of product alongside Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
within the Time Warner
Time Warner
Time Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...
conglomerate. The following year, Showtime launched Roger Corman Presents, a series of thirteen straight-to-cable movies produced by Concorde–New Horizons. A New York Times reviewer found that the initial installment qualified as "vintage Corman...spiked with everything from bared female breasts to a mind-blowing quote from Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
's Death in Venice
Death in Venice
The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1913 as Der Tod in Venedig. The plot of the work presents a great writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated and uplifted, then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a...
."
At the same time as exhibition venues for B films vanished, the independent film movement was burgeoning; among the results were various crossovers between the low-budget genre movie and the "sophisticated" arthouse picture. Director Abel Ferrara
Abel Ferrara
Abel Ferrara is an American film screenwriter and director. He is best known as an independent filmmaker of such films as The Driller Killer , Ms. 45 , King of New York , Bad Lieutenant and The Funeral .-Early life:Ferrara was born in the Bronx of Italian and Irish descent...
, who built a reputation with violent B movies such as The Driller Killer
The Driller Killer
The Driller Killer is a 1979 slasher film directed by and starring Abel Ferrara. It was on a list of banned so-called video nasties in the United Kingdom...
(1979) and Ms. 45
Ms. 45
Ms. 45, also known as Angel of Vengeance, is a 1981 American low-budget exploitation film directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Zoë Tamerlis Lund...
(1981), made two works in the early nineties that marry exploitation-worthy depictions of sex, drugs, and general sleaze to complex examinations of honor and redemption: King of New York
King of New York
King of New York is a 1990 American crime drama film, starring Christopher Walken, Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, Victor Argo, and Giancarlo Esposito. It was directed by independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara and written by Nicholas St...
(1990) was backed by a group of mostly small production companies and the cost of Bad Lieutenant
Bad Lieutenant
Bad Lieutenant is a 1992 crime-drama film directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Harvey Keitel as the eponymous "bad lieutenant". The screenplay was written by actress-model Zoë Lund. She also played a small role in the film. Lund had been discovered by Ferrara and had starred in his earlier film, Ms...
(1992), $1.8 million, was financed totally independently. Ferrara followed these two movies with Body Snatchers (1993), a major-studio remake of the sci-fi classic and an acknowledgment of his debt to the B's of an earlier generation. Larry Fessenden
Larry Fessenden
-Life and career:He is president of Glass Eye Pix, an independent film production company based in New York City. Fessenden produced the Dark Sky film The Inkeepers which is directed by Ti West and the thriller Hypothermia, besides his work as producer he stars in the psychological thriller I Can...
's micro-budget monster movies, such as No Telling (1991) and Habit (1997), reframe classic genre subjects—Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
and vampirism
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
, respectively—to explore issues of contemporary relevance—animal experimentation, ecological destruction, drug addiction, and fin-de-siècle urban romance. Written and directed by Jeremy Horton, 100 Proof
100 Proof
100 Proof is an independently produced American thriller, written and directed by Jeremy Horton. Shot on location in Kentucky, it is based on the true story of a killing spree that took place in Lexington in 1986. Two women, LaFonda Fay Foster and Tina Hickey Powell, murdered five people in the...
(1997) is based on the true story of a killing spree that occurred in Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington is the second-largest city in Kentucky and the 63rd largest in the US. Known as the "Thoroughbred City" and the "Horse Capital of the World", it is located in the heart of Kentucky's Bluegrass region...
, a decade earlier. Praising its authentic depiction of the impoverished milieu in which it is set, critics variously described its style as evoking a home movie or a reality-style TV police series. Joe Leydon of Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
, capturing the way it crossed the line between genre and art film, called it a "diamond in the rough, or at least a shiny bit of jagged rhinestone."
David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the...
, one of the leading B-movie auteurs of the 1970s, had stepped up in financial grade with Scanners
Scanners
Scanners is a 1981 science-fiction horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jennifer O'Neill, Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside, and Patrick McGoohan...
(1980), a $3.5 million production that Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
critic Richard Corliss
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
associated with his earlier, low-budget films as well as George A. Romero
George A. Romero
George Andrew Romero is a Canadian-American film director, screenwriter and editor, best known for his gruesome and satirical horror films about a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. He is nicknamed "Godfather of all Zombies." -Life and career:...
's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and John Carpenter
John Carpenter
John Howard Carpenter is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.- Early life :Carpenter was born...
's The Fog
The Fog
The Fog is a 1980 horror film directed by John Carpenter, who also co-wrote the screenplay and composed the music for the film. It stars Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins and Janet Leigh...
(1980) as "hip parables of contemporary moral malaise." Cronenberg's crowning achievement in that vein would come a decade and a half later: Like that of Scanners in 1980, the budget of Crash
Crash (1996 film)
Crash is a 1996 Canadian/British drama thriller film written and directed by David Cronenberg based on the J. G. Ballard 1973 novel of the same name. It tells the story of a group of people who take sexual pleasure from car accidents, a notable form of paraphilia. The film generated considerable...
, $10 million, wasn't comfortably A-grade by 1996, but it was hardly B-level either. The film's imagery was another matter: "On its scandalizing surface, David Cronenberg's Crash suggests exploitation at its most disturbingly sick," is how Janet Maslin
Janet Maslin
Janet Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as the Times film critic from 1977–1999.- Biography :...
's New York Times review begins. The review ends with an explanation of the film's rating: "Crash has the NC-17 rating (No one under 17 admitted) that it fully deserves. It includes frontal nudity, many sexual encounters and coolly grotesque situations linking sex and violence in graphic, sickening ways." Financed, like King of New York, by a consortium of production companies, it was ultimately picked up for U.S. distribution by Fine Line Features
Fine Line Features
Fine Line Features was the speciality films division of New Line Cinema. It produced, purchased, distributed and marketed films of a more "indie" flavor than its parent company...
. In more ways than one, this result resonated perfectly with the way the film scrambled definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire—specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor's arthouse division.
The B movie in the digital age: 2000s
By the turn of the millennium, the average production cost of an American feature had already spent three years above the $50 million mark. In 2005, the top ten movies at the U.S. box office included three adaptations of children's fantasy novels (including one extendingHarry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (film)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is a 2005 fantasy film directed by Mike Newell and based on the novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. It is the fourth instalment in the Harry Potter film series, written by Steve Kloves and produced by David Heyman...
and another initiating a series, as well as a remake
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children's book by British author Roald Dahl. The story features the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of the eccentric chocolatier, Willy Wonka....
of a 1971 film
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 musical film adaptation of the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, directed by Mel Stuart, and starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. The film tells the story of Charlie Bucket as he receives a golden ticket and visits Willy...
), a child-targeted cartoon
Madagascar (2005 film)
Madagascar is a 2005 computer-animated film produced by DreamWorks Animation, and released in movie theaters on May 27, 2005. The film tells the story of four Central Park Zoo animals who have spent their lives in blissful captivity and are unexpectedly shipped back to Africa, getting shipwrecked...
, a comic book adaptation
Batman Begins
Batman Begins is a 2005 American superhero action film based on the fictional DC Comics character Batman, directed by Christopher Nolan. It stars Christian Bale as Batman, along with Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy, Morgan Freeman, Ken Watanabe, Tom Wilkinson,...
, a sci-fi series installment
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a 2005 American epic space opera film written and directed by George Lucas. It is the sixth and final film released in the Star Wars saga and the third in terms of the series' internal chronology....
, a sci-fi remake
War of the Worlds (2005 film)
War of the Worlds is a 2005 American science fiction film adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel of the same name, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp. It is one of three film adaptations of War of the Worlds released that year, alongside The Asylum's version and...
, and a King Kong remake
King Kong (2005 film)
King Kong is a 2005 fantasy adventure film directed by Peter Jackson. It is a remake of the 1933 film of the same name and stars Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody. Andy Serkis, through performance capture, portrays Kong....
. It was a slow year for Corman: he produced just one movie, which had no American theatrical release, true of most of the pictures he had been involved in recently. Bloodfist 2050, directed by long-time B filmmaker and Corman collaborator Cirio H. Santiago
Cirio H. Santiago
Cirio H. Santiago was a prolific Filipino film producer, director, writer and cinematographer. He also uses the screen names: Cirio Santiago and Leonard Hermes.-Life and career:...
, went straight to DVD in the United States. Ultrawide openings at many thousands of theaters were becoming the norm. In May 2007 alone, three fantasy blockbusters—Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (third in a series based on an amusement-park ride), Spider-Man 3
Spider-Man 3
Spider-Man 3 is a 2007 American superhero film written and directed by Sam Raimi, with a screenplay by Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent. It is the third film in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Spider-Man...
(third in a series based on a superhero comic book), and Shrek the Third
Shrek the Third
Shrek the Third is a 2007 American animated film, and the third film in the Shrek series. It was produced by Jeffrey Katzenberg for DreamWorks Animation, and is distributed by Paramount Pictures. It was released in U.S. theaters on May 18, 2007...
(third in a series of "family" cartoons)—each opened on over 10,000 screens. As big-budget Hollywood movies further usurped the genre territories that were traditionally the domain of the B's, the ongoing viability of the familiar brand of B movie was in grave doubt. Critic A. O. Scott
A. O. Scott
Anthony Oliver Scott, known as A. O. Scott , is an American journalist and critic. He is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with Manohla Dargis.-Background and education:...
of the New York Times warned of the impending "extinction" of
the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures that used to bubble up with some regularity out of the B-picture ooze of cut-rate genre entertainment. Those cherished bad movies—full of jerry-built effects, abominable acting, ludicrous story lines—once flickered with zesty crudity in drive-ins and grind houses across the land. B-picture genres—science fiction and comic-book fantasy in particular, but also kiddie cartoons and horror pictures—now dominate the A-list, commanding the largest budgets and the most attention from the market-research and quality-control departments of the companies that manufacture them.... [F]or the most part, the schlock of the past has evolved into star-driven, heavily publicized, expensive mediocrities....
On the other hand, recent industry trends suggest the reemergence of something that looks very like the traditional A-B split in major studio production, though with fewer "programmers" bridging the gap. According to a 2006 report by industry analyst Alfonso Marone, "The average budget for a Hollywood movie is currently around $60m, rising to $100m when the cost of marketing for domestic launch (USA only) is factored into the equation. However, we are now witnessing a polarisation of film budgets into two tiers: large productions ($120–150m) and niche features ($5–20m). The rationale is that the likelihood of success is maximised by coupling ultra-large budget and highly marketable features (e.g., Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a 2006 adventure fantasy film and the second film of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, following Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl . It was directed by Gore Verbinski, written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and produced by...
), with multiple low-cost bets (e.g., Little Miss Sunshine
Little Miss Sunshine
Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 American comedy-drama film. The road movie's plot follows a family's trip to a children's beauty pageant.Little Miss Sunshine was the directorial film debut of the husband-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. The screenplay was written by first-time writer...
). Fewer $30–70m releases are expected."
Little Miss Sunshine was produced by Fox Searchlight, the major studio's pseudo-indie
Independent film
An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...
subsidiary, for $8 million. With its quirky, "indie"-style comedy, the film hardly meets any conventional definition of a B movie beyond its relatively small budget, but the sorts of movies embraced by the term have shifted drastically before. Classic film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
's combination of visual beauty and verbal wit, for instance, was hardly common coin in exploitation-era B filmmaking. Further expanding the field, Fox launched a new subsidiary in 2006, Fox Atomic
Fox Atomic
Fox Atomic was a production label of film studio 20th Century Fox created in 2006 to generate comedy and genre films.In 2008, Fox Atomic scaled back its production operations and shut down all marketing divisions...
, to concentrate on teen-oriented genre films (horror in particular, at first, then increasingly comedy, as well). The genre focus was similar to that of Sony
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc. is the television and film production/distribution unit of Japanese multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony...
's Screen Gems
Screen Gems
Screen Gems is an American movie production company and subsidiary company of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group that has served several different purposes for its parent companies over the decades since its incorporation....
division and the Weinsteins
The Weinstein Company
The Weinstein Company is an American film studio founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 2005 after the brothers left the then-Disney-owned Miramax Films, which they had co-founded in 1979...
' Dimension Films
Dimension Films
Dimension Films is a motion picture unit currently a part of The Weinstein Company. It was formerly used as Bob Weinstein's label within Miramax Films, to produce and release genre films...
, but the economic model was deliberately low-rent, at least by major studio standards. According to a Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
report, "Fox Atomic is staying at or below the $10 million mark for many of its movies. It's also encouraging filmmakers to shoot digitally—a cheaper process that results in a grittier, teen-friendly look. And forget about stars. Of Atomic's nine announced films, not one has a big-name." In sum, this was an updated version of a Golden Age big studio B unit targeting a market very similar to the one Samuel Z. Arkoff
Samuel Z. Arkoff
Samuel Zachary Arkoff was an American producer of B movies.-Life and career:Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa to a Russian Jewish family, Arkoff first studied to be a lawyer. Along with business partner James H. Nicholson and producer-director Roger Corman, he produced eighteen films...
and James H. Nicholson
James H. Nicholson
James Harvey Nicholson was an American film producer. He is best known as the co-founder, with Samuel Z. Arkoff, of American International Pictures.-Biography:...
's AIP helped define in the 1950s. Despite its low budgets and consequently low benchmarks for profitability, Fox Atomic's output was seen as unsuccessful by its parent company, which shut it down in 2009.
In a development hinted at by the Variety quotation above, technological advances are greatly facilitating the production of truly low-budget motion pictures. Although there have always been economical means with which to shoot movies, including Super 8
Super 8 mm film
Super 8 mm film is a motion picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement of the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format....
and 16 mm film
16 mm film
16 mm film refers to a popular, economical gauge of film used for motion pictures and non-theatrical film making. 16 mm refers to the width of the film...
, as well as video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
cameras recording onto analog
Analog signal
An analog or analogue signal is any continuous signal for which the time varying feature of the signal is a representation of some other time varying quantity, i.e., analogous to another time varying signal. It differs from a digital signal in terms of small fluctuations in the signal which are...
videotape
Videotape
A videotape is a recording of images and sounds on to magnetic tape as opposed to film stock or random access digital media. Videotapes are also used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram...
, these mediums could hardly rival the image quality of 35 mm film
35 mm film
35 mm film is the film gauge most commonly used for chemical still photography and motion pictures. The name of the gauge refers to the width of the photographic film, which consists of strips 35 millimeters in width...
. The development and widespread usage of digital cameras
Digital video
Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...
and postproduction methods allow even low-budget filmmakers to produce films with excellent (and not necessarily "grittier") image quality and precise editing effects—though technical excellence is no guarantee of aesthetic value or even cinematographic competence. As Marone observes, "the equipment budget (camera, support) required for shooting digital is approximately 1/10 that for film, significantly lowering the production budget for independent features." Comparing circumstances in 2006 to those just a couple of years earlier, he argues that the "quality of digital filmmaking has improved dramatically."
Independent filmmakers, whether working in a genre or arthouse mode, continue to find it difficult to gain access to distribution channels, though so-called digital end-to-end methods of distribution offer new opportunities. The so-called day-and-date strategy, in a which a film is released simultaneously in theaters as well as DVD and/or cable, may offer a way for the true low-budget B movie to regain some of the audience it has lost. In a similar fashion, the popularity of Internet sites such as YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
have opened up entirely new avenues for the presentation of motion pictures made on a shoestring. Abel Ferrara, envisioning his first digital film, says, "I want to do it on the Internet...and put it out in 10-minute increments. I know that watching films on computer is the future—it's a direct connection to the audience."
Many of these developments have come together to create a boom in a relatively new form of low-budget genre picture. The fan film, typically an unauthorized production set in the imaginary universe of a popular genre movie or TV series, may be thought of as the most widespread present incarnation of the B movie. "Arguably the first fan film was Hardware Wars
Hardware Wars
Hardware Wars is a short film parody of the classic science fiction film Star Wars. The thirteen-minute film, which premiered in theatres only seven months after Star Wars, consisted of little more than inside jokes and visual puns that heavily depended upon audience familiarity with the...
, a short spoof from 1977 depicting toasters and egg-beaters fighting in space," according to journalist Curt Holman. "In the first decade of the new millenni[um], fan films have grown exponentially in quantity and improved significantly in quality and ambition...[t]hanks to digital cameras, affordable editing software and online distribution." In 2002, Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman and CEO, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....
created a yearly award ceremony for noncommercial fan films, arranging to screen them online via AtomFilms (purchased in 2006 by MTV Networks
MTV Networks
MTV Networks is a division of media conglomerate Viacom that oversees the operations of many television channels and Internet brands, including the original MTV channel in the United States...
). Star Wars: Revelations (2005), a 40-minute drama directed by Shane Felux for a production cost of $20,000, has apparently been downloaded by millions. Similar projects are designed as "episodes" set in the TV-based Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
and Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes. A parallel development in fan culture has been inspired in part by the direct-to-video market, whose products garner little notice and less respect in mainstream culture. According to scholar Linda Ruth Williams, the "new B-movie culture runs on the convoluted equation that cheap means bad which means good. Such products garner far more respect from fans because they manage to press the same buttons on one million dollars (or less) rather than one hundred million (or more)."
Since 2006, The Asylum
The Asylum
The Asylum is an American film studio and distributor which focuses on producing low-budget, usually direct-to-video productions. The studio has produced titles that capitalize on productions by major studios; these titles have been dubbed "mockbusters" by the press.-History:The Asylum was founded...
—a production company founded in 1997—has specialized in low-budget pictures also inspired by the big-budget films that have largely usurped the B movie's place in the theatrical market. The company makes what one critic dubbed "mockbuster
Mockbuster
A mockbuster is a film created with the apparent intention of piggy-backing on the publicity of a major film with a similar title or theme and are often made with a low budget. Often these films are created to be released direct-to-video at the same time as the mainstream film reaches theaters or...
s", straight-to-video knockoffs of major studio action pictures: Transformers, for instance, is transformed into The Asylum's Transmorphers
Transmorphers
Transmorphers is a science fiction alien invasion film released direct-to-DVD on June 26, 2007. It was written and directed by Leigh Scott and produced by David Michael Latt and The Asylum. Transmorphers was developed as a mockbuster, intending to capitalize on Michael Bay's Transformers...
. Another commercial relative of the fan film is the overt B-movie homage. Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
and Robert Rodriguez
Robert Rodriguez
Robert Anthony Rodríguez is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician. He shoots and produces many of his films in his native Texas and Mexico. He has directed such films as Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, The Faculty, Spy Kids, Sin City, Planet...
's Grindhouse (2007) nods to a wide variety of exploitation styles popular from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Criticizing the film, notwithstanding its "posture of cool," as yet another "blockbuster B-movie," Adario Strange places it in historical context: "Despite themselves, Tarantino and Rodriguez have the right idea. As the tools for filmmaking have become cheaper and more malleable, now is the time for rough, ugly, experimental films to shine again as they did in the '70s. The problem for these directors is that they are just too rich, too well-connected and too self-aware to produce films that are truly spit and chewing gum, bleeding-edge like Eric Nicholas' Alone With Her
Alone with Her
Alone with Her is a 2007 American suspense film directed by Eric Nicholas about a tech-savvy stalker who uses spy cameras to force his way into the life of a young woman.The film tells the story through the lenses of spy cameras.-Plot:...
, Vincent Gallo
Vincent Gallo
Vincent Gallo is an Italian-American film director and actor. Though he has had minor roles in mainstream films such as Goodfellas, he is most associated with independent movies, including Buffalo '66, which he wrote, directed, did the music for and starred in; The Brown Bunny, which he also...
's The Brown Bunny
The Brown Bunny
The Brown Bunny is a 2003 independent American art house film written, produced and directed by actor Vincent Gallo about a motorcycle racer on a cross-country drive who is haunted by memories of his former lover. The film had its world premiere at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival to boos and catcalls...
or Shane Carruth
Shane Carruth
Shane Carruth is an American film writer, director, editor, producer, actor and musician.- Life and career :Carruth was born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He attended Stephen F...
's Primer
Primer (film)
Primer is a 2004 American science fiction drama film about the accidental discovery of a means of time travel. The film was written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth and was completed on a budget of $7,000...
—films most Americans will never see."
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