Next week, the Chicago International Film Festival will bestow a Career Achievement Award on B-movie king Roger Corman; as part of the fest, “A Bucket of Blood” and “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” will be screened on at 7 p.m. Tuesday. What better way to get into the Halloween spirit than with the leading auteur of drive-in horror?
Q. What’s your wierdest memory of making a movie?
A. I made a film for some drive-in theater owners in New Orleans – they asked me to do a picture called “Swamp Women,” which was about women who escaped from prison in Louisiana and had to make their way across the swamps. The script called for the girls to wade across this bayou where we were shooting, and somebody said there were poisonous snakes in the swamp, and the girls wouldn’t go in. So I jumped in the water and waded around to prove there were no snakes there, and the leading lady said, “Roger, all that proves is that you’re an idiot.”
Q. How did the idea for “A Bucket of Blood” come about?
A. I was working on all sorts of overly intellectual ideas at that time, and I had a theory connecting horror, sex and comedy and I wanted to try that out. Under the ratings code of that time (1959) there (ended up being) almost no sex in it, but putting the idea of sex and comedy together was an experiment, and (the studio) was willing to let me experiment, providing I could do it in five days and for $50,000.
Q.What do you think your scariest movie is?
A. My films today would not be considered that scary, because when I was directing in the ’50s and ’60s, you simply were not allowed to be as graphic with blood and special effects. So probably none of them today would be as “horrific” as they were (then). My favorites of that genre would be the Poe films, “The Pit and the Pendulum” or “The Mask of the Red Death.”
