AIP and the Assembly Line of American International Horror

James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff founded American Releasing Corporation in 1954 and renamed it American International Pictures in 1956, and the pair of them had a division of labour that explains everything the company made. Arkoff was the lawyer and the money. Nicholson had run theatres, and he understood something that the majors had forgotten in the years when they owned their own screens: an exhibitor buys a reason to believe people will turn up.

So AIP built its pictures backwards. Nicholson would think of a title. He would commission poster art for the title. He would test the artwork — reportedly on exhibitors, on his own staff, on anyone available — and if the poster worked, a writer was hired to produce a screenplay that the poster would not be lying about. The film was the last thing made and, in the company’s own internal logic, the least important.

Every instinct says this should produce nothing but garbage. It produced a great deal of garbage. It also produced the Poe cycle, a house style, and one of the two or three most consequential production shops in American genre cinema.

The business, precisely

The method rested on a specific commercial insight about the drive-in. The majors were refusing to sell first-run product to outdoor exhibitors, and the outdoor exhibitor needed two features a week. AIP sold the complete bill — both halves, made in-house, priced in advance — which meant the exhibitor could plan a season and AIP could plan a factory.

Arkoff codified the target audience into a rule of thumb that has been quoted for decades: aim at the nineteen-year-old male, on the theory that a young woman will attend the film a young man picks and a younger child will watch what the older ones watch. He also left behind an acronym for what the films needed to contain — action, revolution, killing, oratory, fantasy and fornication, arranged so that the initials spelled his own surname, which tells you a good deal about the man.

The production rules followed from the sums. A schedule of one to three weeks. Standing sets reused between pictures. Two films shot with overlapping crews so the second inherits everything the first is finished with. And a director who could deliver on the date, every time, which is how a young Roger Corman became the company’s most valuable asset.

The cycles

The teen monsters came first. I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), produced by Herman Cohen and directed by Gene Fowler Jr., cost a reported $82,000 or thereabouts and returned it many times over; I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula followed in the same year. The films are crude and they achieved the first serious thing AIP did: they put the monster inside the audience’s own school.

The Poe cycle is the company’s monument, and it happened because Corman made an argument to Arkoff about arithmetic. Rather than two cheap black-and-white films, give me the money for both and I will make one, in colour and CinemaScope, with Vincent Price in it. House of Usher went out in 1960 and was a substantial hit, and it started a run — Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) among them — mostly with Price, several scripted by Richard Matheson, with Daniel Haller’s art direction doing the heavy lifting.

Haller is the unsung name in this story. Given almost nothing, he built a Gothic vocabulary out of matte paintings, coloured gels, fog and a small stock of dressing that rotated from film to film. Corman’s habit of recycling footage is part of the legend for good reason — burning-set material shot for the Usher climax turns up again in later entries of the cycle, and The Terror (1963) exists mainly because the Raven sets were still standing and Corman had two days of Boris Karloff left on a contract.

Vincent Price is the other component, and his function in the cycle is frequently misread as camp. Price was a trained, expensive actor with a Yale degree and a serious stage career behind him, and what he supplied AIP was a voice that could deliver Poe’s prose without embarrassment on a fifteen-day schedule. That matters mechanically. The Poe films are talky by necessity — dialogue is the cheapest scene in cinema — so the cycle stands or falls on whether a man in a room describing his own dread is watchable. Price made it watchable, and he did it while visibly enjoying himself, which is the quality later mistaken for a lack of seriousness. Watch him in The Tomb of Ligeia and the enjoyment is nowhere in evidence; he plays it as grief.

Then AIP followed the audience wherever it went. The beach party films from 1963. The biker cycle after The Wild Angels (1966) did enormous business. The drug picture with The Trip (1967), written by Jack Nicholson, which the company nervously topped with a disclaimer. Gas-s-s-s in 1970, recut over Corman’s objections, which ended the relationship. In the 1970s AIP moved into blaxploitation, produced Blacula and its sequel, and kept the machine turning until Filmways absorbed it in 1980.

The import arm mattered as much as anything AIP shot itself. The company bought foreign films cheaply, redubbed them, rescored them, retitled them and often recut them for the American market. Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio became Black Sunday in AIP’s hands with a new score and trimmed gore, and it is the single most influential thing the company ever distributed without making. I tre volti della paura became Black Sabbath and had its episode order rearranged and its content softened. Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965) was an AIP co-production. This is a mixed legacy at best — it introduced Anglophone audiences to Italian Gothic and it mangled the films doing it, which is a story the whole dubbing history of Eurohorror tells at length.

AIP also understood that the sale continues inside the cinema. The company ran gimmicks, insurance stunts and warning campaigns in the William Castle tradition, and when the Production Code gave way to the ratings system in 1968 it was ready to exploit the change faster than anyone with a board to answer to. A small company that has already priced its films for a market of teenagers has nothing to lose from a rating that keeps some of them out, provided the rating itself sells tickets to the rest.

The mechanic: what a house style is made of

Here is the argument that makes AIP worth an essay rather than a footnote.

A studio style is usually explained as a taste. It is more honestly explained as an inventory. When the same art director works with the same fog machine, the same six candelabra and the same three castle interiors across eight pictures in four years, the films acquire a family resemblance that no one designed and everybody recognises. Hammer got its own look the same way, out of Bray Studios and a standing lot — the colourising of the Gothic is as much a story about a paint budget as an aesthetic decision.

The constraint does something else that the prestige model rarely manages. A schedule of fifteen days forbids deliberation. There is no time to shoot coverage from every angle and decide in the edit, so the director must commit on the floor, in front of the crew, to one solution. Commitment reads on screen as confidence, and confidence is most of what separates the Poe films from the identically-budgeted rubbish AIP put out on the other half of the same bill.

And the poster-first method, absurd as it sounds, imposes a discipline that a great many better-funded films lack: the film must contain the thing that was advertised. A picture built to justify an image of a pendulum descending on a bound man will, at some point, deliver a pendulum descending on a bound man. Contemporary genre cinema is full of films that promise a premise in the trailer and then spend two hours avoiding it. AIP’s method made that failure structurally impossible, because the promise came first and the whole production existed to keep it.

The case against, which is substantial

The assembly line’s output is mostly indefensible. For every Masque of the Red Death there are a dozen films that are shot flatly, cut badly and abandoned rather than finished, and the company’s own executives would have told you as much cheerfully, because they were selling a slot on a bill rather than a work.

The import practice was cultural vandalism dressed as distribution. Films arrived in America under invented titles, with their scores replaced, their scenes reordered and their meaning altered, and generations of viewers formed opinions about Bava based on documents Bava did not sign off. The recut of Gas-s-s-s is what a company does when it regards a director as a supplier.

And the demographic theory produced two decades of films built on the assumption that the paying customer is a nineteen-year-old boy and everyone else on screen is scenery for him. That is legible in nearly every frame of the beach and biker cycles and it does not improve with age.

What survives the prosecution is this: AIP kept a door open that the majors had bolted. It hired people with no credits, gave them a budget and a deadline and let them keep whatever they could smuggle in underneath, and the list of who came through that door is longer and more distinguished than any film school’s. Corman himself is the proof of the model’s ceiling and its floor — the same man delivering The Masque of the Red Death and a film shot in two days on standing sets, inside the same year, for the same company.

Start with The Masque of the Red Death, where Nicolas Roeg’s photography and Haller’s design get money behind them for once, then The Tomb of Ligeia for the cycle’s last and strangest word, then Black Sunday to see what the company could do simply by buying something. The bill was the product. Some of the films escaped anyway.