Roger Corman: The Mogul of the Margins

Sun, 11 May 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Roger Corman liked to say he never lost money on a film, and for most of a career that spanned more than fifty years and hundreds of pictures, it was true. That statistic alone would make him a curiosity — a producer who cracked the economics of the exploitation film so completely he turned a genre most of Hollywood sneered at into a reliable machine. But the reason his name outlasts the films is stranger and more important. The cheapest producer in America was also the greatest talent scout in the history of the medium. The people who learned the trade on Corman’s dime went on to make The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Jaws, The Terminator and Silence of the Lambs. He built the margins, and the margins rebuilt Hollywood.

Poverty Row and the Democracy of the Cheap Horror Film

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The prestige history of American horror is a history of the majors: Universal built the monster, MGM and RKO and Paramount refined it, and the canon was written from the top down. Underneath that history runs a second one, cheaper and more interesting for being cheaper. Below the great studios sat a cluster of tiny operations grinding out films at a few days apiece for the bottom half of the double bill, and horror was one of their staple products, because horror was one of the few genres that could frighten an audience without money. This was Poverty Row, and its bargain-basement monster movies did something the majors could not: they made horror a form almost anyone could afford to make.

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Roger Corman: The Mogul of the Margins

Poverty Row and the Democracy of the Cheap Horror Film