B movies (exploitation boom)
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 associated with so-called ‘exploitation’ films.
The demise of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1968[1] and coupled with the success of the film Easy Rider the following year fueled the trend throughout the subsequent decade.
An 82-minute-long suspense film, Terror Is a Man, ran as a "co-feature", and is notable for including a now-common exploitation gimmick, asking sensitive viewers to close their eyes during the dénouement.
"[4] A period piece in the vein of Britain's Hammer Films, House of Usher was a success, launching a series of Poe-based movies Corman would direct for AIP.
[5] With the loosening of industry censorship constraints, the 1960s and 1970s saw a major expansion in the production and commercial viability of a variety of B-movie subgenres that have come to be known collectively as exploitation films.
In the early 1960s, exploitation movies in the original sense continued to appear: 1961's Damaged Goods, a cautionary tale about a young lady whose boyfriend's promiscuity leads to venereal disease, comes complete with enormous, grotesque closeups of VD's physical manifestations.
[6] At the same time, the concept of fringe exploitation was merging with a closely related and similarly venerable tradition: “nudie" films featuring nudist-camp footage or striptease artists like Bettie Page had simply been the softcore pornography of previous decades.
And, as William Paul notes, this move into the horror genre by respected director Alfred Hitchcock was made, "significantly, with the lowest-budgeted film of his American career and the least glamorous stars.
Along with the output of "off-Hollywood" U.S. concerns similar to Lewis and Friedman's, distributors brought in more foreign movies to fill the demands of rural drive-ins, lower-end urban theaters, and outright grindhouses.
[12] Hammer Films' success with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and its remake of Dracula (1958) had established the studio as an important supplier of horror movies to the American B market, a positioned it maintained throughout the 1960s.
In 1961, American International released a movie clearly influenced by Hammer's characteristically bold visual style and moody pace—Black Sunday was a dubbed horror import from Italy, where it had premiered the previous year as La maschera del demonio.
[13] The movie's director was Mario Bava, who would launch the horror subgenre known as giallo with La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much; 1963) and Sei Donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace; 1964).
[15] With the Production Code gone and the X rating established, major studio A films like Midnight Cowboy could now show adult imagery, while the market for increasingly hardcore pornography exploded.
Easy Rider would earn $19.1 million in rentals, becoming, as one history puts it, "the seminal film that provided the bridge between all the repressed tendencies represented by schlock/kitsch/hack since the dawn of Hollywood and the mainstream cinema of the seventies.
Reviewing Sisters, De Palma's first horror film, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael observed that its "limp technique doesn't seem to matter to the people who want their gratuitous gore.
"[22] Many examples of the so-called blaxploitation genre of the early and middle part of the decade, featuring stereotype-filled stories revolving around drugs, violent crime, and prostitution, were the product of AIP.
Melvin Van Peebles wrote, co-produced, directed, starred in, edited, and composed the music for the film, which was completed with the last-minute help of a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby.
[24] In 1970, a low-budget crime drama shot in 16 mm by a first-time American director won the international critics' prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Loden, who spent six years raising money for the sub-$200,000 production, created a film that Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised for "the absolute accuracy of its effects, the decency of its point of view and the kind of purity of technique that can only be the result of conscious discipline.
Beverly Hills Nightmare; 1972), Black Caesar (1973), and Hell Up in Harlem (1973), were all nominally blaxploitation movies, but Cohen—also the screenwriter on each film—used them as vehicles for a satirical examination of race relations and the wages of dog-eat-dog capitalism.
Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), for AIP, might have "the look of tabloid sleaze," but one leading critic found it "perhaps the most intelligent film about American politics ever to come out of Hollywood.
Just as Hooper had learned from Romero's landmark Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, in turn, largely followed the model of Black Christmas, directed by Deathdream's Bob Clark.
[33] The impact of these films still echoes through such movies as the Saw series, including 2006's Saw III, a mainstream, $10 million production—far below the current Hollywood average, but more than a hundred times Hooper's budget and well out of any true independent's league.
Almost all the works of Quentin Tarantino—in particular, Jackie Brown (1997), the Kill Bill movies (2003–04), and his Death Proof segment of Grindhouse (2007)—pay explicit tribute to classic exploitation cinema.
Blaxploitation is a direct homage by the former, while the Kill Bill pictures reference a wide variety of Asian martial arts films, which appeared as imports in U.S. theaters regularly during the 1970s.
Death Proof is inspired by a range of exploitation styles, particularly giallo/slasher pictures and car-chase movies like 20th Century-Fox's Vanishing Point (1971) and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) and New World's Cannonball (1976) and Grand Theft Auto (1977).
In the early 1970s, the growing practice of screening non-mainstream motion pictures as late shows, with the goal of building a cult film audience, made the midnight movie a significant new mode of cinematic exhibition, with transgressive connotations.
The midnight movie success of low-budget pictures made entirely outside of the studio system, like John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972), with its campy spin on exploitation, spurred the development of the independent film movement.
Television films inspired by recent scandals—such as ABC's The Ordeal of Patty Hearst, which premiered a month after her release from prison in 1979—harkened all the way back to the 1920s and such movies as Human Wreckage and When Love Grows Cold, pictures from low-budget studio FBO made swiftly in the wake of celebrity misfortunes.
