Stranded at the Drive-in: JDs, Sleaze & AIP

No less a personage than Stephen King attributes the budget B-movie company, American International Pictures with singlehandedly reviving the horror B picture and thus saving the horror genre. In 1956 James H Nicholson & Samuel Z Arkoff decided that there was money to be made in supplying the bottom end of the cinema market with two-for-the-price-of-one movies. The B-picture was thought to be dead, the two-picture moviegoing experience usurped by television. However, Arkoff and Nicholson had a very specific audience in mind - one that enjoyed NOT sitting in the living room surrounded by close family members. And they knew what teenagers wanted.

What elements made these AIP films shlock classics? They were simple, shot in a hurry, and so amateurish that one can sometimes see the shadow of a boom mike in the shot or catch the gleam of an air tank inside the moster suit of an underwater creature (as in The Attack of the Giant Leeches). Arkoff himself recalls that they rarely began with a completed script or even a coherent screen treatment, often money was committed to projects on the basis of a title that sounded commercial, such as Terror from the Year 5000 or The Brain Eaters, something that would make an eye-catching poster.

— Stephen King, Danse Macabre, p46

With titles like The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini (show me a teenager who doesn't want to see THAT!!), and a willingness to experiment and move on, AIP produced a range of horror B-movies which sewed up the drive-in market. Perhaps the most famous is I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, directed squarely at the teen drive-in audience squirming on the seats of their cars.

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Trick or Treat?

The 1950s saw a number of technical innovations in the cinema; CinemaScope, Cinerama, Stereophonic sound, 3-D and even Smell-O-Vision (!), all designed to lure the audience away from their TV sets. Whilst big-budget, full-technicolour Hollywood epics offered a real 'big screen' alternative, lower budget movies needed extra gimmicks to pull in the punters. One ex-music hall impresario, William Castle, understood what it took to get the audience actively involved in the horror experience, and, with his production company Castle Pictures, launched a series of gimmicks to draw the crowds. The devices added to the fun of the horror movie experience, audiences screamed as much with laughter as anything else. This is the sort of shared experience delighted in by viewers of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and is a concept deftly explored in the 1991 movie Popcorn (Tagline = Buy it in a box. Go home in a bag).

This was another Vincent Price shocker, during which a device called the Emergo, a glowing skeleton which, at a certain point in the film screeched out over the heads of the audience, This was installed in selected cinemas only.

 

Tinglers are evil-looking parasites which embed themselves into the spines of human beings and feed from their fear. The only way to dislodge them is to scream. At one point in the film it looks like the print has broken off the projector, and the shadow of a Tingler appears to be crawling over the screen. The voice of Vincent Price intones 

"Ladies and Gentlemen, please don't panic, but SCREAM. Scream for your lives. The Tingler is loose in this theatre. If you don't scream, it will kill you."

Then, in suitably equipped cinemas, a device called the Percepto was activated (this was a series of vibrators attached to seats), thus making the audience 'tingle'. You bet they screamed...

 

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