Roger Corman: Slinger of Sleaze, Connoisseur of Carnage, Incidental Feminist
Roger Corman — legendary producer for American International Pictures and founder of New World Pictures and, later, Concorde Pictures and New Horizon Pictures, who launched the careers of filmmakers like James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Martin Scorcese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, and others — is primarily known for the slew of low-budget genre movies he released in the ‘70s and ‘80s that featured what film critic Joe Bob Briggs refers to as “blood, breasts, and beasts.” Corman had an almost scientific approach to the balance of titillation filmmakers should provide in their films to achieve maximum commercial success for minimal budget. His mandate to include ample skin and gore in flicks like Galaxy of Terror, Forbidden World, The Slumber Party Massacre, and Humanoids from the Deep certainly pigeonholed the man, giving many people the impression that he was out to exploit the women involved in his films.
But, perhaps paradoxically, his production firms consistently hired women filmmakers at a much higher rate than was typical in Hollywood. Women who worked for Corman during his heyday include Penelope Spheeris (director, Wayne’s World, The Decline of Western Civilization), Gale Anne Hurd (producer, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Aliens, Armageddon), Katt Shea (director, Poison Ivy, The Rage: Carrie 2), Stephanie Rothman (director, The Student Nurses, The Velvet Vampire), Amy Holden Jones (director, The Slumber Party Massacre, Love Letters), and Deborah Brock (director, Slumber Party Massacre II). Gale Anne Hurd has said Corman “had women writing, directing, art directors. [At New World Pictures] I saw a Hollywood that doesn’t even exist now, and this was 1978.” Penelope Spheeris said, “The film industry is like a fort with all of these guys — and they are guys — holding guns saying, ‘You can’t come in!’ But Roger opened the door to that fort for us.”
Was Corman, whose politics definitely slanted more progressive, a trailblazing feminist in a “good old boys” industry? Not exactly. At his core, the man was a pragmatist almost obsessively concerned with making money. And, as it turns out, women were much cheaper to hire. His propensity to hire women “was self-serving to a degree, because he didn’t really pay us,” Spheeris admitted. “But he always instinctively knew the right people to open the door to.” Corman described himself as a “semi-feminist” in an interview with Esquire magazine:
“It isn’t that I went out to look for female producers, directors, and writers. I simply wanted to go for the best person, and it made no difference whatsoever to me whether that person was a man or woman. So, my goal was not really to employ specifically female producers and directors, my goal was to get the best person, which meant that I would be getting a fair number of women and maybe more women because other people were not treating women equally. So, there were more opportunities for women to come work for me, not because I was favoring women but because I was giving them a 50-50 chance."
But regardless of the more practical and less commendable reasons he hired so many women, he genuinely appreciated talent in all its forms, and seemed to allow and even encourage his talent to pursue their creative vision (provided it satisfied his equation for profit). Stephanie Rothman was given complete freedom to infuse her 1970 hit The Student Nurses with social and political discussion that was rare in film. Rothman, in a 2007 interview, said:
“We were free to develop the story of the nurses as we wished, as long as there was enough nudity and violence distributed throughout it. Please notice, I did not say sex, I said nudity. This freedom, once I paid my debt to the requirements of the genre, allowed me to address what interested me: political and social conflicts and the changes they produce. It allowed me to have a dramatized discussion about issues that were then being ignored in big-budget major studio films: for example, a discussion about the economic problems of poor Mexican immigrants ... and their unhappy, restive children; and a discussion about a woman’s right to have a safe and legal abortion when, at the time, abortion was still illegal in America.”
Rothman contends that the success of The Student Nurses encouraged Corman to actively include discussions of social issues, including feminism, in the films he financed. And certainly, hers was not the last time gender roles were explored by women working at New World Pictures. The Slumber Party Massacre franchise probably best exemplifies Corman’s often contradictory cinematic interests in female objectification and agency.
The 1982 original was helmed by Amy Holden Jones and based on a script from feminist author Rita Mae Brown. Though Brown’s original screenplay reflected a much more serious film that actively skewered slasher cliches, Holden’s broad rewrite still includes some of the feminist intent while checking boxes for a New World Picture. The movie simultaneously features one of the most infamously leering scenes of nudity in horror (a lengthy shower scene in which the camera spends long moments zoomed on boobs and butts, included of course by Corman’s request) and one of the genre’s more blatant depictions of an impotent male killer, infuriated and emasculated by his misogyny. The “driller killer” is named Russ Thorn, a bland name that sounds like someone’s lonely uncle, never married, kind of grumpy. He looks completely nondescript (well, as nondescript as someone outfitted entirely in denim can be). He wields a comically oversized drill that is ultimately “castrated” by the larger machete of the female hero. Rewarding the film’s success, Corman then financed Jones’ passion project follow-up, Love Letters, a romantic drama starring Jamie Lee Curtis.
Slumber Party Massacre II, written and directed by Deborah Brock, even further illustrates the freedom encouraged by Corman. Brock had zero interest in convention, and, though it does feature the requisite topless scenes, her sequel is a weirdo rockabilly nightmare much more concerned with special effects and musical interludes than any kind of thoughtful breakdown of gender barriers. It has, however, been read as a breakthrough in queer representation in the horror genre and as an examination of the onset of female sexual awareness. You can certainly parse through subtext to find support for those theories, but none of that is as surficial as the discussion in the first film. Regardless, Slumber Party Massacre II was not bogged down by producer restraints on creativity, and it remains one of the stranger movies released by Corman (and in the horror genre at large).
Largely, it seems as though the women filmmakers who worked with Corman have found abiding by his on-screen carnal demands to be a fair trade-off for the opportunities he provided, but there have been instances of on-set strife. Barbara Peeters, who directed Humanoids from the Deep (1980) after Joe Dante turned it down, left the film disenchanted by Corman’s demand that the monsters “kill all the men and rape all the women.” Though he apparently felt Peeters adequately captured the graphic violence, he hired second unit director James Sbardellati to film additional scenes of gratuitous nudity and sexual assault. Corman’s actions prompted Peeters and star Ann Turkel to request their names be removed from the film — a request Corman denied.
While, at least for sales intent (which may have trumped all other intents), Corman preferred his female characters naked at specific points in his movies, he also preferred their resourcefulness and agency. Of this, he’s said, “A number of [New World Pictures films] featured women as the leads, and several times the writer would send in a script in which the girl’s boyfriend would come in and solve the problem for her, and I said, ‘No, the girl must solve her own problem.’ So, there was a little bit, not a great bit, a little bit of a feminist movement, a liberal movement, and a little nudity.”
His feminist ethos is muddled at best, and you can definitely argue that even if his insistence on tits and ass, as they say, was purely pragmatic, it did as much to damage the representation of women in genre film as much as his strong heroines emboldened it. There’s no doubt that many horror filmmakers learned the wrong lessons from movies like The Slumber Party Massacre, as evidenced by many of the slashers and monster movies made during the latter half of the ‘80s, a decade of horror heavily influenced by Corman and known more for its carnal and violent excesses than its progressive on-screen representation.
Roger Corman is a complicated figure that probably doesn’t deserve to be hailed as any kind of progressive hero, and his on-screen legacy is based less on his more equitable hiring practices than his savvy understanding of what would motivate young, horny men with expendable cash to flock to a movie theater. But regardless of the purity of the circumstances leading to it, Corman gave talented women opportunities that many others were not, opportunities to create interesting and memorable movies that have carved an important place in the genre film history and, moreso than Corman likely purposely intended, opened more seats for women directors in Hollywood.