B movies had their heyday during Hollywood's Golden Age (late 1920s-early 1960s). During the Great Depression, studios and movie theaters tried to entice moviegoers into the theater with a bill that could last more than 3 hours, with two features, cartoons, a
newsreel, and previews of forthcoming films. The main attraction would be the A film, with the B feature being a lower budget genre film (often sci-fi, Western, or film noir) that was quickly produced, frequently using talent that was either waning or on the rise. The big studios had separate B-units to produce these films. These early B films were tied to the Big Five studio system - before 1948, major studios had their own theater chains, and there was a complicated booking system for A and B features.
In the 1950s, feature films got longer - 70 minutes or more, rather than an hour - and the double feature fell out of favor. B movie became a blanket term used for genre films with formulaic plots and cheap production values. These films helped create the drive-in cinema business, which skyrocketed between 1945-55, and launched the career of one of the most famous names in the history of B movies,
Roger Corman, and another big name in B,
William Castle, who specialized in gimmicks. "For
The Tingler, which starred Vincent Price, the theater seats were wired
with buzzers, which would make the seats vibrate when the tingler
supposedly escaped into the theater," the website
B-Movie Central reports.
In the 60s and 70s, B movies came to include exploitation films, as the film industry's adherence to the
Motion Picture Production Code relaxed and finally ended in 1968. Major studios were no longer making B films, and these exploitation films - which often "
graphically depicted the wages of sin in the context of promoting prudent lifestyle choices" - ultimately became the whole market, ranging from "sexploitation" to "blaxploitation" films, except for the rise of kung fu (sometimes called "Brucesploitation") and "slasher" films in the 1970s. Some famous names came out this era - John Waters, Melvin Van Peebles, Brian de Palma, Russ Meyer, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Francis Ford Coppola - with some later achieving mainstream fame and others becoming cult classics.
Easy Rider, with its themes of hippies, drug use, and communal living, became the first movie under the exploitation umbrella to debut at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a spoof of B movie tropes.
As cinema moved into the 1980s, the era of the star-studded blockbuster began. There was still a lot of low-budget horror films being made, and
Troma Pictures, which got its start in 1974, was still "disrupting media." But there were more independent films being made in the last years of the 20th century, and it's important to remember that an independent or arthouse film is not the same as a B movie.
It has been suggested that recent technological advances have made it easy to make low-budget motion pictures again, and digital cameras allow any filmmaker to make films with reasonably good image quality and effects. Is the B-movie ready to make a comeback? Well,
The Guardian suggests:
So here’s a suggestion: a two-tier cinema system. Your blockbusters
in one league, and a separate circuit for lower-budget movies, with much
cheaper tickets. For a long time, this was how movies operated... Now it’s serious dramas that are the B-movies, pushed to the margins
along with what we used to call 'arthouse' movies: challenging,
non-mainstream, maybe foreign movies. These are cinema’s endangered
species. So why not put them all in a separate type of cinema and charge
half the price? It would be a cheaper night out for punters and a
proving ground for new talent.
Or, do you agree with
Wired that "In 2017, 'genre' is no longer a niche, and nearly *every *movie feels
like a midnight movie—albeit the kind you no longer need need to stay up
all evening to enjoy." Whatever your take on the subject, why not take a little time to delve deeper into B movies of the past? The library catalog is here to help, with some likely contenders listed below:
Hail to the Chin: Further Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell with Craig Sanborn
Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir by Arthur Lyons
Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American '70s by Charles Taylor
The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero, Tom Bissell [eAudiobook]
Foxy: A Life in Three Acts by Pam Grier with Andrea Cagan
DVDs
The House on Haunted Hill
The Return of the Living Dead
Barbarella
The Blob
John Dies At the End
Evil Dead
They Live
Machete
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Brother From Another Planet
Tremors
Forbidden Planet
Schlock: Secret History of American Movies
American Grindhouse
Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel
The Ed Wood Awards: The Worst Horror Films of All Time
Links
The 100 Best "B Movies" of All Time [Slate]
15 Awesome B-Movies You Need To See [Screen Rant]
Attack of the B Movies! 50 of the Best Schlocky Titles of All Time [Hollywood Reporter]
