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Stepanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire and its Feminist Impact on 1970s Horror
Content Warning: Images and videos throughout the site may depict nudity and violence.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
Introduction
When most people think of low-budget film, "Pope of Pop Cinema" Roger Corman is probably the first name to come to mind. He began producing his own films in 1954 and has made over 200 movies throughout his lifetime. Corman is best known for his fantastical, campy horror films that explore leftist ideas with a heavy dose of melodrama, gore, and nudity. Today, his most popular titles are his Poe adaptations, including The Masque of the Red Death (1964), House of Usher (1960), and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), but he also other experimented with other genres – crime thriller Boxcar Bertha (Scorsese, 1972), drug-fuelled drama The Trip (1967), and more.
Although Corman was generally strict about genre conventions, setting quotas for the number of explosions, crashes, deaths, and nude women in each film, he also allowed his directors, writers, and actors to experiment. He allowed his filmmakers to experiment with leftist techniques and introduce leftist concepts, embracing the political and culture revolutions of the 60s and 70s.
Above all, Corman is credited for revolutionizing the film industry. Fed up with the bureaucracy of Hollywood, he rebelled by funding his own films and hiring unknown actors. He started the careers of big-name actors and filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, and others. But you'll notice that most, if not all, of the big names associated with him are men. What happened to the women?
Women and the Exploitation Film
Women and the Exploitation Film
A still from The Trip (Corman, 1967), a psychedelic movie about LSD.
Corman began his career by making B-movies and exploitation films. Lying somewhere between conventional and avant-garde cinema, exploitation films are cheaply produced, independently made movies for niche audiences. Most of them contain obscene imagery, entertaining viewers with images of gratuitous gore and nudity. Despite having a reputation for offensive content, exploitation movies allowed filmmakers to explore controversial topics because they operated outside of Hollywood constraints. Though exploitation films tend to be left out of serious film theory and criticism, they deserve thorough sociopolitical analysis.
Increasingly, exploitation films are gaining wider recognition in film history. Still, most people are only aware of a few big names, most of them men. Additionally, most of the more subversive films were ignored in their time and have remained forgotten. For example, Corman's 1962 movie The Intruder, starring William Shatner, explored racial integration and exposed white supremacy – it was also Corman's least financially successful movie and has remained largely forgotten.
Though women played important roles in the B-movie industry, their place in film history has been diminished. This is an unfortunate omission. Corman's studio gave women opportunities for independence and allowed them to tackle feminist and queer themes, something that was impossible to do in mainstream Hollywood. Unfortunately, few of them went on to be as successful as the men he worked with. Some of Corman's women-directed movies have gained loyal cult followings, while others have remained largely forgotten.
On this website, I will explore Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire one of the most significant movies in Corman's repertoire. Though mostly unknown, The Velvet Vampire reinvents the exploitation through its feminist and queer commentary while still remaining faithful to genre conventions. Rothman's work should be considered more seriously in film history.
Exploitation films were played at grindhouses. Image via Comicsverse
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