Before television was an essential element in homes, people went to the movies. Before there were television films, there were B movies, low-budget productions that were used to fill long sessions in theaters, films that served as opening acts for posh films. Roger Corman, who died today at the age of 98, was one of the architects of that cinema that was made with little money, but with a lot of intelligence and good actors.

Corman directed about 60 B movies, many of which were horror films, some about aliens, and others about action. He produced almost 500 titles and acted in another 37. The filmmaker, who boasted that he never lost a cent making films, was as famous as he was prestigious and, through a lot of work, he became the teacher of other great directors who, to put it bluntly, In some way, they were his interns, greats of the seventh art such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron or John Sayles.

“A child is afraid of thunder, lightning and the monster under the bed. His parents tell him that there is nothing to worry about, but he knows that there are many things to worry about,” said the late director, who built his films with that fear to “pierce our conscience, which feels that there is nothing to worry about.” “what to worry about, and reach childhood memories.”

Preparing the viewer for shock, filming in a short time and spending less money were the three keys to Corman’s strategy, whose career behind the cameras began in 1955 with a low-budget western, Five Guns, which featured John Lund and Dorothy. Malone as heads of cast. After directing some more Westerns, Corman entered the field of film noir with The Swamp Women (1956) where a policewoman pursued some criminals who had hidden a loot in jewels in some swampy land.

And it didn’t take long for it to also be released in the science fiction genre or, as they said at the time, in Martian films. In 1955 he filmed The Day of the End of the World, which was not exactly about Martians but about some mutant humans who devoured the few surviving earthlings of a nuclear holocaust.

Already in the sixties, he found a vein in the work of the great Edgar Allan Poe and directed The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), where Vincent Price gave life to the turbulent Roderick Usher. Again with Price as the protagonist and against a terrible castle as a backdrop, Corman directed The Pendulum of Death (1961). He continued with the adaptation of Poe’s famous poem, The Raven, in 1963. Price once again led the cast, which on this occasion was joined by two other of the genre’s great supporting characters, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff.

And he had a great star, Ray Milland, for The Man with X-Rays in His Eyes (1963) where a self-scientist experimented with a drug and managed to see too much. Other titles followed such as The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) or Secret Invasion (1964), which had a glittering cast, Stewart Granger, Raf Vallone and Mickey Rooney, and which took place during World War II, the only time Corman confessed to having been afraid in real life: “We knew exactly what they were training us for: the invasion of Japan. “We knew why we were there and what awaited us,” he said in 2019.

Televisions became widespread in the 70s and videos in the 80s, theaters no longer needed B movies to fill the programming and Corman reduced his fervor as a director. He filmed his last film in 1990, The Resurrection of Frankenstein, with John Hurt, Raul Julia and Bridget Fonda, but he did not leave the world of cinema by any means. He continued his work as a producer and with a new company, New World, he dedicated himself to the distribution of international independent films in the United States. The films of Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut and Kurosawa reached the American public thanks to Corman. The man who had triumphed thanks to cheap B-series cinema thus became an emissary of the most prestigious filmmakers in the world.