A Horror Movie, Dismembered

Good horror is like good sex, says Roger Corman, producer and occasional director of such cult classics as “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1956) and the original “The Little Shop of Horrors” (1960).

“You build up tension then jolt your audience. With sex,” he smiles broadly, a slightly subversive glint in his hazel eyes, “you also have [that] exciting climax.”

Dressed in crisply pressed navy slacks, a checked shirt and buttery soft loafers, the soft-spoken Corman, looking fit at 74 and still cranking out upward of a dozen movies a year at his Concorde-New Horizons Studio, is hardly the picture of iconic horrormeister. Indeed, this Stanford engineering graduate who read English at Oxford has made more than 300 films in the last five decades, defining not only horror for several generations, but the low-budget independent movie as we now know it.

“The Blair Witch Project,” the summer independent horror phenomenon that shattered box-office records, no doubt owes a debt to the man whose 1989 autobiography was dubbed, “How I Made 100 Movies and Never Lost a Dime.”

Relaxing in his Santa Monica home amid vases of redolent lilies and art-covered walls, Corman could be mistaken for a benign grandfather, albeit one whose keen eye is ever on the bottom line, and one who has not only given us collective chills over the years, but has fostered great talents like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Not one to rest on cinematic laurels--and nowhere near retiring--Corman’s latest production is something of a novelty: a 35-part serial monster movie that airs in the breaks between American Movie Channel’s presentation of classic horror films in a three-day Halloween weekend marathon.

Scripted by Benjamin Carr, “The Phantom Eye” stars Corman as Professor Gorman, festival host and AMC Horror Department head, who is unable to find the midnight movie of the same name.

The plot is simple, yet rife with nods to Corman’s legendary past. Gorman, clad in a Frankenstein-esque white laboratory coat, hates “wise-guy interns,” and thus sends two film students, Joey and Catherine (David Sean Robinson and Sarah Aldrich), scurrying into AMC’s film library to find the missing film.

Threatened with “dire consequences” if the mission is not accomplished, the pair then split up, entering a number of rooms in a quintessentially creepy, dark cellar. With each new door they enter, they become characters in another kind of horror movie.

Spoofing seven different film genres--from mummies and man-eating plants to sea creatures and an out-of-sync dubbing of the low-budget Mexican horror flicks--”The Phantom Eye” also features cameos by Corman’s former American International Pictures cronies, including Frank Gorshin and “Little Shop of Horrors” star Jonathan Haze.

Longtime Corman aficionado and senior vice president of original programming for AMC, Marc Juris thought it would be fun and different to pay homage to classic monster movies in this interstitial format, with each chapter of the serial less than 10 minutes in length.

Explains Juris: “We thought the best way to do this would be to go to one of the people who created these movies, and actually create an entirely new movie that pays tribute to him. It would [also] help educate and recontextualize these movies for a new generation of monster-movie lovers.

“I came bearing tchotchkes,” Juris recalls of the meeting last March with Corman and Corman’s producer, Marta Mobley-Anderson. “He thought it was a great idea and [since] no one had done it before, he said he would love to do it.”

Corman’s studio--seven acres a block from the beach in Venice--was a lumber factory when he purchased it in 1979. The smell of wood, in fact, still permeates the air, as sets are being readied and dressed for Corman’s scenes. An ardent believer in recycling, the legendary King of the B-flicks is making use of his original film canisters.

Lining the shelves are many actual films from his past, including “The Cry Baby Killer,” which featured a 21-year-old Jack Nicholson in his first film in 1958, and “The Terror,” in which a novice Francis Ford Coppola directed a few scenes for Corman, before going on to write and direct “Dementia 13” in 1963, also made for Corman, on a $22,000 budget. Gobs of spider webs are spewed across the blue canisters from a cobweb gun; eyeballs float in jars; a bloodied, headless body hangs from a hook.

Amid this creepy background, Director Gwenyth Gibby then yells, “Action.”

Corman, whose thespian skills have not yet earned him the attention that his bang-for-the-buck reputation has (he played a senator in Coppola’s “Godfather II” and a congressman in Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13”), is nevertheless game when it comes to retakes. The opening scene requires four, and the next day he does, according to Juris, “some 50-odd pages . . . working until 10 p.m.”

In typical Corman style, the filmmaker quips, “I paid myself overtime.”

No Monster Budget for ‘Phantom Eye’

Also true to low-budget form, he has allotted a 14-day shoot for the format he likens to the cliffhanger serials he loved watching as a kid. Though AMC will initially air “The Phantom Eye” in 35 segments, executives plan to eventually present the film in a single showing.

While Corman’s on-screen participation is only two days work, for the actors cast as the interns it’s another matter. Aldrich, who plays Courtney on ABC’s daytime soap opera, “Port Charles,” works in the mornings for the network, then shows up at the Corman lot, switching gears to monster mode.

“In a way it’s extremely difficult,” says the perky, pigtailed Aldrich, “but it’s similar in the pacing, [and] there’s a lot of material each day. There’s also not a lot of pressure here, and if there’s a mistake, that’s OK, because the movies we’re doing are spoofs. Anything’s bearable,” she says wryly, “for two weeks.”

Robinson, whose previous acting credits include donning the “carnosaur suit” in Corman’s 1996 straight-to-video flick, “Carnosaur 3: Primal Species,” was particularly pleased that Corman would “get to see my face this time.”

The 26-year-old, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Matthew Broderick, oozes glee at the mention of Corman’s name.

“The man is a legend,” he says, “and it’s my first lead in a decent-size movie. This is the most fun I have had in my entire life with clothes on or not.”

While Robinson isn’t acting from the confines of a 60-pound rubber dinosaur suit in this outing, there is no dearth of creatures in “The Phantom Eye.” One of these is Beulah, whose scaly green costume, Corman insists, “must be moist.”

Ah, one of the dictums for fashioning a great monster. Corman, who says he misses directing, still knows the ingredients for conjuring up terror.

“A dry monster looks less threatening,” he points out, “while a slimy monster the light glints off it, and it really [does] look more threatening. If you have hair,” he adds, tongue planted firmly in cheek, “then you don’t have to be wet.”

Monsters, whether wet or dry, are not what ultimately scares Corman. “It’s the fear of the unknown,” he claims. “But with horror and humor, I’m excited and attracted at the same time.”

* “The Phantom Eye” airs Halloween weekend on American Movie Classics from 9 p.m. Friday until Sunday at midnight. Corman also hosts AMC’s weeklong MonsterFest with four nights of features at 10 p.m. beginning tonight.