Yes, there were "good old days," and during those halcyon times one could wander down to the local cinema and watch not one, but two horror flicks.  Why two?  Because watching a twin terror bill is a guaranteed way to...

By JOE WINTERS

As any fan of mystery, horror or science fiction films can tell you, one is never enough, but the idea of the double feature didn’t have its beginnings with films of a fantastic nature.

During the Thirties, the lower budget "B" movies were offered to accompany a major studio’s more prestigious "A" pictures. Two films for the price of one stood a better chance of luring hard-up Depression-era patrons back to the cinema. The practice continued into the Forties with minor studios like Monogram or PRC and major-minors like Universal pairing up their low budget ‘B’ product to the delight of patrons who could enjoy such double delights as 1942’s The Mummy's Tomb and Night Monster. In 1944, you could catch the all-star monster rally House Of Frankenstein and then stick around to see what old Kharis was up to with The Mummy's Curse. And in 1945, the Count, the Monster and the Wolf Man were back in House Of Dracula, co-billed with The Daltons Ride Again (well, not every double feature could be perfect)!

While the war years were profitable for Hollywood, by the end of the decade, the major studios were feeling the pinch from a series of legal entanglements that would end their iron-handed dominance over the motion picture industry. While majors like Paramount, MGM, RKO, Fox and Warner Brothers watched their power slip away, Columbia was moving, at least in part, into television production. Columbia would still maintain its lower budget theatrical film output into the Fifties as well, and double features were still on the agenda, as evidenced by such pairings as 1955’s It Came From Beneath The Sea and Creature With The Atom Brain.

By the late Fifties, there were close to five thousand outdoor screens in the United States. During that same period over five thousand indoor theaters would close, due in no small part to the emergence of television. Even so, film companies like Sam Arkoff’s and Jim Nicholson’s American International Pictures were wise to the profit-making potential of the drive-in movie. Teenagers, either borrowing their dad’s car or lucky enough to have their own, would turn out in droves to see movies geared specifically toward them. Even though the films themselves were mainly an excuse for teens to scare up an evening of heavy petting, sooner or later they’d have to come up for air.

At that time the movies would be there for them with an array of teenage werewolves, teenage Frankensteins, teenage zombies, teenage cavemen, and other adolescent rebels, with or without causes, all speaking to young people in a way that hadn’t been done. Besides providing teens with the ideal backdrop for amorous activities, drive-in movies were a unique way for families to enjoy pictures without having to dress up. They could kick back in their cars or set out a couple lounge chairs or even spread a blanket or sleeping bag. Fresh air, food and refreshments intermingled with the occasional drawbacks, mosquitoes and horn honking. There seemed no end to the options and combinations that a drive-in could provide.

Drive-ins provided film distributors with a seasonal second-run outlet for prestige pictures, and a first-run showcase for those films that seemed even better suited for the drive-in experience. For the patrons, drive-ins offered more movies for their entertainment dollar. At the very least, you could see two pictures for the price of one and sometimes on weekends even go all out with a dusk-to-dawn marathon, usually with a horror theme.

The genre of first-run drive-in movies would usually be of a horrific, sci-fi, or sexploitative nature. There would be films with similar type plots or monsters, films from the same company, or even from the same director who might also be the producer/writer/star!

The natives were restless in an Allied Artists double feature from 1957 as lovely Allison Hayes worked her voodoo magic in The Disembodied while the mystical living tree Tobanga stalked island natives in From Hell It Came. More fun on a shoestring would come from director Richard C. Cunha with a pairing of his 1958 double helping of She Demons, starring Irish McCalla (television’s "Sheena") menaced by a mad Nazi doctor and his creepy creations, and Giant From The Unknown, where archaeologists unearth a centuries-old (and still living) Spanish conquistador. Cunha struck again that same year with the dreadfully delightful Frankenstein's Daughter and Missile To The Moon.

Distributors Corporation of America and Eros Film Distributors (of the UK) would team up The Crawling Eye (1 958) with Cosmic Monsters, and both co-starring American actor Forrest Tucker (later of F-Troop fame). In one he battles giant eyeballs from space, and in the other, mutated insects. More oversized oddities were on the way, courtesy of Hollywood Pictures Corporation’s 1959 double feature of The Killer Shrews (dogs with masks) and The Giant Ghila Monster (average sized reptile set against miniatures and with the occasional giant prop foot). Both films featured former beauty queens in distress, and both films were produced by Ken "Festus" Curtis, who also co-starred in the former.

In 1960, Miller Consolidated Pictures would present Beyond The Time Barrier and The Amazing Transparent Man, both directed by celebrated low-budget movie meister Edgar G. Ulmer in Dallas on the site of the Texas State Fair using exhibits of futuristic art and design as backdrops. Ulmer had previously done wonders with such films as The Black Cat (1934), Bluebeard (1944), and The Man From Planet X (1951), among others. Economizing was the name of the game, and its to the credit of such filmmakers as Ulmer, Cunha, and our next gentleman, that the films maintained their varying degrees of fun quotient. Less celebrated low- budget director Jerry Warren churned out a gaggle of films that ensured his status, including the 1960 double fiasco The Incredible Petrified World (with John Carradine, Robert "Sun Demon" Clarke, and feisty Phyllis "Lois Lane" Coates, who keeps the film from being totally petrified) and Teenage Zombies (the latter shot in 1957, but unreleased at the time).

Director Kenneth G. Crane is the link between an abominable snowman effort called Half Human (1957) (with footage culled from a supposedly superior Japanese yeti movie and added American footage with John Carradine spliced in) and Monster From Green Hell (1957) with giant wasps on the loose in Africa.

The doctors were in with a 1962 English-dubbed double feature from Italy, films known in the US as The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock and The Awful Dr. Orloff, two men with decidedly different ideas about dead people. Orloff was into re-animation, while the former dabbled in necrophilia.

Re-issuing previously-released movies under different titles was not uncommon, such as when in 1963 Cari Releasing Corporation teamed up Silent Death (better known as 1957’s Voodoo Island) with Doctor Cadman's Secret (known in 1956 and since as The Black Sleep).

Auteur, anyone? The highlights of writer/director/actor/ producer, Ray Dennis Steckler’s less-than-illustrious film career were on view in the 1964 drive-in double feature of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies and its companion film, the shorter-titled, but more outrageously effective The Thrill Killers.

Of course American International were masters of the game and would grace hundreds of drive-in movie screens with domestic product as well as international pickups. The Phantom Planet would be teamed with Antonio Marghariti’s Space Men (a.k.a. Assignment Outer Space). One might have seen Planet Of Blood (a.k.a. Queen Of Blood) double-billed with the more Earthbound Track Of The Vampire (a.k.a. Blood Bath).

Double features less suited to be double features, yet paired up anyway, might include Night Of The Blood Beast and She-Gods Of Shark Reef. However, by the time you’ve been treated to an intermission and countdown peppered with commercials for taste-tempting treats available at the refreshment stand, chances are you wouldn’t even notice the drastic change between the first feature and the second.

Britain’s Hammer Films (with American distributor Columbia) would get in on the double-feature act, luring 1964 patrons into theaters with a jazzy jingle promoting "The Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb…and The Gorrrrrgon…yeah, The Gorgooon." Another pairing would be Hammer/20th Century Fox’s Dracula, Prince Of Darkness and Plague Of The Zombies (1966) at which the goofy gimmick of zombie eyeglasses were given to girls, while they boys got vampire fangs.

In 1971 producer Jerry Gross needed a co-feature to go with his cannibalistic hippie flick I Drink Your Blood, and so he bought Del Horror Of Party Beach Tenney’s unreleased 1964 zombie film Voodoo Blood Bath and re-named it I Eat Your Skin, proving that sooner or later almost every movie finds a home.

Sadly, the heyday of the theatrical or drive-in double feature is long since done. Oh, if you’re fortunate enough to live in a city with a repertory theater, you can still catch the occasional combo of, say, Doctor X and Mystery Of The Wax Museum (two gems from the early 1930’s utilizing a two-color process). And while the number of drive-in theaters in the U-S has dropped from over four-thousand in the 1960’s to fewer than eight-hundred today, some have re-opened and new ones are occasionally being built to provide a nostalgic kick for baby boomers while finding a niche among the retro-fascinated younger set.

Recently through home video such as Sinister Cinema’s drive-in double feature tapes (complete with previews and snack bar intermissions), as well as through various companies’ DVD double features, a viewer can still get double the pleasure, double the fun, and with what’s available on home video, there’s practically no end to the combinations of do-it-yourself double features!

Thanks, Joe!  Yes, dual horror film viewing can be a treat for horror fans--of course, that does depend on what's playing at the home cineplex.   

Article copyright © Joe Winters

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