A "Retro"-Retrospective On The Drive-In Horror Film Experience...
By Renfield
"Hey! Let's go to the drive-in and catch that dusk-to-dawn horror show!"
These words, uttered more than once during Renfield's misspent youth, really sum up the drive-in horror movie experience...drive-in theaters and horror flicks just went together perfectly, like "freshly popped popcorn" and "sweet, creamery butter" (get 'em at the snack bar now!).
The most (but not uniquely) American form of filmic entertainment is the drive-in movie theater. Ever since visionary Richard Hollingshead, Jr., opened the first drive-in theater in Camden, New Jersey, in June 1933, watching a film or two (or three or more) under the stars has been the quintessential American pop-cultural experience. However, the addition of horror film programming was been a more recent event in the history of the American drive-in.
The drive-in with its dark-night setting and claustrophobic seating (if you stayed in your vehicle, at least) helped promote the proper chills and thrills that horror films, even bad ones, generate. No wonder so many horror films seemed to be made just for the drive-in crowds. Pioneer drive-in critic Joe Bob Briggs (AKA John Bloom) 'way back in the early Eighties, with tongue firmly in cheek, reviewed the cheesy but fun not-ready-for-indoor-theater films he rightly christened "drive-in films." After him came a flood of drive-in film studies, retrospectives, reviews, and revivals (Sinister Cinema's excellent Drive-In Double Feature videos, for example). But what it all boiled down to was this: Drive-ins were for decades the most accessible source of cinematic horror for all of us next to heavily commercialized and censored television.
Originally meant to provide a cheap alternative for families to the "hardtop" indoor movie theaters (no dressing up, no paying a baby-sitter), the drive-in served families, war production workers, and the middle-to-lower-income population well from the Thirties to the Fifties. By the mid Fifties, however, the drive-in was evolving from a family roost to a haunt for teenagers (a cultural phenomenon caused by a heady mixture of rebellious kids with cars, postwar prosperity, the rise of the suburb, and working parents)--ergo the birth of the infamous "passion pit" that drive-ins became notorious as amongst parents and public officials.
However, between the necking
and heavy petting, the young crowd in the mid to late Fifties was
watching the films that filled the then-giant (to handle the
movie industry's switch to wide-screen 70 mm films) drive-in
theater screens. This salient fact was missed by the major movie
studios at first, but not by Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson whose
newly formed American International Pictures geared up to supply
drive-in owners and patrons just what they wanted: movies about
teens for teens (niche marketing a la Hollywood). There
were the juvenile delinquent films (1957’s Motorcycle
Gang), of course, and the rock-and-roll films (Rock All
Night, also 1957)…and then there was horror...teenage
horror.
One memorable teen-terror drive-in double feature was, of course, A.I.P's seminal I Was A Teenage Werewolf and I Was A Teenage Frankenstein (both 1957). The latter became an almost instant teenage-pop culture icon as well as a runaway hit and introduced Michael Landon as the beastly teen just before he hit his own bonanza with TV's Bonanza. The former flick's outright ludicrousness was spiced with a dollop of gore--at around the time England's Hammer Studios was splattering their horror films (Curse Of Frankenstein, Horror Of Dracula, 1957 and 1958, respectively ) with the same red stuff that nightmares are made of. Ironically, the shift to teen horror films by the independent film producers was, in part, sparked by the strong public reaction to the showing of Universal's horror classics on TV...the same classics Hammer Studios was reanimating in Technicolor.
The flood of teen horror product continued unabated throughout the late Fifties, with A.I.P. in general and it's erstwhile top producer, Roger Corman, in particular, leading the way. Teenagers battled bulb-headed aliens (classic monster mummery by A.I.P. monster-maker Paul Blaisdell) in Invasion Of The Saucermen (1957—what a great year for drive-in horror!). Teenagers fought alien teenagers in the classic no-budget, cult wonder (Warner Brothers actually released this turkey) Teenagers From Outer Space (1959). There was even Teenage Monster (1957), a woebegone western flick starring a hairy teenage goonie whose problems were that of a typical teenager—a speech impediment and an overprotective mother (see this month’s cover). Teenage Frankie and Teenage Wolfie were reunited in A.I.P.'s wonderfully quirky and prophetic How To Make A Monster (1958). "Prophetic" because the script's description of a movie studio's deliberate move away from horror toward more standard fare (which, in the film, enraged the suddenly unemployed makeup man enough to unleash his cinematic monsters against the arrogant studio bosses) foreshadowed A.I.P.'s and other major and minor studio's temporary move from horror programming at the end of the Fifties. (Even more prophetic was A.I.P.'s next year’s release of The Ghost Of Dragstrip Hollow, which plays the horror elements for yucks and Paul Blaisdell, in his last film for A.I.P., appears as a pathetic loser trying to scare the stalwart teens to no avail.)
For a few years in the early Sixties, A.I.P., as well as other first and second-banana film companies produced beach films, action films, even Westerns, with a teenage point of reference. But teen horror still lumbered along. Del Tenny mixed beach frolics with horror in the camp bad-film classic Horror of Party Beach (1964). Former Hollywood leading man Jon Hall tried the same formula the following year in The Beach Girls And The Monster, but the putrid results reportedly drove him to suicide, whereas Tenny made a mint off his beach monster opus.
Overall, though, horror languished, relegated to the occasional European import (1961’s Werewolf In A Girl's Dormitory, for example, which was the closest thing to a Euro teen-terror film ever produced, The Playgirls And The Vampire (1960), Jesse Franco's The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962), which was probably his best film in terms of overall quality until his last one, Faceless) to enliven the marquees. A favorite with the drive-in crowd then no doubt was Circus Of Horrors (1960)—if only for the pinning-the-woman-on-the-wheel sequence alone. Thank God (or Satan) for the bewitching Barbara Steele, whose raven-haired (and raven-spirited) presence on a list of Euro-horrors in the early to mid-1960s (Mario Bava's masterpiece, Black Sunday {1960}, the kinky necrophiliac orgy The Horrible Doctor Hitchcock {1962}, the "faceless monster" flick Nightmare Castle {1965}, et al.) lent a touch of horror class to drive-in screens...as did Corman's colorful Edgar Allen Poe epics, such as The Pit And The Pendulum (1961), also starring Steele with venerable Vincent Price.
Otherwise, horror-wise, there was only the steady horror product from Hammer Films and it's rivals. A notable one was Herman Cohen and his delightfully campy, sleazy, and outright lurid misogynist fright flicks such as the 1961 King Kong Klone Konga (Kong shoulda sued) and the Michael Gough Grand Guignol shocker, 1959’s Horrors Of The Black Museum (Renfield still won't focus a pair of binocular while looking through the eyepieces!).
Ironically, as one-time midget-movie-maverick A.I.P. settled into film industry respectability, a pair of real mavericks reintroduced horror to the drive-in, with a vengence—featuring, glorying in, explicit, spewing, blood-red gore. The mavericks were, of course, one-time college professor Herschell Gordon Lewis and former Paramount Studios flackman David F. Friedman. This odd couple saw that the market for nudie films (another staple of drive-ins then) was drying up as Hollywood become more daring in depictions of adult scenes. What to do? The answer--splash the screen with gore. The two cranked out Blood Feast (1963) with spare change for a budget, one kettledrum for a music score, and buckets of stage blood and butcher shop leavings for set dressing. The film did boffo drive-in business, and Lewis and Friedman went on to make the rather good Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and the rather lame Color Me Blood Red (1965).
They then went their separate ways as the Sixties ran down, Lewis to more gore (1972’s The Gore-Gore Girls), softcore adult (1967’s Suburban Roulette), and hillbilly (1964’s Moonshine Mountain) flicks and Friedman to softcore adult epics (The Defilers {1965} and Trader Hornee {1970})...but not before they inspired lesser lights such as Jerry Gross and Ray Dennis Steckler to pick up the exploitation-horror reins up into the early Seventies. (Friedman did produce a drive-in horror flick in 1967 entitled She-Freak, a updated, bloody remake of Tod Browning’s 1932 geek show Freaks.)
Steckler, AKA "Cash Flagg," created the first and
only monster musical anti-masterpiece The Incredibly Strange
Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964).
In terms of drive-in interest, Steckler later took Incredibly
Strange and retitled it as Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody
Mary just for drive-in distribution. He even took a page from
gimmick-movie mogul William Castle's (The Tingler, 13
Ghosts) playbook by having employees dressed up as monsters
invade the drive-in's car-filled rows during the showing of the
film (a testimonial from one of Steckler’s rent-a-monsters
can be found in "Gore-Respondence"). (Such antics were
also employed and probably better executed in Monsters Crash
The Pajama Party {1965}.)
Jerry Gross took a cheap, graceless, gross-out film (but in color) about a boy who feeds rabies-infected meat pies to hippies he doesn't like and mated it with an older, black-and-white Del Tenny zombie flick made back in 1964 but never released (originally entitled, appropriately enough, Zombie) that resembled the old forties zombie programmers cranked out by poverty row studios such as Monogram and Producers Releasing Corporation. The resultant progeny was the categorical drive-in horror double-feature of David E. Durston's one-hit-wonder I Drink Your Blood and the retitled I Eat Your Skin (1971). Literally hundreds of thousands of drive-in moviegoers, mainly teens and young adults, flocked to see this double helping of schlock horror and superlative hucksterism (whereas the seminal zombies ‘n’ gore masterpiece, George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (1968), initially struggled to earn its space on dive-in and theater marquees). Gross earned a little more respectability when he introduced Lucio Fulci's gooey and gory Zombie (1980) and the feminist revenge tale I Spit On Your Grave (1977) to audiences. (I Spit On Your Grave, starring comedy legend Buster Keaton’s grandniece, Camille, is the film that shocked mainstream critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to all but call for outright movie censorship.)
We come to the early to mid Seventies where Renfield has his own memories.
(While still a grade-school ghoul, Renfield does recall being
taken to the drive-in during the early 
Sixties
with his buddies by the long-suffering father of one of those
buddies. There, two of the horror helpings he relished were The
Fiendish Ghouls (1960), the more-exploitable title for
Mania, the Peter Cushing-led grave-stealing saga, and The
Horrors Of Spider Island (1959), the German sex-and-shudder
film that appealed to Renfield and his buddies on both levels.
Another drive-in horror viewed during that period of Renfield's
adolescence was Roger Corman's Cuban monster-mystery-spy-spoof The
Creature From The Haunted Sea (1961) which was not so well
received. Even at those tender years, Renfield knew a crummy
rubber- suit monster when he saw one.)
As a teenage Renfield, he and his buddies often visited the drive-in, especially when horror films were playing. The Seventies were a good time for horror, since the family audience was largely staying home to watch television rather than go out to see a movie. Television was then chock-full of family programming (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Thriller were just memories). But for the teenager and the young adult wanting spicier fare, TV was truly a great wasteland. The fledgling cable TV and VCR industries were no help there, either. The only place to catch the sexy flicks, the foreign films, and the horror shows was the theater--and the drive-in was the venue of choice for teens and adults not yet burdened by family matters. The drive-in theater owners knew this and booked exploitation/sex/horror films that the hardtops wouldn't touch as quickly as they could find them.
By now, A.I.P. was fading into gray middle-age, but there were
others to take its place. One 
notable was the fun drive-in double
features The Undertaker And His Pals (1971) and The
Corpse Grinders (1971-72). These were the cinematic
spawn of Ted. V. Mikels (of Astro-Zombies infame) whose
own life (he allegedly lived in a castle with seven wives) was a
drive-in movie. While The Corpse Grinders was a silly
schlock screamer featuring a cardboard box with blinking lights
masquerading as a mega-meat-grinder that accidentally
"grinds" a human body to produce cat food that, in
turn, somehow causes the cats that eat the product to attack
their human masters (cats do that anyway without corpse-grinder
chow), The Undertaker And His Pals was a nifty little
tongue-in-cheek horror/black comedy. An undertaker and his
diner-owner compadres ride mototcycles and murder
and mutilate pretty women to create business for the undertaker
and to provide "weekly specials" at the diner (the
"specials" match the victim's names--thus, poor Mary
Poultry became "Breast of Chicken"). A dopey detective
and a dopier cop chase the baddies amongst a mulligan stew of bad
puns, Keystone Cops-slapstick, and a few gushes of gore (at least
Renfield remembers the gore; his video copy of Undertaker
is the censored version, alas). A few years later, the future
director of Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman) and a couple of
TV’s SCTV alums (Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin) made a real
drive-in flick, complete with warning sound (when gore was about
to spurt) in Cannibal Girls (1972).
It was horror programs like Undertaker and Grinders, the "dusk-to-dawn" horror film marathons (usually based on a theme like Don't Go Into The House, Don't Go Into The Park, Don't Look In The Basement, etc.) that Renfield remembers best. It was the horror films--and only the horror films--that we watched at all faithfully at the drive-in. Thusly, it was the drive-in that fatally inflamed that peculiar passion yours truly and many other have for horror films.
Back in my Teenage Renfield days, I and my buddies would stop by the local White Castle for a few sacks of belly bombers (we never call those mini-burgers "sliders"), pick up a case of beer, pile in my ’66 Plymouth Sport Fury, and head for the drive-in. Our favorite outdoor theater was the 66 Park-In Theater (now defunct like so many other great drive-ins), right off Route 66 near St. Louis. We'd head for the back of the lot, where a lot of other teenagers were already parked. The evening's activity would consist of beer drinking, belly-bomber dropping, an occasional foray to the snack bar, mingling, looking for girls, and, sometimes, even movie-watching. (We usually watched enough of the flicks to know what they were about, sorta).
In its own
pedestrian way, it was magic, drive-in magic. It was the total
experience, the starlit night, the smell of popcorn and exhaust
fumes, the taste of greasy, heavily onioned beef, the crackle of
the tinny speakers--all merged into a sort of heady effluvium
that is simply indescribable unless you've personally experienced
it. It gave ambiance to watching horror films, one that too many
would-be Renfields have not experienced. For you Generation Xers:
Get thee to a drive-in and get some soul!
If horror films and drive-in are a natural combo then, is there a "best" drive-in horror film? Here we run into the factor of personal preference and personal experiences; we feel warmly even toward bad horror films if they bookmark a fondly remembered period of our past. For yours truly, the aforementioned double-team of Undertaker and Grinder would be a best pick because of where I saw them and when I saw them. To another person seeing them for the first time on video, they wouldn't rate as best anything. No doubt to a younger horror fan, seeing Jason and Freddy do their hack-and-slash on a drive-in screen would rate much higher to him or her. Let's leave it at this, gentle fiends: the best drive-in horror film is the one you saw with your best girlfriend/boyfriend/pals at the threater where admission is by the carload and movies flicker on wide screens under a canopy of stars.
Article (c) Joe "Renfield" Meadows. "PIC" and "Drive-In Ads" for animated GIF from Corral Drive-In and 99W bumper sticker from 99W Drive-In (both www.driveintheater.com). Drive-In Theatre Sign for animated GIF from "The American Drive-In Theatre". Animated Drive-in Ads GIFs (c) Joe "Renfield" Meadows. All rights reserved.
