B-movies: origins, development and categories

B-movie is a low budget formulaic movie, which falls somewhere in the horror, sci-fi, western or gangster genres, although the other genres can be covered as well. The common but not compulsory features of a B-movie are 1) cheesy acting and dialogue and 2) tendency to focus on action in prejudice of the story. The other distinguishing feature of a B-movie is a tendency to have an overblown title, or a number of alternative titles in order to grab movie-goers' attention [21].

B-movies come in different forms, but the most prominent categories of this type of movies are exploitation and trash. Exploitation is a movie with a low budget and even lower moral and artistic merit, trying to make a quick buck by exploiting a current trend or a niche genre. Trying to attract audience’s attention, exploitation flicks more often than not play on primitive desires to survive and procreate by including vast amounts of violence and sex [23].

Trash is a movie that was deliberately made with almost nonexistent budget and complete disregard to the laws of moviemaking and good taste. Due to sometimes focusing on sleazy topics, trash movie is often confused with exploitation movie, although trash is a product of exploitation, rather than its counterpart. There was also some debate about the difference between trash and so-called “Z-movie”. Nowadays it is universally accepted, that in trash the movie’s “badness” is a conscious stylistic decision, while in Z-movie poor quality of the movie is caused by sheer incompetence of everyone involved [20].

Even though the term “B-movie” wasn’t invented until the 1930s, movies that had very similar characteristics were being made during the silent era. Universal Studios is considered to be the first Hollywood studio to differentiate feature brands based on production costs. Back in the early days Universal used 3-tiered branding system in order to distribute its movies to independent movie theaters: big-budget “elitist” feature movies to Jewel, mainstream releases to Bluebird and low-budget flicks to Red Feather. In the beginning of 1920s the branding system has died out, but Universal continued to make low-budget productions in between its ambitious big-budget movies. This practice allowed Universal to derive maximum value from its staff and facilities at all times, even if there was no major production in the making. This turned out to be an effective business model. In the late 1920s, at the end of the silent era, while the cost of an average movie from major Hollywood studio could be from 200000 to 300000 $, the cost of these quickly-made flicks was about 50000 $.

The development of the phenomenon of B-movie in the 1930s was greatly influenced by two things – the spreading of sound movie technology and the Great Depression. Movie studios of the 30s were feeling the pinch and tried desperately to save money and stay afloat.

Most of the big studios owned their own theatres by then, so they didn’t need to try to sell their movies to someone else anymore, which gave them the freedom to implement a new format. A typical movie bill in a theatre by the mid 30s might be comprised of a short movie, a cartoon, a news reel, movie previews and then a double feature [22].

The main event of the double feature became known as the A, and the second on the bill – the B, which was usually under 80 minutes long. This also meant that studios could rent movies together, or charge a flat fee for the Bs. Obviously, when the B feature was sufficiently low-budget, they made more profit. In Depression-era America audiences started to prefer cheaper “two for one” value tickets, so eventually simple double bills began to prevail.

The B-movie was usually made with existing sets, low paid actors and reused stock footage. They were often formulaic and easily genre-identified, while the A-movie had the big names, talented writers, Technicolor and expensive production values. By the late 30s both major (Warner Bros, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, MGM and RKO) and minor (Universal, Columbia and United Artists) studios were churning out B-movies, which had become important to their survival. For these studios, the B-movie was often a lifeline. They kept money flow moving, distribution channels open, staff working, enabled the reuse of sets and props, and, basically, kept the audiences.

There were also a range of studios specialising in low-budget movies only. These became known in Hollywood as Poverty Row, and included Republic, Monogram and Tiffany Pictures. The average price of an A movie in the mid 40s was almost half a million dollars, whereas most Republic movies were made for under $200,000.

Yet, sometimes a B-movie ended up more popular than the A-movie. And every now and then Bs acted as launch pads for talent ascending the Hollywood career ladder. Before starring in such classics as 1969 “True Grit”, which brought him an Oscar for Best Actor, John Wayne appeared in many B-westerns, for example.

Also, during that era film noir ­– French for “black movie”, a type of criminal drama, notable for its low-key black-and-white visuals and cynical, dismal worldview, set in a world of hardboiled private detectives, perfidious femme fatales and ruthless criminals [21]– became a very popular genre of B-movies, begetting such moviemakers as Fritz Lang, who, despite being known today mostly as the director of “Metropolis”, also directed some of the most brutal film noirs, such as 1944 “The Woman in the Window” or 1953 “The Big Heat”, and Michael Curtiz, the director of “Casablanca”. The low budget of B-movies allowed directors to be free of the commercial constraints often associated with big budgets, thus bringing out their creativity.

The B-movie, as we understand it today, is perhaps most synonymous with the 40s and 50s era of Hollywood. At this stage the label was beginning to be used as derogatory slang for cheapo movies with stale dialogue, unknown actors and old sets.

In the 40s the double feature still prevailed (in 1941, 50 % of theaters were double-billing), but soon the legal restrictions were put on big studios, forbidding them from block booking and enforcing them once again focus mostly on A-movies production. Thus B-movies production became mostly the prerogative of smaller studios.

And once again B-movies sometimes became more popular than A-movies. For example, one of the highest-grossing movies of 1943was RKO’s “Hitler’s Children”, a thriller about Hitler-Jugend, which earned more than 3 million dollars.

During the 40s RKO were renowned for their focus on B-movies, thanks to screen writer and producer Val Lewton, who mostly specialized in horror movies. His production team made movies like “Cat People” (1942), a horror-thriller about a woman, who turns into panther when sexually aroused, “I Walked With A Zombie” (1943), a movie about Voodoo magic (it should be noted, that back then the term “zombie” meant “a person who was brainwashed into submission, usually via magic”, rather than “a living dead with cannibalistic tendencies”) [14], and “The Body Snatcher” (1945), the adaptation of the short story of the same name by Robert Louis Stevenson, about grave robbers, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

Despite mostly focusing on horror, however, RKO was also responsible for a number of successful film noirs, including “Stranger on the Third Floor”(1940), which is now considered film noir classic.

Meanwhile, down in Poverty Row, the reduction of budgets and cliché plots led to the production of movies that can only be characterized as “proto-exploitation”, like “Women in Bondage” (1943), a movie about the treatment of women in Nazi prisons, and “She Shoulda Said 'No!” (1949), also known as Wild Weed; Marijuana, the Devil's Weed; The Story of Lila Leeds and Her Exposé of the Marijuana Racket; and The Devil's Weed – a cautionary tale about, as the numerous alternative titles suggest, the perils of smoking weed [23].

By the 50s the term “B-movie” started to be more broadly used to describe a style, rather than budget or billing position. Although they were still, no doubt, cheaper movies, the B-movies were now the adopted moniker for movies that were outlandish or experimental. The term “B-actors” – meaning the actors, who star in B-movies almost exclusively – has also appeared during that decade [21].

In 1948 the movie industry was shaken by the big court case between the Supreme Court and major Hollywood studios that banned the block booking of As and Bs. So, the two-feature billing practice started to abate. This led to the downfall of many movie studios, including RKO, which closed its doors in 1957.

With the double-feature tradition dying, drive-in theaters, which were created in 1933, but failed to gain lots of popularity back then, became top place for seeing a B-movie. Drive-in theater is a movie theater consisting of a large outdoor movie screen, a projection booth, a concession stand and a large parking area for automobiles, thus allowing customers to watch movies from their cars. [22] This type of movie theaters was often considered immoral among pious elderly, since it was especially popular among teenagers, who found drive-ins perfect for dates. This, in turn, caused drive-ins to show entertaining easy-to-follow flicks that wouldn’t distract the couples in the audience from billing and cooing.

American International Pictures (AIP), founded in 1954, became the spiritual successor of RKO, devoted even more solely to B-movies than its predecessor. AIP had a long standing relationship with noted director Roger Corman, who is often referred to as “the King of Bs”, and with writer Charles B. Griffith. It’s also worth mentioning, that Corman, passionate about supporting and inspiring new talent, helped discover seminal names such as Francis Ford Copploa, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard.

AIP produced such famous titles as “The She Creature” (1956), a horror movie about a hypnotist, who turns some woman into a prehistoric beast, “It Conquered the World” (also 1956), a sci-fi flick about an alien from Venus, who tries to, well, conquer the world, and“I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (1957), one of the most successful AIP movies, telling the story of a hot-tempered teenaged, who turns into a werewolf after being experimented on by a mad scientist [11] .

During that decade the most popular movie genres were science fiction (especially those, featuring nuclear mutants and /or megalomaniac aliens) and horror (especially monster movie and its sub-genre creature feature – a movie featuring an existing animal, rather than a fictional monster, going rouge). In addition to the aforementioned movies, notable titles of the 50s include “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951), a somewhat anti-war movie about a nearly omnipotent alien, who arrives to Earth to decide the fate of humanity, “The Thing” (also 1951), often referred to as “The Thing from Another World” to avoid confusion with 1982 remake, a sci-fi horror about scientists at a remote Arctic research outpost forced to defend themselves from a malevolent alien, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), sci-fi movie about aliens trying to take over the world by replacing the humans with their clones, and “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman” (1958), a sci-fi movie about a woman, who turns into a giantess after encountering an alien being and proceeds to take revenge on her unfaithful husband.

Another trend of B-movie market of the 50s is an influx of foreign movies, mostly Japanese, Italian and British. Most of these movies were retitled, redubbed and reedited; in some cases specially made scenes with American actors were also added to attract more audience. The first attempts to bring foreign flicks into the US were made between 1951 and 1955, when Lippert Studios and Hammer Movie Productions, small American and British movie studios respectively, made a distribution deal, which brought a couple of Hammer sci-fi movies across the Atlantics. But they remained mostly unnoticed. The second, far more successful, attempt was made in 1957 by an American producer Joseph E. Levine, who acquired 1954 Japanese sci-fi movie about a mutant lizard, titled “Godzilla” and added new footage with Canadian-American actor Raymond Burr. The movie, renamed “Godzilla, king of the monsters”, was a hit, grossing 2 million $, mostly due to Levine’s clever marketing, featuring such taglines as “Fantastic beyond comprehension, beyond compare – Astounding beyond belief!”, or “Terror staggers the mind as the gargantuan creature of the sea surges up on a tidal wave of destruction to wreak vengeance on the Earth!” [11].

1957 was also marked by another deal between Hammer and American studio – this time Warner Bros. – which brought much more satisfying results, than the first one. The distributed movie, “The Curse of Frankenstein”, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, was made on a budget of roughly 400000 $, but grossed over 3 million $. The movie’s success led to the production of other remakes of horror classics, like “Dracula” (1958), released in the US as “The Horror of Dracula”, and “The Mummy” (1959), both starring Lee and Cushing. These movies, distributed in the States by Universal, were smash hits and influenced both British and American moviemakers of the years to come [12].

The Italian cinema in the US was mostly represented by pepla – moderate-budget costume dramas based on ancient history, Greek mythology, or Biblical stories [2, p. 1125]. The most notable peplum of that decade is “Hercules” (1958), original title – “Le fatiche di Ercole” (“Labours of Hercules”), a loose adaptation of Greek myths, starring American-born actor Steve Reeves. This movie was once again bought, distributed and heavily marketed by Levine and earned 5 million dollars.

It is often said that the horror and sci-fi boom of the 50s reflected a fear perpetuated by the onset of the Cold War, and that the decidedly paranoid and anti-communist paradigm shift in the US meant that such monsters and aliens embodied a totalitarian Red threat.

Although these theories are quite justifiable, one could argue that the prevalence of these kinds of movies was also due to a surge in technological obsession matched by improved special effects, while thematically and symbolically the ideas of authority, anarchy, invasion, socialism, nationalism, capitalism and new scientific or technological consumerism and its repercussions were probably an allusion to things happening within the borders of the United States, as well as things outside.

It would be a crime to talk about B-movies of the 50s, without mentioning Ed Wood. Named “The Worst Director of All Time”, he is infamous for shooting 20-30 scenes a day, making almost no second takes, working with a microscopic, even by B-movie standards, budget, excessive use of stock footage in his works and not only directing, but also writing, producing, editing and starring in his own movies. He was also a friend of Bela Lugosi in his later years, often giving Lugosi a role in his movies. Although, some argue that Wood exploited whatever was left of Lugosi’s fame. Most well-known Wood’s movies are “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (1959), originally titled “Grave Robbers from Outer Space”, a sci-fi flick about aliens trying to stop the humanity from creating doomsday device by resurrecting the dead, “Bride of the Monster” (1955), originally titled “Bride of the Atom”, a movie featuring Lugosi in his last speaking role of mad scientist obsessed with the idea of creating superpowered nuclear mutants [25], and “Glen or Glenda” (1953), originally titled “I Changed My Sex”, an “early bird” of exploitation, loosely based on the story of the first widely known transsexual Christine Jorgensen. In his declining years Wood completely moved into exploitation and softcore porn areas, creating such “classics” as “Orgy of the Dead” (1963), originally titled “Nudie Ghoulies”, a movie, about 90% of which consists of ghouls, played by local strippers, dancing topless [26].

1960s marked the end of classic B-movie era and the beginning of exploitation era, which was going to last for two decades.

During that time, the popularity of drive-ins declined dramatically, so, in order to survive, they had to live up to their reputation of “cradles of sin” and start showing exploitation movies. Another primary source of exploitative cinema was grindhouse. Unlike drive-in, this type of theaters showed only exploitation. It was named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where “bump-n'-grind” – a sexually suggestive dance involving exaggerated hip movements – was featured. Grindhouses are also notable for reviving double bills tradition in order to urge customers to stay for longer [23].

As was said earlier, exploitation didn’t come out of nowhere. Movies that can be defined as exploitation, although at a bit of a stretch, were filmed as early as 1930s. The most prominent of such movies is Tod Browning’s “Freaks” (1932), an otherwise stale love triangle story, infamous for featuring people with real physical deformities. Many anti-drug PSAs, such as “Reefer Madness” (1936) or aforementioned “She Shoulda Said ‘No!’” can be said to contain some elements of exploitation, due to their deliberate exaggeration of the effects of marijuana, claiming that just one puff can turn anyone into sex-crazed homicidal maniac.

But still, for the first half of XXs century exploitation remained the underdog. It wasn’t until the cultural shift of the 60s and the subsequent relaxing of censorship laws, when exploitation got into full swing.

There are millions upon millions sub-genres of exploitation, sensationalizing everything that thrill-seeking public can find even mildly interesting. The earliest and the longest-living of exploitation sub-genres is sexploitation or skin flick – a movie, as the title suggests, depicting nudity in a very explicit manner. The distinguishing feature of skin flicks, differentiating them from any movie with nude scenes, or pornography, is that, even though gratuitous nudity is the main focus of the flick, there are almost no explicit sexual scenes. The first sexploitation movie is considered to be “The Immoral Mr. Teas” (1959), a story of a clumsy door-to-door salesman, who uses his accidentally acquired X-ray vision to spy on attractive women. Later skin flicks split up into two types – the gritty ones and sex comedies. The former – featuring such titles as “Scum of the Earth!” (1963), also known as “Devil's Camera”, a story about a student, who is blackmailed into doing erotic photography, or “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (1965), a movie about three thrill-seeking go-go dancers trying to seduce an elderly farmer and his two sons out of their money – also focuses on violence and handles the subject of nudity in a provocative manner. The latter – featuring such movies as “Beach Blanket Bingo” and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (both 1965) – is more tongue-in-cheek, and mostly features misadventures of young couples on a tropical beach.

Another old sub-genre of exploitation is outlaw biker movie – an action movie focused on bikers, who are portrayed as dangerous vicious rebels. The most notable of these movies include Motorpsycho (1965), Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and Devil's Angels (also 1967).

Italy continued to provide USA with low-budget movies, only now, instead of pepla, it produced spaghetti-westerns – considerably more violent and amoral than their American counterparts, they eschewed the conventions of Hollywood Westerns. [21] The most well-renowned of this movies is Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy (or the Man with No Name Trilogy): “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), all of them starring Clint Eastwood.

The appearance of hippie subculture led to the emergence of hippiexploitation, which, unlike aforementioned sub-genres, died out in the beginning of the 70s. This sub-genre – featuring such flicks as “Hallucination Generation” (1967), or “Riot on Sunset Strip” (also 1967) – played on the prejudice against hippies, depicting them as being permanently on drugs, having wild orgies and committing crimes left and right. This trend culminated in 1970 with “I Drink Your Blood” (also known as “Hydro-Phobia”), a horror movie about Manson family-style group of Satanist hippies, who terrorize small American town.

The demise of Hays Code, which was a set of moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of most United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968, introduced MPAA rating system.
(Appendix 1) Among movie rating, featured in this system, was rating “X”, meaning that no one under the age of 17 was allowed to watch the movie rated this way. The age limit elaborated the parameters of what was feasible. Thus movies with much more violent subject matter emerged.

Shortly afterwards George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” was made. The movie introduced the concept of zombies as the mindless reanimated corpses, driven by the hunger for human flesh. The movie’s gruesomeness shocked the audience and caused a rather big controversy: some critics called it an “unrelieved orgy of sadism”. But in spite of that, it was a box office success, and other critics praised it for its originality and unsettling atmosphere. The movie created a whole new genre of monster movies – zombie movie, which was touched upon in numerous movies, A and B alike [14].

Another phenomenon, caused by the death of Hays Code, was the rise of exploitation. By the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s many new sub-genres of exploitation had appeared. The most famous of them are blaxploitation and nazisploitation. Blaxploitation movies were made mainly for African-American audience and featured primarily black cast. [23] Despite that many blaxploitation movies were full of stereotypes. Movie historians still can’t reach a consensus on what movie to consider the first blaxploitation – independent “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song”, or MGM’s “Shaft”, since both were released in 1971 and, despite completely different plots, had similar theme of “one black man against the world”. Nowadays “Shaft” is thought to be the father of blaxploitation, as the more popular of the two. The standard plots of blaxploitations involved either remakes of other movies with all black cast: for example, “Blacula” (1972) – a remake of “Dracula” (1931), or “Black Mama White Mama” (1973) – a remake of “The Defiant Ones” (1958); or criminals, mostly pimps and drug dealers, overcoming hostile authorities (which were usually the only characters played by white actors) through cunning and violence. The most infamous of the second type of blaxploitations is “Dolemite” (1975), which achieved notoriety not only due to incredibly poor production values, but also by featuring “sophisticated” lines, like “Dolemite is my name, and fuckin' up motherfuckers is my game!”

Nazisploitaion is a movie that involves villainous Nazis committing criminal acts of a sexual nature, with an added emphasis on sadism, gore, and degradation, often as camp or prison overseers in World War II settings. [23] Even though movies featuring Nazi themes and sexual imagery were already being made in the early 50s, the genre didn’t blossom forth until 1974, when “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS” came out. The movie was loosely based on Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, who was rumored to have been a sadist. The movie, featuring, naturally, excessive amount of nudity and graphic torture, became a surprising hit in grindhouses, and soon the wave of rip-offs and copycats, most of which were made in Italy, had followed. These Italian Nazisploitations, however, didn’t exploit the Nazi paraphernalia all that much, preferring to focus more on “attractive women torturing other attractive women” side of the genre. Thus, due to the influence of Italian Nazi exploitation movies, the whole of Nazisploitation rather quickly moved into “women in prison” sub-genre of exploitation. The most responsible for this genre shift was an Italian director Bruno Mattei, with movies, like “SS Girls”, also known as “Private House for the SS” (1977). Mattei, often referred to as “Ed Wood of Italian moviemaking”, also covered many other genres of exploitation, like nunsploitation – movies, depicting nunneries as the abode of Satan, mockumentaries – fake documentaries and also zombie movies.

Another theme that was frequently exploited in the 70s is martial arts. Most of these movies were imported from Asian countries. Sub-genres of martial arts flicks of that decade include chambara – Japanese movies about revenge-driven samurais, featuring loads of swordplay, sex, and exaggerated violence, chopsocky – Taiwanese movies with over-blown storylines, cheesy special effects, and, once again, excessive violence, and ninja movies (which, unlike previous examples, were mostly produced in the US) – flicks that center on various ninja stereotypes, often depicting them as unbeatable magical warriors. A very peculiar sub-genre of martial arts flicks is Bruceploitation – mostly Taiwan and Hong Kong made, they appeared after the death of martial artist and actor Bruce Lee in 1973, and tried to cash in on the racket, caused by Lee’s death. Most of them rehashed plots of famous Lee movies, for example, like “Enter the Game of Death” (1978), also known as “Cross Hands Martial Arts” and “The King of Kung Fu”, “Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger” (1976), also known as “Bruce Lee: The Star of Stars”, and “Fist of Fury: part two” (1977) – rip-offs of “The Game of Death” (1972), “Enter the Dragon” (1973) and “Fist of Fury” (1972) respectively. Other Bruceploitations were completely off their rocket, like “The Dragon Lives Again” (1977), a movie, where the soul of Bruce Lee has to battle Dracula, James Bond, Clint Eastwood, The Godfather, and, for some reason, Emmanuelle, in order to get back to Earth, and “The Clones of Bruce Lee” (1981), also known as “Death Penalty on Three Robots”, in which the aforementioned clones, who, by the way, not only look nothing like Lee himself (that was, actually, not uncommon for Brucesploitations), but also look nothing like each other, fight an evil scientist and his army of bronze men, who can die by chewing some grass. But some of Bruceploitations were just already existing cheap martial arts flicks that were renamed and in some cases reedited for the American market. The most infamous of these movies is “Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave” (1976), originally titled “Visitor in America”. Apart from the opening shots, in which supposed Bruce Lee leaps out of his grave, the movie has nothing to do with him, and actually concerns a Korean man, travelling to America in order to discover the truth behind his brother’s death [23].

Despite not being the main distributor of low-budget flicks anymore, Italy was still providing the US with new movies. One of the most important Italian contributions in the American B-movie market is the creation of mondo films – mockumentaries, depicting sensational topics, scenes or situations. These movies were being made in Italy since the 60s, but were brought in the US only after the creation of MPAA rating system. The first mondo film was “Mondo cane” (“A Dog's World”, 1962), which was the genre-namer. The movie had no coherent storyline, it was just a series of vignettes that provide glimpses into cultural practices around the world with the intention to shock or surprise Western movie audiences. Other notable mondo filmss include “Kwaheri: Vanishing Africa” (1964), a movie about customs of African tribes, “Mondo Topless” (1966), a movie with rather self-explanatory title, depicting daily life of San Francisco strippers, and “Faces of Death” (1978 – 1990), a movie series that provided viewers with scenes of violent deaths, most of which were fake, although there were some actual ones, taken from news reports or wartime footage.

Mondo film was the father of shocksploitation – a movie containing extremely realistic graphic violence or other shocking material and nothing much else. Shockploitations often touched upon the idea of snuff – a horror movie, where the actors were killed on-screen for real. No records of actual snuff movies exist, but it didn’t stop the B-moviemakers from using the concept as a marketing gimmick. The most notable shocksploitations, trying to pass for snuff movies, are “Snuff” (1976), an Argentinean movie about evil cultists, reedited specifically to the US to feature the scenes of movie crew supposedly killing random strangers, and “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), a mockumentary about a group of moviemakers travelling to the Amazon to movie a documentary about cannibal tribes, only to get eaten by said cannibals.

Another horror genre appearing in the 70s was slasher – a movie about a group of teenagers being stalked and killed one by one, usually in a violent manner, by a psychopathic killer, who is often wearing a mask and is nearly impossible to kill, despite seemingly not possessing any supernatural powers [13]. Slasher is somewhat similar to shockploitation in its portrayal of violence and death, and some experts often consider slasher to be a variation of shockploitation; although, this consideration is not entirely correct, seeing as shockploitaton, unlike slasher, doesn’t often have a clear antagonist. Easter egg found. Plus 100 points. Even though the first movie to use typical features of a slasher – a mysterious stalker, a set of adolescent would-be victims, a remote secluded location, gory deaths – was “Black Christmas” (1974), due to its moderate success in the box office, the first slasher is thought to be John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), which popularized the genre, making it get into full swing in the 80s.

It's rather hard to talk about B-movies of the 80s, because on one hand the genre has started to die out, but on the other hand the movies with classical B-movie attributes have been being made. The success of some movies made in the 70s by B-movie canons, like aforementioned “Halloween”, demonic possession horror “The Exorcist” (1973), creature feature about a killer shark “Jaws" (1975) and space opera “Star Wars” (1977), provoked the major Hollywood studios’ interest in B-movies. As a result many small studious, specializing on B-movies, collapsed or were absorbed by big studios. Other former B-movie studios changed their specialization, like AIP, which gradually moved from low-budget horror into mainstream movies territory.

Despite that, many high-budget movies, mostly of horror and action genres, adapted the ways of low-budget movies of the 70s. As was mentioned earlier, 80s can be considered the golden age of slasher. The most canonical slashers, in addition to “Halloween”, are “Friday the 13th” (1980) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984). These three movies established and developed the characteristic features and compulsory plot devises of a slasher. “Halloween”, which is about escaped mental patient, who was committed after brutally killing his sister, stalking a teenage girl, who babysits a kid on Halloween night, was the father of several key points of slasher movie – silent villain, holiday theme, sexually active characters dying first and the concept of “final girl” – the only character that is left alive by the end of the movie should be a virtuous, strong-willed young woman. “Friday the 13th”, which is about a woman going crazy after losing her son due to summer camp chancellors’ negligence (the sequels follow the said son, brought back from the dead), introduced “youth camp in the woods” setting. “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, which is about several teenagers getting killed in their dreams by the soul of the serial killer, lynched by their parents, incorporated some elements of black comedy into the horror by featuring a wisecracking antagonist, rather than a usual silent one [13].

The formulaic nature of a slasher movie made filming one an easy job, but the more popular slashers became, the ore of them were being made, and the more desperate moviemakers became for new ideas. And soon slasher genre almost completely moved into direct-to-video market, now trying to attract the audience not by suspense and gruesomeness, but rather by exploitation levels of nudity.

The other genre that was in its prime in the 80s is the action movie. There were three types of action movies in the 80s. The first one, featuring movies like first three “Rambo” movies (1982 – 1988), “Commando” (1985) or “The Delta Force” (1986), follows a “real American hero”, who disposed of a cartoonishly evil drug-dealing Nazi communist terrorist and his army of mooks in over-the-top manner, usually with lots of explosions and cheesy one-liners. The second, known as “buddy cop” movie popularized by “Lethal Weapon” (1987), features two cops, one with devil-may-care attitude and the other is more by-the-book, who need to solve crimes as well as try to get along. The third one, popularized by “Die Hard” (1988) and utilized by countless movies with Steven Seagal, is somewhat similar to the first one, only the hero inadvertently gets involved in a hostage situation. These movies won the movie-goers’ hearts with their brutal simplicity and were also very formulaic [19].

The Italians quickly caught up with this trend and filmed a number of cash-ins, most of which were made by aforementioned Bruno Mattei and starred American actor Reb Brown. The most infamous of these movies are “Strike Commando” (1987) – a rip-off of “Rambo II” (1985) and “Robowar” (1988) – a rip-off of “Predator” (1987).

Speaking of rip-offs, the phenomenon of mockbuster – a low-budget low-quality movie, trying to capitalize upon a popular movie became widely-known in the US. Back then almost all of the mockbusters were foreign, mostly from Italy or Turkey. The foreign moviemakers would steal the ideas of an American blockbuster, hastily re-movie them strictly for local audience, and then the end product would find a way onto the American market, to the amusement of B-movie lovers. Most of these movies’ American titles are not official, and they all formed in a similar manner – “Country of origin, the movie it rip-offs”, like, for example “Turkish “Star Wars”” (1982), released in Turkey as “Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam” (“The Man Who Saved the World”), which not only features stolen footage from original “Star Wars”, but also the music from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) and many other Hollywood movies [16].

By 1990, two of the highest-grossing movies of that year would have been strictly B-movie material before the late 1970s: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and noir-style “Dick Tracy”.

The growing popularity of home video and access to unedited movies on cable and satellite television along with real estate pressures were making survival more difficult for the sort of small- or non-chain theaters that were the primary home of independently produced genre movies. Drive-in screens were rapidly disappearing from the American landscape: between 1987 and 1990, the number in operation fell from 2507 to 910. Surviving B-movie operations completely moved into straight-to-video. For example, Empire's founder, Charles Band, started a new production company, “Full Moon”, specifically to address the direct-to-video market. “New Line”, in its first decade, had been almost exclusively a distributor of low-budget independent and foreign genre pictures. In 1995 “Showtime” launched “Roger Corman Presents”, a series of thirteen straight-to-cable movies produced by “New Horizons”.

At the same time as exhibition venues for B-movies vanished, the independent movie movement was burgeoning; among the results were various crossovers between the low-budget genre movie and the “sophisticated” arthouse picture. Director Abel Ferrara, who built a reputation with violent B-movies such as “The Driller Killer” (1979) and “Ms. 45” (1981), made two works in the early nineties that marry exploitation-worthy depictions of sex, drugs, and general sleaze to complex examinations of honor and redemption: “King of New York” (1990) was backed by a group of mostly small production companies and the cost of “Bad Lieutenant” (1992), $1.8 million, was financed totally independently. Ferrara followed these two movies with “Body Snatchers” (1993), a major-studio remake of the sci-fi classic and an acknowledgment of his debt to the B's of an earlier generation [16].

Some of these independent moviemakers, however, went straight into the realms of exploitation, didn’t even trying to merge it with arthouse. Due to handheld cameras becoming available, amateur filmmakers were able to flood straight-to-video market with their creations. These movies – notorious for incredibly poor quality and excessive use of violence – became known as shot-on-shitteo [8].

By the turn of the millennium, as big-budget Hollywood movies further usurped the genre territories that were traditionally the domain of the B's, the ongoing viability of the familiar brand of B-movie was in grave doubt.

However, due to rapid technological development, 2000s signed the renaissance of B-movies. The most widespread present incarnation of the B-movie is mockbuster. The pacemaker of this genre is The Asylum, founded in 2006, which at first specialized on creature features, but became infamous due to their rip-offs of major studio action pictures: “Transformers”, for instance, is transformed into “Transmorphers”, and “Snakes on a Plane” into “Snakes on a Train”. In recent years, however, due to endless lawsuits, Asylum was forced to go back to creature features, their most recent release being “Sharknado”, a movie about the tornado made of sharks, with the expressive tagline “Enough said!”

The Asylum, as a provider of corny low-budget creature features, can be challenged by SyFy (previously known as Sci-Fi) Channel original productions, with such films as “Frankenfish” (2004), “Attack of the Sabretooth” (2005) and “Mansquito” (also 2005). “SyFy Original” became the synonym of a bad creature feature flick [9].

The very specific type of B-movie, emerging in the Internet era is the fan movie – an unauthorized and non-profitable production set in the imaginary universe of a popular genre movie or TV series [19]. Fan movies can include parodies, as well as serious dramas set in fictional universes.