Roger Corman’s unwitting role in launching Stephen King’s career
If you ever have an hour to spare, consider diving into Roger Corman’s extensive filmography. The legendary producer and director, who passed away in 2024 at the age of 98, worked on over 500 films throughout his remarkable career. As a director, he brought cult classics like The Little Shop of Horrors and House of Usher to life, while his work as a producer delivered a host of low-budget, campy horrors that continue to delight fans of cult cinema to this day.
Corman’s own output only tells half of his story. He will go down in history as a man who gave a leg up to some of the most acclaimed actors and directors to have ever lived. In The Little Shop of Horrors, he cast a young Jack Nicholson years before he would make it big. He produced Boxcar Bertha, one of Martin Scorsese’s earliest films, and he was responsible for the US distribution of films from Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, and many other acclaimed foreign directors.
Another name that Corman helped out earlier in their career was Stephen King, although this assistance came indirectly. Speaking with the New York Times, King remembered his early days as an aspiring novelist. To hone his craft, he would go to the cinema, watch one of Corman’s films, and then adapt it into the written word. He would make enough copies to sell these stories to the kids at his high school, charging a quarter each for the pleasure.
This hustler attitude would come to define King as an adult. The author’s work ethic is legendary, as he’s churned out more legendary horror stories than most people have had hot dinners. Even in his downtime, his short stories have gone on to be adapted into some of the greatest movies ever made, like Stand by Me or The Shawshank Redemption.
King only said that he was a ‘teenager’ when he started novelising Corman’s films, so we can assume he was doing this in the early 1960s. That means he would have been exposed to the likes of The Raven and The Masque of Red Death, two movies based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Corman’s wheelhouse of darkly gothic tales with spectacular monsters maps perfectly across to King’s own output, so it’s clear that those tales he was writing stayed with him long after he’d left the playground.
Maine’s finest has never shied away from his love of Corman’s work. He once singled out the 1963 film Dementia 13 as “a movie that matters” and said it made the likes of Psycho and Night of the Living Dead “look tame”. Dementia 13, which Corman produced, was directed by another future legend that he helped get on the ladder – Francis Ford Coppola. Corman had some money left over from a previous project and, spotting the potential in the young director, offered him the chance to use it to make his own film. It is safe to say that the risk paid off.
In his 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre, a meta-commentary on the nature of horror fiction, King referenced another of Corman’s pieces. The Pit and the Pendulum, which the late legend directed, was essential in laying the groundwork for a new breed of horror films beyond the 1960s. If you want to know why, you’ll have to watch it for yourself. Neither Corman nor King would approve of spoilers.
