Anything to do with the exploitation movement during the 1950’s and 60’s was certainly a money machine, but the genre’s pioneers are often blamed for compromising Hollywood’s honor. Making movies with specific types of lifestyles in mind is a good strategy if you have a target audience, but there is a reason that the saying “sex sells” works for every generation. If the filmmakers appeal to the primal instincts of the audience by providing sexual content, the feeling of being understood, or the sensation of pure horror, they knew they could sell it.
The directors of exploitation films would often pre-sell movies that they had not even shot a single reel of footage for. This enabled them to quickly narrow down the selection of movies that came across their desks, but it also severely limited the production time once they found one that would sell. One studio that actually had great success in doing this was American International Pictures, or AIP. They had a reputation for making movies in six or seven days, (too quickly to think about what was in it) which unintentionally set up a very subtle type of realism that allowed their movies to feel more truthful than the big blockbusters that were being produced with huge budgets. The appeal of cheaper, maybe even homemade looking films is not lost on AIP’s audience, and perhaps they are even preferred over the extremely polished and politically careful mainstream films.
AIP was one of the independent film studios to come out of the Paramount Decision in 1948. Prior to the Paramount Decision, studios were able to sell bundles of movies to exhibitors through a process called block booking, which made it difficult for smaller independent filmmakers to find room in the market for their art. After this huge adjustment, studios could no longer use block booking to sell their films, cartoons, or newsreels. Everything had to be sold separately, making a lot of undesirable movies and directors lose business. That eventually led to theaters having a lack of surplus movies, forcing them to buy the independently produced product that was free from the restraints of a Hollywood production code.
At the time of the late 60’s and 70’s, Hollywood was still neglecting niche markets in favor of large budget blockbusters that many would surely enjoy. Early producers of exploitation films quickly covered the topics the topics of race specific genres, like “blaxploitation”, an age related genres, like the “I Was a Teenage…” formula that AIP used to tap into the wallets of young viewers. It all started with their cult classic “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”, and was later resurrected by other money hungry studios as “I Was a Teenage” caveman, vampire, zombie, and so on, which eventually turned into somewhat of a meme with entertainment society.
Most of the ideas for the films mentioned above were taken from Hammer Films library of monsters, which made a killing off of stories that were in public domain anyway. The only things that Hammer had a copyright on were the more trivial things like make-up design.
History of the Motion Picture 