Roger Corman’s Greatest Films: ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ ‘The Wild Angels,’ and More

When Roger Corman died on May 9 at age 98, the film world lost one of its great independent film legends. Over the course of his seven decade career, Corman directed over 55 films and received more than 500 producing credits, creating work that helped serve as the launchpad for major Hollywood stars and filmmakers like Peter Fonda, Frances Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jonathan Demme. And yet, from his first film to his last, Corman remained true to his roots of low-budget, independent, lowbrow-yet-brilliant genre filmmaking.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Corman was smart enough to attend Stanford University studying industrial engineering, but quit his first job in the field after only four days. Looking to go into the film industry, he worked his way up at 20th Century Fox from mail room messenger to story reader. But after he didn’t receive credit for the success of “The Gunslinger,” a Western he heavily contributed to, Corman left Fox and spent the rest of his career as an independent director and producer, chasing his own muse and establishing his own band of collaborators which included iconic character actors like Dick Miller and Vincent Price and future mainstream star Jack Nicholson.

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Corman is perhaps most strongly associated with horror films, including macabre comedies like the original “Little Shop of Horrors” and his cycle of loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that included some of his greatest work. But he was a versatile director whose work ran the gamut, including boundary-pushing work like “The Intruder” which contended with themes of racism at the height of the Civil Rights moment, and biker films (“The Wild Angels,” “The Trip”) that paved the way for “Easy Rider.” His impact outside of just directing is similarly enormous; as a producer, he practically nurtured an entire generation of filmmakers, paving the way for New Hollywood auteurs like Scorsese by bringing their first films to screens. In the ’70s, his company New World Pictures became renowned for distributing acclaimed foreign arthouse cinema, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and including films from Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and Akira Kurosawa.

In celebration of Corman’s life, IndieWire rounded up a selection of the director’s greatest films, ranging from his horror films to crime dramas to biker pictures. Only his directorial efforts are included, which means excluding some of his notable producing credits like “Rock ‘n Roll High School,” “Death Race 2000,” and “Boxcar Bertha.” Read on for Roger Corman’s 10 greatest films, ranked.

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