What Is a B Movie? The Double Bill, Poverty Row and 6 Films That Explain It

A B movie is a low-budget film made to be the second half of a double feature. That is the original meaning, and it has nothing to do with quality. The A picture had the stars and the budget. The B picture was the shorter, cheaper film that played alongside it.

Today the term means any cheap genre film: horror, science fiction, crime, monsters. But the history explains why so many strange, fast and inventive films came out of that corner of the business.

Where B movies came from

• The Depression double bill. In the 1930s, cinemas started offering two features for one ticket to fill seats. That meant twice as many films were needed.
• Flat fees. A studio earned a share of the takings on an A picture. A B picture was usually rented for a fixed fee, so its profit was capped before it was shot. The only way to earn more was to spend less.
• Poverty Row. Small studios such as Monogram, Republic and PRC made almost nothing but B pictures, often in under a week.
• The end of the system. A 1948 Supreme Court ruling broke the studios' control of cinemas, and the old double bill faded. The B movie moved to drive-ins and teenagers, and producers like Roger Corman took it over.

What made a B movie a B movie

• Short. Usually around an hour and rarely more than 70 minutes, so it fitted in front of the main feature.
• Fast. Shot in days, often on sets left over from bigger films.
• Genre. Crime, horror, westerns and science fiction, because audiences knew what they were getting.
• Left alone. Nobody at the top cared what a B movie said, as long as it came in on budget. That is why many of them hold up.

6 B movies that explain the form

White Zombie (1932)

The first feature-length zombie film, made independently by the Halperin brothers and shot in 11 days on sets rented from Universal and RKO-Pathé. Bela Lugosi, a year after Dracula, runs a Haitian sugar mill worked by the living dead.

Before Romero, this was what a zombie was: a person robbed of their will and put to work. The whole film is built from borrowed rooms and staircases, and it looks far richer than it cost.

Horror

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Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)

This is the B movie after the old studio system ended. Roger Corman made it for Allied Artists for about $70,000, and it became the most profitable film he had made up to that point. The writer, Charles B. Griffith, was told every scene needed either suspense or a shock.

Scientists on a shrinking Pacific island are hunted by giant crabs that absorb the minds of the people they eat. The crabs are not convincing. The pace is.

Horror

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A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Corman shot this in about five days. Dick Miller plays Walter Paisley, a busboy at a beatnik café who wants to be an artist and finds that his sculptures sell best with a body inside.

It is a horror film and a satire of the art scene at once, and it shows what the B movie was good at: a sharp idea, a few sets, and no one from the studio asking questions. The team reused the same idea the next year for The Little Shop of Horrors.

Comedy

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The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)

Edgar G. Ulmer shot it in Dallas back to back with a second feature, Beyond the Time Barrier, on a combined schedule of about two weeks. Ulmer had spent decades making films this cheap.

A group of spies helps a thief break out of prison, then turns him invisible so he can steal nuclear materials. It is a B movie in its plainest form: a small cast, a short schedule and a director who knew how to stretch both.

Sci-Fi

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The Terror (1963)

When Corman finished The Raven, the castle sets were still standing, so he paid Boris Karloff for two more days and shot a new film around them, with a young Jack Nicholson as a French officer lost on the coast.

The rest was filled in over nine months by whoever was available, including Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman and Jack Hill. It is a B movie made from the leftovers of another B movie, which is the form at its most pure.

Horror

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Dementia 13 (1963)

Coppola's first mainstream feature. Corman had a crew in Ireland finishing another picture and gave the 23-year-old a small budget to shoot a horror film with the same people before they flew home.

An axe murderer stalks a family estate during the anniversary of a daughter's drowning. It launched a career: the man who made this on almost nothing made The Godfather nine years later.

Horror

Where to go next

• The B movies that turned into cult classics are in Cult Classic Movies.
• The ones that failed so completely they became entertainment are in So Bad It's Good Movies.