Free cult classic B-movies: Roger Corman, Ed Wood and midnight-movie favourites

Made fast and cheap for drive-ins and double bills, these films found their real audience later, on late-night TV and at midnight screenings. Some are genuinely great, some are gloriously bad, and all of them are fun with friends.

Graveyard Shift (CH 4) plays horror and B-movies live; Rocket Age (CH 5) has the flying saucers.

Roger Corman

• The Little Shop of Horrors 73 min · Graveyard Shift
  A flower-shop clerk raises a plant with a taste for blood, shot in a few days, with a young Jack Nicholson (1960).
• A Bucket of Blood 65 min · Graveyard Shift
  A busboy becomes the star of a beatnik café with sculptures that hide a dark secret (1959).
• The Wasp Woman 73 min · Graveyard Shift
  A cosmetics boss tries a youth serum made from wasp enzymes (1959).
• Attack of the Giant Leeches 62 min · Graveyard Shift
  Giant leeches lurk in a Southern swamp; produced by Roger and Gene Corman (1959).
• The Terror 79 min · Graveyard Shift
  Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson in Corman's gothic mystery set in a Baltic castle (1963).
• Dementia 13 66 min · Graveyard Shift
  Francis Ford Coppola's first mainstream feature, produced by Corman: an axe killer stalks an Irish castle (1963).

So bad they're good

• Plan 9 from Outer Space 78 min · Graveyard Shift
  Ed Wood's famous flying-saucer and graveyard picture, with Bela Lugosi's last footage and Vampira (1959).
• The Brain That Wouldn't Die 82 min · Graveyard Shift
  A surgeon keeps his fiancée's head alive in the lab while he hunts for a new body (1962).
• Teenagers from Outer Space 85 min · Rocket Age
  Young aliens bring a monster to a small California town, and one of them falls for an Earth girl (1959).
• Indestructible Man 71 min · Graveyard Shift
  Lon Chaney Jr. as an executed killer brought back to life to take revenge (1956).
• The Screaming Skull 67 min · Graveyard Shift
  A new bride is haunted by a skull in her husband's house (1958).

Midnight-movie horror

• Night of the Living Dead 95 min · Graveyard Shift
  George A. Romero's low-budget zombie classic that started a genre (1968).
• The Devil Bat 68 min · Graveyard Shift
  Bela Lugosi breeds giant bats trained to attack anyone wearing his aftershave (1940).
• Bowery at Midnight 62 min · Graveyard Shift
  Bela Lugosi runs a soup kitchen as a front for a crime ring (1942).
• Maniac 51 min · Graveyard Shift
  Dwain Esper's notorious exploitation film about a mad doctor and his assistant (1934).

See also: Free classic horror movies · Free classic sci-fi movies · Free 1950s movies · All free collections