IHdb

ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - September 14th

"THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS" released in 1960

When inadequate florist's assistant, Seymour Krelboyne (Jonathan Haze), informs his boss, the penny-pinching Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles), about a "special plant" he has crossbred from a butterwort and a Venus flytrap - naming it Audrey Jr. - he soon discovers he is cultivating a plant that feeds on human flesh and blood, in Roger Corman's cult classic, The Little Shop of Horrors!

Watch The Little Shop of Horrors movie!
(or Click the Link at the end of today's blog to head over to IHdb's video section on Facebook)

Don't miss out on future blogs, trailers, and clips IHdb has coming up 

by Following IHdb's Facebook page above!

When the clumsy florist's assistant Seymour Krelboyne (Haze) accidentally fouls up the arrangement for sadistic dentist, Dr. Farb (John Shaner), he is fired by his boss Gravis Mushnick (Welles). Hoping to get his job back, Seymour shows Mushnick a strange cross bred plant he had grown at his apartment (which he shares with his hypochondriac mother, Winifred (Myrtle Vail)), bashfully admitting that he named the plant "Audrey Jr.", a revelation that delights the real Audrey (Jackie Joseph), Seymour's co-worker with whom he is secretly in love with. Not impressed with the sickly looking plant, Mushnick changes his mind when regular customer is Burson Fouch (Dick Miller) - who eats the plants he buys for lunch - suggests that Audrey Jr.'s uniqueness might attract people from all over the world to see it, and gives Seymour one week to revive it. Having already discovered that the usual kinds of plant food do not nourish his strange hybrid, Seymour soon realizes what the plant really craves is blood after he accidentally pricks his finger on the thorny plant. With Seymour nursing his creation with his own blood each night, Audrey Jr. begins to grow and the shop's revenues increase due to the curious customers who are lured in to see the plant. Soon Audrey Jr. develops the ability to speak (voiced by writer Charles B. Griffith) and demands that Seymour feed him. Not knowing what to do, Seymour takes a walk by the railway tracks and inadvertently kills a vagrant. Guilt-ridden but resourceful, Seymour collects the body parts and feeds them to Audrey Jr., but is caught in the act by Mushnick, but decides to keep quiet about the affair after seeing the long lines of customers at his door the next day. Later, Seymour has an appointment with Dr. Farb and ends up killing him in self-defense when Farb attempts to pull several of Seymour's death without anesthetic. Seymour is horrified that he has now murdered twice and after posing as a dentist to avoid the suspicion of Farb's masochistic patient Wilbur Force (Jack Nicholson), Seymour feeds Farb's body to Audrey Jr. But as the monstrous plant's growth increase with this latest meal, its intelligence and abilities do as well, and Audrey Jr. employs hypnosis on Seymour, commanding him to bring it more food. Realizing his creation is completely out of control, Seymour has to summon what little courage he has to destroy Audrey Jr. before it's buds open and reveal his shocking secret!

[Seymour walks into the shop holding a bag with Dr. Farb's body in it]
Audrey Jr.: Feed me! 
Seymour: Aw, take it easy, Dracula. What do you think I'm carrying here, my dirty laundry?

Top:   Seymour (Jonathan Haze) learns the secret to growing his beloved "Audrey Jr." - human flesh!;

Above:   As the plant grows, it increases the popularity of Mushnick's (Mel Welles) Florist 

With Roger Corman's first attempt at the horror comedy genre, A Bucket of Blood (1959), being filmed the year before, he was informed by the manager of Producer's Studio that some of the sets were still standing. Realizing he could reuse his own sets for free, Corman quickly developed a story to film, initially planning a a story involving a private investigator.  The characters that eventually became Seymour and Winifred Krelboyne were named "Irish Eye" and "Iris Eye" with actors Mel Welles scheduled to play a character named "Draco Cardala", Jonathan Haze was scheduled to play "Archie Aroma," and Jack Nicholson would have played a character named "Jocko". However, Charles B. Griffith wanted to write another horror-themed comedy film, but first had to convince Corman, who was disappointed by the box office performance of A Bucket of Blood. The first screenplay Griffith wrote was Cardula, a Dracula-themed story involving a vampire music critic. After Corman rejected the idea, Griffith says he wrote a screenplay titled Gluttony, in which the protagonist was "a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that, you know? We couldn’t do that though because of the code at the time. So I said, “How about a man-eating plant?”, and Roger said, “Okay.” By that time, we were both drunk." The screenplay was then written under the title of The Passionate People Eater.

The film was partially cast with stock actors that Corman had used in previous films, with Griffith portraying several small roles, including the screaming dental patient who runs out of Dr. Farb's office, the burglar who breaks into the flower shop, and the voice of Audrey Jr. (his voice as the deadly plant was largely ridiculed on set by the actors, but Corman kept it in as he was too cheap to dub the lines with another actor). Dick Miller, who had starred as the protagonist of A Bucket of Blood was offered the role of Seymour, but turned it down, instead taking the smaller role of Burson Fouch. As part of the original three actors cast for the "detective movie", Jonathan Haze then took the role of Seymour, with Mel Welles and Jackie Joseph also joining the cast as Mushnick and Audrey.  Jack Nicholson - who had appeared in only two films at that time, including the lead in another Corman picture, The Cry Baby Killer - went into the shoot already deciding to play his character of the masochistic dental patient Wilbur as quirky as he could, as Corman originally hadn't wanted him for the part. Nicholson later explained, "I couldn't play it straight. So I just did a lot of weird shit that I thought would make it funny."

[excitedly sitting in the dentist's chair]
Wilbur Force: No novocaine! It dulls the senses.

Top:   Masochistic dental patient Wilbur Force (Jack Nicholson, in one his most memorable early performances);

Above:   Florist Robber (Charles B. Griffith) is about to meet a grisly end when he meets Audrey Jr.! 

On a budget of $22,500, The Little Shop of Horrors was shot in two days and one night. Rumor was Corman planned the shooting schedule on a bet that he could not complete a film within that time. But according to Joseph, Corman shot the film quickly in order to beat changing industry rules that would have prevented producers from "buying out" an actor's performance in perpetuity, and be forced to pay all actors residuals for all future releases of their work. This meant that Corman's B-movie business model would be permanently changed and he would not be able to produce low-budget movies in the same way, so Corman decided to shoot one last film and scheduled it to happen the last week in December 1959. Interiors were shot with three cameras in wide, lingering master shots in single takes (similar to how a modern sitcom is filmed), with Corman rarely shooting retakes and spending even less time on lighting the scenes. According to Nicholson, "You'd go in, plug in the lights, roll the camera, and shoot. We did the take outside the office and went inside the office, plugged in, lit and rolled. Jonathan Haze was up on my chest pulling my teeth out. And in the take, he leaned back and hit the rented dental machinery with the back of his leg and it started to tip over. Roger didn't even call cut. He leapt onto the set, grabbed the tilting machine, and said 'Next set, that's a wrap.'" But despite all his hurried preparations, by 9 am of the first day, Corman was informed by the production manager that he was behind schedule!

Corman still managed to warp shooting on the main sets before they were due to be pulled down, and spent the next weekends with $279 worth of rented equipment, shooting exterior scenes, including Skid Row in Los Angeles. Griffith and Welles paid a group of children five cents apiece to run out of a subway tunnel, and they were also able to persuade winos to appear as extras for ten cents apiece. "The winos would get together, two or three of them, and buy pints of wine for themselves! We also had a couple of the winos act as ramrods — sort of like production assistants — and put them in charge of the other wino extras." The pair also persuaded a funeral home to donate a hearse and coffin — with a real corpse inside! — for the film shoot, and used the Southern Pacific Transportation Company yard for an entire evening using two bottles of scotch as persuasion. In total, the filmmakers spent a total of $1,100 on fifteen minutes worth of exteriors.

[Mushnick catching Seymour feeding Dr. Farb to Audrey Jr.]
Mushnik: You have perhaps an explanation for this?
Seymour: No, but if you give me a minute I'll think of one.

Top:   A scene for the 1982 musical Little Shop of Horror's;

Above:   Producer/director Roger Corman with his family at the release of the 1986 remake

Corman had initial trouble finding distribution for the film, as some distributors, including American International Pictures, felt that the film would be interpreted as anti-Semitic, citing the characters of Gravis Mushnick and Siddie Shiva. Welles, who is Jewish, stated that he gave his character a Turkish Jewish accent and mannerisms, and that he saw the humor of the film as playful, and felt there was no intent to defame any ethnic group. Eventually, Corman released the film under his own production company, The Filmgroup Inc., nine months after it had been completed. Positive word-of-mouth for The Little Shop of Horrors spread when it was released as part of a double feature preceded by Mario Bava's Black Sunday, and was re-released the following year in a double feature with The Last Woman on Earth. Jack Nicholson, recounting the reaction to a screening of the film, states that the audience, "laughed so hard I could barely hear the dialogue. I didn't quite register it right. It was as if I had forgotten it was a comedy since the shoot. I got all embarrassed because I'd never really had such a positive response before." The film's popularity slowly grew with local television broadcasts throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and with a stage musical called Little Shop of Horrors produced in 1982. The musical was based on the original film and was itself adapted to cinema as Little Shop of Horrors, in 1986. In November 2006, the film was issued by Buena Vista Home Entertainment in a double feature with The Cry Baby Killer (billed as a Jack Nicholson double feature) as part of the Roger Corman Classics series. However, the DVD contained only the 1987 colorized version of The Little Shop of Horrors, and not the original black-and-white version.

Ironically, Corman - whose idea it was to film Little Shop of Horrors quickly to circumvent paying his actors royalties - did not see any of the profits generated from the rekindled interest in the film, as the copyright for the movie had lapsed into the public domain years before because Corman did not believe that The Little Shop of Horrors had much financial prospect after its initial theatrical run, and did not bother to copyright it. Because of this, the film is now widely available in copies of varying quality on video, DVD and, especially, the internet. For those reading this blog now wanting to view the full back and white version, please head over to IHdb's Video Section on our Facebook page and enjoy the full screening of The Little Shop of Horrors!

Click HERE to watch the full length, 

black and white version of The Little Shop of Horrors!

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:    91% 

_________________________________________