Splat!FilmFest Celebrates Roger Corman. Julie Corman Comes to the Festival
Any list of the most important filmmakers in cinema history would be incomplete without Roger Corman. The king of independent Hollywood, the emperor of B-movies and one of the founding fathers of modern genre cinema died in 2024 at the age of 98. This year, he would have turned 100. To mark the occasion, Splat!FilmFest celebrates this giant of cinema and filmmaking during its 12th edition, following in the footsteps of the Museum of Modern Art and the film festivals in Cannes and Venice. Our special guest in Warsaw will be Julie Corman, Roger Corman’s wife and closest collaborator for many years, as well as a film producer in her own right. Her visit is a unique opportunity for festival audiences to get to know Roger Corman a little better through the stories of the woman who knew him best. It will be Julie Corman’s first visit to a Polish film festival.
She was never simply the wife standing beside her husband. She has production credits on nearly 40 films, including Martin Scorsese’s “Boxcar Bertha”. Over the years, she worked with filmmakers and actors including Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Martin Sheen, Barbara Hershey and David Carradine. From the 1970s onwards, she and Corman also formed one of the most important producing partnerships in independent cinema. Their company, New World Pictures, produced and distributed hundreds of films and brought acclaimed international cinema to American audiences, including works by Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. Roger Corman may have been the more visible figure, the eccentric associated with swamp monsters and plenty of bare breasts, but Julie Corman’s influence on his legacy is impossible to overstate.
Roger Corman had imagination, business instinct and a taste for rebellion. He had an uncanny ability to sense where the film industry was heading, and from the 1950s onwards he produced and directed films at a remarkable pace. Westerns, horror, science fiction: he gave audiences what they wanted, while often showing the industry where it could go next. In the 1960s, he adapted the works of Edgar Allan Poe and made the cult classic “The Little Shop of Horrors” with a young Jack Nicholson. Many of the filmmakers who would later become leading figures in American cinema, including Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron, got their start on Corman’s sets. Corman himself occasionally appeared in their most famous films, taking small roles in “The Godfather Part II” and “The Silence of the Lambs”, among others.
With the birth of the home-video market, Corman’s empire truly took off. His companies worked around the clock, delivering an endless supply of entertainment throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and occasionally producing genuine little masterpieces along the way. At a time when Hollywood was still deeply sceptical of women directors, Corman gave them opportunities to work on his productions. He also helped launch new stars of genre cinema, including Shannon Tweed, Maria Ford, Julie Strain and Shannon Whirry.
He worked tirelessly and never really retired. His producing credits span nearly 500 films, while he directed more than 50 himself. That kind of legacy is impossible to ignore. Neither could the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awarded him an Honorary Oscar in 2009.
Splat!FilmFest’s celebration of Corman’s centenary will include meetings with Julie Corman and screenings of some of the filmmaker’s most famous works. The programme features “The Pit and the Pendulum” starring Vincent Price, “Bloody Mama” with a young Robert De Niro, and the legendary “X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes”. After each screening, audiences will have a chance to meet Julie Corman for a Q&A.
The programme will also feature Dr Paweł Aleksandrowicz’s lecture, “How to Win an Oscar for ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters’, or the Incredible Career of Roger Corman”.
Splat!FilmFest proudly, and with a suitably terrifying amount of enthusiasm, invites everyone who wants to discover how and where the cinema they love was forged.
The 12th edition of Splat!FilmFest is the biggest in the festival’s history, with nearly 100 productions from all over the world. Splat!FilmFest is the most important genre festival in this part of Europe and one of the leading events of its kind worldwide. Alongside Julie Corman, more than 40 creators of contemporary genre cinema will join us for this year’s festival.