A Bucket of Blood, 1959

A Bucket of Blood is a 1959 American comedy horror film produced and directed by Roger Corman. It stars Dick Miller, Barboura Morris, Antony Carbone, Ed Nelson and Bert Convy, and is set in the West Coast beatnik culture of the late 1950s. The film, produced on a $50,000 budget, was shot in five days and shares many of the low-budget filmmaking aesthetics commonly associated with Corman’s work. Written by Charles B. Griffith, the film is a dark comic satire about a dimwitted, impressionable young busboy at a Bohemian café who is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor when he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and covers its body in clay to hide the evidence. When he is pressured to create similar work, he becomes a serial murderer.

A Bucket of Blood was the first of a trio of collaborations between Corman and Griffith in the comedy genre, which include The Little Shop of Horrors (which was shot on the same sets as A Bucket of Blood) and Creature from the Haunted Sea. Corman had made no previous attempt at the genre, although past and future Corman productions in other genres incorporated comedic elements. The film is a satire not only of Corman’s own films but also of the world of abstract art as well as low-budgeted teen films of the 1950s. The film has also been praised in many circles as an honest, undiscriminating portrayal of the many facets of beatnik culture, including poetry, dance, and a minimalist style of life.[citation needed] The plot has similarities to Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). However, by setting the story in the Beat milieu of 1950s Southern California, Corman creates an entirely different mood from the earlier film.