B-movie director Herbert L. Strock said his movies weren't intended to be funny
He wasn't bothered by people laughing, though.
Today, it's easy to come up with a dozen examples of movies that are made campy and low budget on purpose. See the plethora of shark-thing movies, like Sharknado, Sharktopus, or for a twist on the formula, Ghost Shark. However, the more decades we look back, the harder it can be to tell if these movies were made tongue-in-cheek or dead serious.
Herbert L. Strock was one of those directors who made his name in over-the-top sci-fi and horror movies, ones that finely walked the line between sincere and goofy. His accolades include Gog, The Magnetic Monster, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, How to Make a Monster, and The Crawling Hand, among others. Most of these came out during the 50s and 60s, during the golden age of drive-in movies made on a tight schedule and even tighter budget. But were Strock's films meant to elicit laughs, or screams?
In 2002, the Springfield News-Sun entertainment writer Andrew McGinn called up Strock to get an answer on that exact question.
"They were dead serious," Strock said. The director explained that the films weren't intended to be funny, they were straightforward horror.
"I worked my butt off on the films," Strock said, "but sometimes the audience grows." Strock seemed to understand their view. On his film The Crawling Hand, which was famously mocked on Mystery Science 3000 on their first season, he said, "When people tell me it scared them as a kid, I say 'What? It was a crawling hand!'"
Strock wasn't bothered by his films becoming funnier instead of freakier over time, though. Instead, he was just "amazed these films lived".
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