The Little Shop of Horrors

Plot

Florist shop owner Gravis Mushnick has two employees, Audrey Fulquard and Seymour Krelborn. Located on skid row, Mushnick's rundown shop gets little business. When Seymour fouls up a floral arrangement for dentist Dr. Farb, Mushnick fires him. Hoping to change his mind, Seymour talks about a plant he has grown from seeds he got from a "Japanese gardener over on Central Avenue". Seymour names the plant "Audrey Jr.", which delights Audrey.

However, when finally shown the plant, Mushnick is unimpressed. Seymour suggests that Audrey Jr.'s uniqueness might attract people to see it, and Mushnick gives him one week to revive the plant. The usual plant food does not nourish it, but when Seymour accidentally pricks his finger, he discovers that the plant craves blood. Fed on Seymour's blood, Audrey Jr. begins to grow. The shop's revenues increase when customers are lured in to see the plant. Mushnick tells Seymour to refer to him as "Dad" and calls Seymour his son in front of a customer.

The plant develops the ability to speak and demands that Seymour feed it. Now anemic, Seymour walks along the railroad track. Throwing a rock to vent his frustration, he inadvertently knocks out a drunken man who falls on the track and is run over by a train. He tries to get rid of the body by burying it in a yard but is nearly caught each time. Guilt-ridden, Seymour decides to feed the mutilated body parts to Audrey Jr. Meanwhile, Mushnick returns to the shop to get cash and secretly observes Seymour feeding the plant. Mushnick considers telling the police but hesitates after seeing the line of customers at his shop the next day.

Seymour eventually arrives too, suffering from a toothache. Mushnick confronts him about Audrey Jr.'s eating habits without explicitly revealing what he knows about the plant. Seymour grows increasingly distressed as he realizes that Mushnick knows the truth. After finishing his rant, Mushnick sends Seymour to Farb, who wants to kill him and get even for his ruined flowers. Defending himself, Seymour kills Farb. Although horrified, Seymour feeds Farb's body to Audrey Jr. The disappearances of the two men attract the attention of Sergeant Joe Fink and his assistant Officer Frank Stoolie.

Audrey Jr. grows several feet tall and is budding. A representative of the Society of Silent Flower Observers of Southern California announces that Seymour will receive a trophy and that she will return to the shop when the plant's buds open. While Seymour and Audrey go on a date, Mushnick stays at the shop to see that Audrey Jr. harms no one else.

Cast

Jonathan Haze as Seymour Krelboined

Jackie Joseph as Audrey Fulquard

Mel Welles as Gravis Mushnick

Dick Miller as Burson Fouch

Myrtle Vail as Winifred Krelboined

Sandra De Bear (as Tammy Windsor) as Shirley Plump

Toby Michaels as Barbara Fridl

Leola Wendorff as Mrs. Siddie Shiva

Lynn Storey as Mrs. Hortense Feuchtwanger

Wally Campo as Sergeant Joe Fink / Narrator

Jack Warford as Officer Frank Stoolie

Meri Welles (as Merri Welles) as Leonora Clyde

John Herman Shaner (as John Shaner) as Dr. Phoebus Farb

Jack Nicholson as Wilbur Force

Dodie Drake as Waitress

Charles B. Griffith (uncredited) as Voice of Audrey Jr. / Screaming Patient / Kloy Haddock

Jack Griffith (uncredited) as Agony Lush

Robert Coogan (uncredited) as Tramp

Development

The Little Shop of Horrors was developed when director Roger Corman was given temporary access to sets that had been left standing from his previous film, A Bucket of Blood. Corman decided to use the sets in a film made in the last two days before the sets were torn down.

Corman initially planned to develop a story involving a private investigator. In the story's initial version, the character that eventually became Audrey would have been referred to as "Oriole Plove." Actress Nancy Kulp was a leading candidate for the part. The characters that eventually became Seymour and Winifred Krelborn were named "Irish Eye" and "Iris Eye". Actor Mel Welles was 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".

Charles B. Griffith wanted to write a horror-themed comedy film. According to Mel Welles, Corman was not impressed by the box office performance of A Bucket of Blood, and had to be persuaded to direct another comedy. However, Corman later claimed he was interested because of A Bucket of Blood and said the development process was similar to that of the earlier film, when he and Griffith were inspired by visiting various coffee houses:

We tried a similar approach for The Little Shop of Horrors, dropping in and out of various downtown dives. We ended up at a place where Sally Kellerman (before she became a star) was working as a waitress, and as Chuck and I vied with each other, trying to top each other's sardonic or subversive ideas, appealing to Sally as a referee, she sat down at the table with us, and the three of us worked out the rest of the story together.

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."

Jackie Joseph later recalled "at first they told me it was a detective movie; then, while I was flying back [to make the movie], I think they wrote a whole new movie, more in the horror genre. I think over a weekend they rewrote it."

Production

The film was partially cast with stock actors that Corman had used in previous films. Writer Charles B. Griffith portrays several small roles. Griffith's father appears as a dental patient, and his grandmother, Myrtle Vail, appears as Seymour's hypochondriac mother. 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. Production at the Bucket of Blood sets was compressed into three days of cast rehearsals, immediately followed by two days and one night of principal photography.

It had been rumored that the film's shooting schedule was based on a bet that Corman could not complete a film within that time. However, this claim has been denied by Mel Welles. 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. On January 1, 1960, new rules were to go into effect requiring producers 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 films in the same way. Before these rules went into effect, Corman decided to shoot one last film and scheduled it for the last week in December 1959.

Interiors were shot with three cameras in wide, lingering master shots in single takes. Welles states that Corman "had two camera crews on the set—that's why the picture, from a cinematic standpoint, is really not very well done. The two camera crews were pointed in opposite directions so that we got both angles, and then other shots were 'picked up' to use in between, to make it flow. It was a pretty fixed set and it was done sort of like a sitcom is done today, so it wasn't very difficult."

At the time of shooting, Jack Nicholson had appeared in two films and worked with Roger Corman as the lead in The Cry Baby Killer. According to Nicholson, "I went in to the shoot knowing I had to be very quirky because Roger originally hadn't wanted me. In other words, I couldn't play it straight. So I just did a lot of weird shit that I thought would make it funny." According to Dick Miller, all of the dialogue between his character and Mel Welles was ad-libbed. During a scene in which writer Charles B. Griffith played a robber, Griffith remembers that "When [Welles] and I forgot my lines, I improvised a little, but then I was the writer. I was allowed to." However, Welles states that "Absolutely none of it was ad-libbed [...] every word in Little Shop was written by Chuck Griffith, and I did ninety-eight pages of dialogue in two days."

Release and reception

Release history

Corman had initial trouble finding distribution for the film, as some distributors, including American International Pictures (AIP), felt that the film would be interpreted as anti-Semitic, citing the characters of Gravis Mushnick and Siddie Shiva. Welles, who was 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. The film was finally released by its production company, The Filmgroup, nine months after it had been completed.

The Little Shop of Horrors was screened out of competition at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival on the strength of its reviews in trade papers. Mel Welles had sent these to the festival, which asked for a print of the film.

A year later, AIP distributed the film as the B movie for its release of Mario Bava's Black Sunday. Despite being barely mentioned in advertising (it was only occasionally referred to as an "Added Attraction" to Bava's film), Black Sunday's critical and commercial success resulted in positive word of mouth responses to The Little Shop of Horrors. The film was re-released again the following year in a double feature with Last Woman on Earth.

Because Corman did not believe that The Little Shop of Horrors had much financial prospect after its initial theatrical run, he did not bother to copyright it, resulting in the film entering the public domain. Because of this, the film is widely available in copies of varying quality. The film was originally screened theatrically in the widescreen aspect ratio of 1.85:1, but has largely only been seen in open matte at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 since its original theatrical release.

Critical and audience reception

The film's critical reception was largely favorable. On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes it has an approval rating of 92% based on reviews from 12 critics. Variety wrote, "The acting is pleasantly preposterous. [...] Horticulturalists and vegetarians will love it."

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."

In his book Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914-2008, Bruce G. Hallenbeck called the film "one of Corman's gems, an idea that was born on 'a night out on the town' that's every bit as loony as it sounds." He cited the hilarious performances delivered by the ensemble cast and Corman's strong results while working under the self-imposed pressures of a cheap budget and a fast shooting schedule.

Legacy

The film's popularity slowly grew with local television broadcasts throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Interest in the film was rekindled when a stage musical adaptation called Little Shop of Horrors was produced in 1982. It was based on the original film and was itself adapted to cinema as Little Shop of Horrors in 1986. A short-lived animated television series, Little Shop, about a teenage boy and his giant talking plant, was adapted from the 1960 film, but incorporated elements from the musical. By 2024, Joe Dante and Roger Corman were working on a spinoff film to be titled Little Shop of Halloween Horrors. Dante was set to direct with Charles S. Haas writing the script. Corman, who died in May of that year, would have produced the film with Brad Krevoy. In 2025, Dante announced that the film had been shelved.