The second film Roger Corman produced was his first monster movie, Monster From the Ocean Floor in 1954. By 1955, he realized it would be cheaper to direct some films himself than to hire someone else to do it. He directed without credit some of Beast with a Million Eyes (the first film he hired Paul Blaisdell to design, build and/or play a monster), the film he where he also learned distributors and theater owners would demand an actual monster in their sci-fi films. However, it was with The Day the World Ended–starring Mannix!–that he officially became a monster movie director. Monster movies were a fairly small percentage of his directorial and producing (500 films!) output, but they loom very large in his legacy, certainly with folks like us.
