The 1960s and 1970s mark the golden age of the independent B movie, made outside of Hollywood's major film studios. As censorship pressures lifted in the early 1960s, the low-budget end of the American motion picture industry increasingly incorporated the sort of sexual and violent elements long associated with so-called exploitation films. The death of the Production Code in 1968 and the major success of the exploitation-style Easy Rider the following year fueled the trend through the subsequent decade.

The success of the B-studio exploitation movement had a significant effect on the strategies of the major studios during the 1970s. Despite the many transformations in the industry, the average production cost of an American feature film was effectively stable over the course of the 1950s. In 1950, the figure had been $1 million; in 1961, it reached $2 million—after adjusting for inflation, the increase in real terms was less than 10 percent.

The traditional twin bill of B film preceding and balancing a subsequent-run A film had largely disappeared from American theaters. The dual genre-movie package, popularized by American International Pictures (AIP) the previous decade, was the new face of the double feature. In July 1960, the latest Joseph E.

Levine sword-and-sandals import, Hercules Unchained, opened at neighborhood theaters in New York. An 82-minute-long suspense film, Terror Is a Man, produced by a Manila-based, American-Philippine company, ran as a "co-feature." It had a now familiar sort of exploitation gimmick: "The dénouement helpfully includes a 'warning bell' so the sensitive can 'close their eyes.'" That year, Roger Corman took American International down a new road: "When they asked me to make two ten-day black-and-white horror films to play as a double feature, I convinced them instead to finance one horror film in color." A period piece in the vein of Britain's Hammer Films, House of Usher was a success, launching a series of Poe-based movies Corman would direct for AIP. It also typifies the continuing ambiguities of B-picture classification.

House of Usher was clearly an A film by the standards of both director and studio, with the longest shooting schedule and biggest budget Corman had ever enjoyed. But from a latter-day perspective, it is regarded as a B movie—that schedule was a mere fifteen days, the budget just $200,000, one-tenth the industry average. Low-budget-movie aficionado John Reid reports once asking a neighborhood theater manager to define "B picture." The response: "Any movie that runs less than 80 minutes." House of Usher's running time is close, 85 minutes.

And despite its high status in studio terms, it was not sent out into the world on its own, but screened in tandem with a crime melodrama asking the eternal question Why Must I Die?With the loosening of industry censorship constraints, the 1960s and 1970s saw a major expansion in the production and commercial viability of a variety of B-movie subgenres that have come to be known collectively as exploitation films. The term gained broader application as well: Exploitation-style promotional practices had become standard practice at the lower-budget end of the industry; with the majors having exited traditional B production, exploitation became a way to refer to the entire field of low-budget genre films.

The combination of intensive and gimmick-laden publicity with movies featuring vulgar subject matter (as judged by mainstream standards) along with often outrageous imagery dated back decades—before such milestones as The Tingler (1959), before Women in Bondage (1943), before even The Terror of Tiny Town (1938). Exploitation had originally defined truly fringe productions with a dose of shocking content, made at the lowest depths of Poverty Row or entirely outside the Hollywood system. Many graphically depicted the wages of sin in the context of promoting prudent lifestyle choices, particularly "sexual hygiene." Audiences might see explicit footage of anything from a live birth to a ritual circumcision in such films.

They were not generally booked as part of movie theaters' regular schedules but rather presented as special events by traveling roadshow promoters (they might also appear as fodder for "grindhouses," which typically had no regular schedule at all). The most famous of those promoters, Kroger Babb, was in the vanguard of marketing low-budget, sensationalistic films with a "100% saturation campaign," inundating the target audience with ads in almost any imaginable medium. In the era of the traditional double feature, no one would have characterized these exploitation films as "B movies." As production and exhibition practices changed, so did the terms of definition.

In the early 1960s, exploitation movies in the original sense continued to appear: 1961's Damaged Goods, a cautionary tale about a young lady whose boyfriend’s promiscuity leads to venereal disease, comes complete with enormous, grotesque closeups of VD's physical manifestations. At the same time, the concept of fringe exploitation was merging with a closely related and similarly venerable tradition: “nudie" films featuring nudist-camp footage or striptease artists like Bettie Page had simply been the softcore pornography of previous decades. As far back as 1933, This Nude World, which promised an "Authentic Trip Through an American Nudist Colony!", was "Guaranteed the Most Educational Film Ever Produced!" In the late 1950s, as more of the old grindhouse theaters specifically devoted themselves to "adult" product, a few filmmakers began making nudies with some greater semblance of plots.

Best known was Russ Meyer, who released his first successful narrative nudie, The Immoral Mr. Teas, in 1959. Five years later, on a sub-$100,000 budget, Meyer came out with Lorna, "a harder-edged film that combined sex with gritty realism and violence." Meyer would build an underground reputation as a talented director with movies such as Faster, Pussycat!Kill!Kill!(1965) and Vixen!(1968), the sort of films, virtually ignored by the mainstream press, that had become known as sexploitation pictures.

These films were largely relegated to the fringe circuit of "adult" theaters, while AIP teen movies with wink-wink titles like Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1966), starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, played drive-ins and other relatively reputable venues. Roger Corman's The Trip (1967) for American International, written by veteran AIP/Corman actor Jack Nicholson, never shows a fully bared, unpainted breast, but flirts with nudity throughout. The Meyer and Corman lines were drawing closer.

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