Roger Corman is one of the most important figures in the history of American cinema. His business minded approach to creating popular films combined with his personal philosophies to create unique works of art that would be largely marginalized or completely dismissed as trash. It is when you take in to consideration the social climate during his most prolific periods that you can begin to formulate a larger picture of the importance of Corman’s work. Exploitation and trash films are largely ignored and disregarded in cineaste culture, but those kinds of films offer a unique look in to the social conditions of the time of their creation. If exploitation cinema exists to give the viewer what they truly want to see in the darkest recesses of their subconscious, then the ability to put a finger on that pulse to create populist art that taps in to those secret desires and unspoken taboos requires unrestrained cultural acumen and the skill to put that acumen to work. Corman had the ability to capture what it was that we actually wanted to see, not what we fooled ourselves in to believing we wanted to see. We might not have the capacity for introspective honesty, but Corman had the ability to look at the cultural climate and distill all of it in to what would be classified as lowbrow art. If one of the primary functions of art is to reflect the nature of humanity, then the entirety of our nature must be captured, whether it be “high art” or “lowbrow”.