When the Drive-In Became Horror's Favourite Cinema

The drive-in cinema was born because somebody thought the best seat in the house ought to have a steering wheel. By the late 1950s, thousands of American families were watching films through their windscreens, while teenagers discovered that a darkened car park could offer considerably more than entertainment.

Then came the monsters, the double bills and the films polite cinemas preferred not to advertise. The history of drive-in movie theaters is also the history of how low-budget horror found an audience willing to stay up late.

A Projector, a Bedsheet and a Car

In 1932, New Jersey businessman Richard Hollingshead began experimenting with an outdoor cinema in his driveway. He used a projector, an improvised screen and a car, then worked out how to arrange vehicles on ramps so one bonnet would not obscure another family's view.

He received a patent in May 1933. On 6 June, his Park-In Theatre opened in Pennsauken, near Camden, charging 25 cents per car and another quarter per person, with a one-dollar maximum. The opening attraction was Wives Beware, a British comedy. Not exactly a warning of the horrors to come.

Hollingshead was not the first person to project moving pictures outdoors. His achievement was to turn the automobile itself into a private cinema box. America had already fallen for the motor car; now it could take the family to the pictures without making anyone leave it.

The first site did not last. The idea did.

The Family Cinema with a Back Seat

Drive-ins flourished after the Second World War, when rising car ownership, suburban expansion and a growing population of young families changed American leisure.

The attraction was practical. Children could make noise, parents could bring snacks, and nobody had to dress for a city-centre picture palace. Later, individual speakers hung from posts beside the parked cars; eventually FM transmission made the car radio part of the experience.

The car also gave young couples a little privacy. Drive-ins earned the nickname "passion pits", a reputation that alarmed parents and delighted promoters in roughly equal measure.

According to the Smithsonian's history of the business, the American drive-in reached its numerical peak in 1958, with 4,063 operating theatres. A field, a screen and a concession stand had become a national institution.

Yet the very format that made drive-ins popular also dictated their limitations. They needed darkness, enormous amounts of land and weather that did not actively discourage leaving the house.

When the B-Movies Took Over

Indoor cinemas could run multiple daytime screenings and command valuable first-run releases. Drive-ins often had to fill their programmes with cheaper attractions, double features and films that benefited from lurid posters more than critical approval.

Science-fiction creatures, juvenile delinquents, giant insects and low-budget horrors all looked rather good from the front seat of a Chevrolet. Nobody was demanding subtlety from a fifty-foot screen after ten at night.

By the early 1970s, exploitation distributors had learned to sell a night out as an endurance test. Consider David E. Durston's I Drink Your Blood, released theatrically in 1971 and paired with the older I Eat Your Skin. The titles sounded like an escalating argument, which was more or less the point.

The former offered a rabies-infected cult and alarming violence; the latter was a previously shelved zombie picture given a more saleable name. The combination was made for the double-feature marketplace, where an outrageous promise on a poster could be as important as the film itself.

Drive-ins did not invent exploitation cinema. They gave it space to thrive, alongside conventional family films and mainstream hits. The programme depended on the proprietor, the audience and the local market.

The Screen That Outlived the Cars

By the 1970s and 1980s, suburban land was worth more, multiplexes offered predictable schedules and operating an enormous outdoor theatre became harder to justify. Screens were demolished, parking ramps disappeared under new developments, and speaker poles rusted in empty fields.

But the drive-in never quite died. Some surviving theatres continued to screen new releases, others found audiences for repertory nights and nostalgic double bills. The appeal remains difficult to reproduce indoors: a communal event experienced from a private little room on wheels.

That contradiction made drive-ins special. They were family outings and teenage hideaways, ordinary businesses and unlikely sanctuaries for cinematic excess.

If the films were occasionally dreadful, the setting usually knew how to make an evening of them.

Hellwood's I Drink Your Blood T-Shirt celebrates one of the more gloriously excessive examples of the early-1970s exploitation boom.

For further excursions into cinema's less respectable corners, explore Hellwood's Cult Classic Movie T-Shirts, the Horror Movies collection and the Halloween Spooktacular collection.

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD T-SHIRT

Once you see it, you'll never eat again.

A Hellwood tribute to David E. Durston's notorious exploitation horror film, a delirious collision of rabies, counterculture paranoia and the anything-goes spirit of early-1970s drive-in cinema.

Inspired by the outrageous shock-horror tradition that made low-budget double features an essential part of American cult movie history.

VIEW THE I DRINK YOUR BLOOD T-SHIRT