There are a lot of TikTok clips floating around out there that muddle the definition of the “POV” shot, to the point where it feels like the war to maintain its original meaning has already been lost.  Thankfully, the 1958 AIP creature feature The Brain Eaters offers a handy tool for any teens confused by the meaning of a camera’s POV.  Halfway through the hour-long horror cheapie, one of the titular brain eaters (parasitic dust bunnies with space-alien antennae) crawls across the carpet, up the bedframe, and over the mattress of a sleeping woman’s bedroom so the ceremonial brain eating can commence.  We watch this slow, low-to-the-ground attack in 1st-person, with the camera inching towards the soon-to-be-brain-eaten victim as she slumbers, unaware.  Now, listen to me carefully. When posting clips of this scene to your socials, do caption it “POV: When you’re about to eat some lady’s brain.”  Do not caption it “POV: When you’re asleep and about to get your brain ate.”  I hope this handy guide clears the matter up for today’s youths once and for all.

Of course, most teenagers are not scouring Tubi for vintage schlock with short enough runtimes to squeeze in before bed, but once upon a time that demographic would’ve been The Brain Eaters‘s exact audience.  The reason it’s so short is that it was specifically made to fill out a double bill at the local drive-in, so that teens had an appropriate place to make out in public while parked in the family car.  That kind of old-school B-movie filmmaking can lead to a lot of dead air between the monster attacks (all the better to make out to), but The Brain Eaters instead chooses to accept the challenge of cramming two hours of plot into one hour of celluloid.  It doesn’t waste a second of its audience’s time as it hops from brain buffet to brain buffet, speeding along its standard-issue body snatcher plot with a narration track that’s impatient to get to the second half of that night’s double bill (either Earth vs. the Spider or Terror from the Year 5000, depending on the city where you parked).  That’s why I was not at all shocked to learn that the late, great Roger Corman worked on the film as an uncredited executive producer, given that it was exemplary of the energy & efficiency desperately missing from most other contemporary drive-in fillers produced by anyone else.

I also was not shocked to learn that the film’s star, regular Corman player Ed Nelson (Bucket of Blood, Swamp Women, Attack of the Crab Monster, etc.), served as the on-set producer of the picture, since it’s essentially a vanity project about how handsome & cool he is.  Nelson plays a buff scientist who’s just as comfortable studying field-research specimens on Bunsen burners as he is knocking out alien zombies with his fists.  He’s a sophisticated brute with his heart worn proudly on his rolled-up sleeves, dragging along his lab-assistant fiancée (the sleeping woman from the film’s Brain-Eater-Cam POV shot, I’m sad to say) for each of his world-saving adventures.  The frame is filled out by plenty of other B-movie archetypes—the perpetually scared girlfriend of a naively brave cop, the hardened detective from Washington D.C. who just wants results damnit, the local old fogey who knows the entire history of the town under attack, and so on—but the only one who really matters is our smart, strapping, all-American hero.  That hero worship is obviously secondary to the brain-eating parasites that Nelson volunteers to thwart, but it’s still an adorable starring-role showcase for him anyway.

As for the brain eaters themselves, they’re not especially impressive as monster puppets.  Stuck somewhere between a throwaway Jim Henson design for a background mouse and a ball of pet hair vacuumed from under your couch, their physical characteristics are more cute than scary.  The movie leans heavily into the uncanniness of their origins & behavior in an entertaining way, though, starting with the arrival of a giant metal cone believed to be a spaceship.  As our impatient narrator explains, a mysterious, 50-foot-tall metal structure appeared without warning in the woods outside Riverdale, Illinois, immediately prompting investigation from Congress’s official UFO Committee (complete with sly match-cut from the silhouette of the cone to the silhouette of the Capitol Dome). The brain eaters appear to rise from the ground at the direction of the cone, attaching themselves to the backs of innocent victims’ necks through vampiric puncture wounds, and piloting them like body-snatched zombies.  The scariest the little scamps get is when they start body-snatching local street toughs, giving adults legitimate reasons to be scared of the youths of the day instead of just the normal, paranoid ones.  Really, the core horror of the film can be found in the question, “What is the secret of The Cone?”, since every new detail about the alien structure just makes its appearance & purpose more confusing.  It’s impervious to bullets, filled with Seussian tunnels to nowhere, and houses a godlike figure played by a young Leonard Nimoy (misspelled as “Nemoy” in the credits) whose plan for peaceful, global takeover via brain eaters actually doesn’t sound all that bad once you hear him out.

There’s a lot going on in this disposable horror-of-the-week novelty, especially considering that it only runs half the length of an average feature film.  It can be harsh (depicting dead dogs & suicide attempts), goofy (in its cutesy creature design), and genuinely baffling (adding continual complications to the mystery of The Cone), but it is never boring, not for a second.  Corman was notorious for establishing a rigid formula in his early monster movies that consistently gripped his audiences’ attention (for as long as they could stand to delay making out in the back seat) and for allowing his employees freedom to express themselves creatively as long as they adhered to that set structure.  The exaggerated Dutch angles, glowing specimen jars full of ready-to-attack brain eaters, and mystical visit from the otherworldly Nimoy all suggest that Corman-actor-turned-Corman-director Bruno VeSota had just as much fun with that freedom behind the camera as Corman-actor-turned-Corman-producer Ed Nelson had posing as a movie star in front of it.  I know it’s a little silly to mourn someone who lived 98 years and continued doing what he loved until the very end, but Corman could have lived for another 100 and it still wouldn’t be enough. 

-Brandon Ledet