The Little Shop of Horrors face of Seymour, which pitifully moans, "I didn't mean it!" before drooping over—apparently ending the life of Audrey Jr. "The Little Shop of Horrors" was developed when director Roger Corman was given temporary access to sets that had been left standing from his previous film, "A Bucket of Blood". Corman decided to use the sets in a film made in the last two days before the sets were torn down. Corman initially planned to develop a story involving a private investigator. In the initial version of the story, the character that eventually became Audrey would have been referred to as
The Little Shop of Horrors with us, and the three of us worked out the rest of the story together. The first screenplay Griffith wrote was "Cardula", a Dracula-themed story involving a vampire music critic. After Corman rejected the idea, Griffith says he wrote a screenplay titled "Gluttony", in which the protagonist was "a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that, you know? We couldn't do that though because of the code at the time. So I said, "How about a man-eating plant?", and Roger said, "Okay." By that time, we were both drunk." Jackie Joseph later