Portal:Horror/Selected biography archive

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[edit] Archive of Selected biography items

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[edit] 2008

[edit] April 2008

Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978) was an American motion picture screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author and editor (often performing many of these functions simultaneously). In the 1950s, Wood made a run of independently produced, extremely low-budget horror, science fiction and cowboy films, now celebrated for their technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts, and outlandish plot elements, although his flair for showmanship gave his productions at least a modicum of commercial success.

Wood's popularity waned soon after his biggest "name" star, Béla Lugosi, died. He was able to salvage a saleable feature from Lugosi's last moments on film, but his career declined thereafter. Towards the end of his life, Wood made pornography and wrote pulp crime, horror, and sex novels. His posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst Director of All Time.^[1] The lack of conventional filmmaking ability in his work has earned Wood and his films a considerable cult following.

Following the publication of Rudolph Grey's biography Nightmare of Ecstasy, Wood's life and work have undergone a public rehabilitation, with new light shed on his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production, and Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood, earned two Academy Awards. (continued)

[edit] February 2008

Stuart Gordon (born August 11, 1947) in Chicago, Illinois) is a director, writer and producer of films and plays. Most of Gordon's film work is in the horror genre, though he has also ventured into science fiction. Like his friend and fellow filmmaker Brian Yuzna, Gordon is a big fan of H. P. Lovecraft and has adapted several Lovecraft stories for the screen. They include Re-Animator, From Beyond, Castle Freak (from "The Outsider"), and Dagon, as well as the Masters of Horror episode "Dreams in the Witch-House."

Gordon attended the University of Wisconsin and soon after formed Screw Theater. In March 1968 Gordon's Screw Theater produced The Game Show at the UW Memorial Union. The goal of the production was to get the audience to leave. To that end the heat was turned to 90, ushers chained the doors behind the audience, the show's start time delayed and the content of The Game Show made as inane as possible. The audience finally demanded to leave one hour and fifty minutes into the two hour production. In the fall of 1968, he produced a version of Peter Pan that got him and his future wife arrested for obscenity. The story made national headlines until the charges were dropped in November 1968. As Gordon described it in a 2001 interview:

"I had been protesting against the war in Viet Nam, and got tear-gassed by the Chicago police, and it suddenly struck me that you could take Peter Pan and turn it into a political cartoon about the whole situation. So, Peter Pan became the leader of the hippies and yippies, Captain Hook became Mayor Daley, and the pirates became the Chicago police. We left all of the James Barrie dialogue intact, so when they all went off to Neverland they sprinkled pixie dust on themselves and think lovely thoughts, and up they go. That was an acid trip, which was visualized by a psychedelic light show that was projected onto the bodies of seven naked young ladies..." [1]

After the University of Wisconsin demanded future theatrical productions by Screw Theater be overseen by a University Professor, Gordon cut his University ties to form Broom Street Theater. Its first production, the new translation of Lysistrata, premiered in May of 1969. Gordon is married to Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, whom he frequently casts in his movies. Together in 1970, they founded the Chicago Organic Theater Company, for which Gordon also served as artistic director. With the company, he did several plays, such as Warp!, Sexual Perversity In Chicago, Bleacher Bums, ER, Bloody Bess. Warp! was later adapted into a comic book by First Comics. (more...)

[edit] January 2008

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937), of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely "reason", like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has become a cult figure for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-invalidating entities, as well as the famed Necronomicon, a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic, fabricating a mythos that challenged the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Christianity.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now commonly regarded^[2] as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe in the tone of his writing style. (more...)