#some horror fans need to learn their herstory

[marypickfords]

"Moreover, by the time Findlay switched her attention to horror, a number of her contemporaries were doing very well from the genre.

Wes Craven, a fully fledged horror auteur by the 1980s, had worked on numerous hardcore features around the time he directed The Last House on the Left in 1972, a widely controversial, yet popular horror film that played all over the world. The success of his subsequent horror films, including The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and especially A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), showed that the transition from porn to horror was not only possible, but also potentially highly lucrative. Similarly, fellow New Yorker William Lustig cut his teeth directing two hardcore features, Hot Honey and The Violation of Claudia (both 1977), prior to shooting the horror film that made his name, Maniac (1980), and several higher-profile R-rated horror films he made in the years that followed.

As hardcore stalwart and director of the R-rated horror film, Deranged (1987), Chuck Vincent, explained to Variety, “Filming adult features has been a tremendous aid for me [and others] in terms of experience,” affording him and his contemporaries the ability to master industry-standard equipment and materials, such as 35mm film, and providing others, including adult film producer and producer of the horror film A Hazing Hell (dir. Paul Ziller, released as Pledge Night in 1988), Joyce Snyder, with unmatched knowledge of distribution and foreign sales.

Findlay, with the assistance of her partner, the composer and studio engineer Walter E. Sear, and their new company Reeltime Distributing (est. 1979), was well positioned to enter commercial filmmaking of this nature, by self-financing and shooting on location (as was usually the case with her adult features), and then exploiting her networks within theatrical, cable, and video distribution."

Johnny Walker, from ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023)

#roberta findlay #johnny walker #refocus: the films of roberta findlay #w* #w #some horror fans need to learn their herstory