Curtis Harrington

Curtis Harrington, director, writer and actor: born Los Angeles 17 September 1928; died Los Angeles 6 May 2007.

Once seen, the eerie black-and-white film Night Tide, directed by Curtis Harrington in 1961, is not easily forgotten. It lingers in the mind, much as Mora, the mermaid character played by Linda Lawson, does in the mind of Johnny Drake, the sailor on leave portrayed by Dennis Hopper in his first lead role. Filmed on a minuscule budget for American International Pictures and based on a short story, "The Call of the Sea", written by the director himself, Night Tide was Harrington's first full-length feature, and seemed a harbinger of things to come.

Harrington never fulfilled this early promise, despite making other notable B-movies like Queen of Blood (1966, again with Hopper) and the Carrie/Exorcist cash-in Ruby (1977, starring Piper Laurie). He also earned a reputation for getting the best out of difficult Hollywood actresses in shlockers - take your pick from Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and What's The Matter With Helen? (both 1971) and Ann Sothern in The Killing Kind (1973). But by the mid-Seventies, he was mostly directing horror films for television - The Cat Creature (1973), Killer Bees (1974), The Dead Don't Die (1975), Devil Dog: the hound of hell (1978) - and episodes of TV series.

Born in Los Angeles in 1928, Harrington grew up in Beaumont, a sleepy, rural Californian town famous for its red-apple plantations, but close enough to Palm Springs and Hollywood for a film-obsessed teenager to indulge his passion for horror, noir and European cinema. Given an 8mm camera in 1943, the precocious 14-year-old set about filming his own version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (playing both doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher himself). "I have a very macabre turn of mind," Harrington admitted, "and there's no way that can be explained. It's just a leaning I've had since childhood."

He made several experimental short 16mm films - Fragment of Seeking (1946), Picnic (1948) and On The Edge (1949) - before working with the independent film-maker Kenneth Anger on Puce Moment (1949) and Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome (1954), in which he acted alongside Anaïs Nin. By then, Harrington had already been a cinema usher, a stagehand and a messenger at Paramount and he later spent some time in London and Paris, where he wrote for Les Cahiers du Cinéma.

In 1957, he joined the producer Jerry Wald at 20th Century-Fox and was his assistant on big-budget dramas like Peyton Place (1957) and The Long Hot Summer (1958), and the musical Mardi Gras (1958), based on one of his stories. But he hankered to direct again and, with the help of Roger Corman, managed to raise the $50,000 necessary to make Night Tide. "Dennis and I got along very well," recalled Harrington of his time directing Hopper. "He came to see some of my short experimental films at a coffeehouse in Los Angeles. When I went to him with the script of Night Tide, he immediately agreed to do it. We felt an artistic rapport with each other."

Sticking with Corman as producer, Harrington made Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), which incorporated huge chunks of footage from a Russian sci-fi film called Planeta Bur, under the pseudonym John Sebastian, and Queen of Blood (1966), both movies featuring Basil Rathbone. In 1967 he directed the "infernal triangle" thriller Games, with Simone Signoret, James Caan and Katharine Ross.

In the 1970 television film How Awful About Allan, Harrington made the most of Anthony Perkins 10 years on from Psycho, while What's The Matter With Helen?, in which Shelley Winters, Debbie Reynolds and Agnes Moorehead battle for attention and acting honours, is listed among the favourites of that connoisseur of Grand Guignol John Waters.

Harrington shot Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) at Shepperton studios with a mostly British cast (Ralph Richardson, Mark Lester, Lionel Jeffries, Hugh Griffith) and in 1974 worked with Gloria Swanson on a TV film called Killer Bees.

In 1985, between assignments on the soaps Dynasty, Hotel and The Colbys, Harrington attempted to direct Sylvia Kristel, the star of the soft porn classic Emmanuelle, in Mata Hari, but pronounced himself frustrated with her limitations as an actress and disappointed with the results. He came out of retirement in 1998 to consult on Gods and Monsters, based on the last days of the expat British horror director James Whale and completed the circle of his working life in 2002 with another self-financed version of The Fall of the House of Usher, Usher, featuring himself and mostly filmed in his own pink house in the Hollywood hills.

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, he replied, "As someone who made a few good films, or interesting films. I think that's the most I can expect."

Pierre Perrone