Curtis Harrington, who dived under his seat while watching his first horror film as a child, then went on to be a filmmaker known for his elegant, edgy cinematic forays into the macabre, died on Sunday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 80. Robert Mundy, his longtime friend and a screenwriter, said that Harrington never fully recovered from a stroke in 2005, but that the cause of death had not been officially determined.
Harrington started as a teenage amateur filmmaker, became a force in the experimental cinema of the '40s and '50s, and then brought his quirky vision to the Hollywood studios. He was an actor, writer, cinematographer, assistant producer and crew member, but was best known as the director of more than two dozen brazenly scary, often intellectually provocative horror films. Time magazine called him "Poe with a megaphone.
" His first commercial feature, Night Tide (1961), starred Dennis Hopper, whose character begins to suspect that a woman who plays a mermaid in a carnival is a real mermaid with an intriguing twist: she kills at the full moon. In a memorable scene, the hero follows the heroine by following her wet trail. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
(1971) is a bizarre twist on the Hansel and Gretel tale in which Shelley Winters' psychotic character searches for a "replacement" for her dead daughter, killing children along the way. The movie is notable for its vivid colors, particularly purple. One of his many works for television, a 1978 movie, Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, tells of a German shepherd possessed by the devil who supernaturally causes mysterious deaths when he is not mauling people's throats.
One scene shows dad unable to resist the urge to plunge his hand into a spinning lawnmower blade as the dog looks on gleefully. "I have a very macabre turn of mind and there's no way that can be explained," Harrington told the magazine Filmmaker. "It's just a leaning I've had since childhood.
" His eye for creepy detail was further suggested by the pinball machine called Turnpike, which the characters played by James Caan and Katharine Ross keep in their game room in the movie Games (1967). When a player wins by scoring the most fatalities, a sign lights up: "You're a dead man." Curtis Harrington was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in Beaumont, Calif.
He begged his mother to take him to The Raven, with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. She claimed he hid under his seat, but he had no memory of that perhaps pivotal event. As a teenager he worked as a movie usher and made amateur films.
His Fragment of Seeking, shot with 16-mm film when Harrington was a teenager, is still cited for its adventuresome experimentalism: it was entirely visual with no dialogue. Harrington never married and has no immediate survivors. His last movie was Usher, a creative take on Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, and also the subject of one of his first films.
..
News RSS