Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter, and playwright. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 19 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2024.
The Elephant Man is a 1980 biographical drama film based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who lived in London in the late 19th century. The film was directed by David Lynch, produced by Mel Brooks and Jonathan Sanger, and starred John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Michael Elphick, Hannah Gordon, and Freddie Jones. The Elephant Man is generally regarded as one of Lynch's more accessible and mainstream works, alongside The Straight Story (1999).
Richard Stanley is a South African filmmaker, known for his work in the horror genre. He began his career making short films and music videos, and subsequently directed the feature films Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992), both of which are considered cult classics. He was the original director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), but was fired early into principal photography due to creative differences, an episode recounted in the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. In 2019, he returned to feature films after more than 20 years, directing the H. P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space.
Young Frankenstein is a 1974 American comedy horror film directed by Mel Brooks. The screenplay was co-written by Brooks and Gene Wilder. Wilder also starred in the lead role as the title character, a descendant of the infamous Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Peter Boyle portrayed the monster. The film co-stars Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Richard Haydn, and Gene Hackman.
The Fly is a 1986 American science fiction body horror film directed and co-written by David Cronenberg. Produced by Brooksfilms and distributed by 20th Century Fox, the film stars Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, and John Getz. Loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story of the same name and the 1958 film of the same name, The Fly tells of an eccentric scientist who, after one of his experiments goes wrong, slowly turns into a fly-hybrid creature. The score was composed by Howard Shore and the make-up effects were created by Chris Walas, along with makeup artist Stephan Dupuis.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It is a 1995 comedy horror film directed by Mel Brooks and starring Leslie Nielsen. It is a spoof of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and of some of the story's well-known adaptations. Brooks co-authored the screenplay with Steve Haberman and Rudy De Luca. He also appears as Dr. Van Helsing. The film's other stars include Steven Weber, Amy Yasbeck, Peter MacNicol, Harvey Korman, and Anne Bancroft.
Frederick William FrancisBSC was an English cinematographer and film director whose filmmaking career spanned over 60 years, from the late 1930s until the late 2000s. One of the most celebrated British cinematographers of his time, he received numerous accolades for his photography, including two Academy Awards and five BAFTA Awards. As a director, he was best known for his horror films, notably those made for production companies Amicus and Hammer in the '60s and '70s.
Mel Welles was an American film actor and director. His best-remembered role may be that of hapless flower shop owner Gravis Mushnick in the 1960 low-budget Roger Corman dark comedy, The Little Shop of Horrors.
Nightmare is a 1964 British horror film directed by Freddie Francis and starring Jennie Linden. It was written by Jimmy Sangster, who also produced the film for Hammer Films. The film focuses on a young girl in a finishing school who is plagued by nightmares concerning her institutionalized mother.
Dementia 13, known in the United Kingdom as The Haunted and the Hunted, is a 1963 independently made black-and-white horror-thriller film produced by Roger Corman, and written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola in his feature film directorial debut. The film stars William Campbell and Luana Anders with Bart Patton, Mary Mitchell, and Patrick Magee. It was released in the United States by American International Pictures during the fall of 1963 as the bottom half of a double feature with Corman's X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes.
Ronnie Rocket is an unfinished film project written by David Lynch, who also intended to direct it. Begun after the success of his 1977 film Eraserhead, Lynch shelved Ronnie Rocket due to an inability to find financial backing for the project. Instead, he sought out an existing script on which to base his next film, settling on what would become 1980's The Elephant Man. Lynch returned to Ronnie Rocket throughout the 1980s but by the following decade had stopped considering it to be a viable prospect.
Torture Garden is a 1967 British horror film directed by Freddie Francis and starring Burgess Meredith, Jack Palance, Michael Ripper, Beverly Adams, Peter Cushing, Maurice Denham, Ursula Howells, Michael Bryant and Barbara Ewing. The score was a collaboration between Hammer horror regulars James Bernard and Don Banks.
Vampira is a 1974 British comedy horror film directed by Clive Donner, and starring David Niven and Teresa Graves. This spoof of the vampire genre was re-titled Old Dracula for release in the United States, in an attempt to ride the success of Young Frankenstein.
Tales That Witness Madness is a 1973 British anthology horror film produced by Norman Priggen, directed by veteran horror director Freddie Francis, written by actress Jennifer Jayne.
The Flesh and the Fiends is a 1960 British horror film directed by John Gilling and starring Peter Cushing, June Laverick and Donald Pleasence. 19th-century medical doctor Robert Knox purchases human corpses for research from a murderous pair named Burke and Hare. The film is based on the true case of Burke and Hare, who murdered at least 16 people in 1828 Edinburgh and sold their bodies for anatomical research.
Burke & Hare is a 1972 horror film directed by Vernon Sewell and starring Derren Nesbitt, Harry Andrews, and Glynn Edwards. It is based on the true story of the Burke and Hare murders, and was the last film to be directed by Sewell.
The Brain, also known as Vengeance and Ein Toter sucht seinen Mörder, is a 1962 UK-West German co-production science fiction thriller film directed by Freddie Francis, and starring Anne Heywood and Peter van Eyck. It is adapted from the 1942 Curt Siodmak novel Donovan's Brain, and in this film, differing from earlier adaptations, the dead man seeks his murderer through hypnotic contact with the doctor keeping his brain alive.
Doktor Rej i đavoli is a 2012 Serbian film directed by Dinko Tucaković. It is co-written by Tucaković and Saša Radojević with input from Dimitrije Vojnov.
Johanna Harwood, a.k.a. J. M. Harwood, is a retired Irish screenwriter. She was born and raised in County Wicklow, Ireland. She co-wrote two James Bond films, and went uncredited for adaptation work on a third.
