by Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: writer, producer, director Ed Hunt, who helmed Bloody Birthday, Plague, UFOs Are Real, Alien Warrior and Halloween Hell.
In horror or science fiction filmmaking, it’s pretty much boom or bust, feast or famine, when it comes to recognition and celebration. While these genres have birthed, and continue to birth, big, above-the-line directorial talent (George Lucas, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and so on) and major-level cult heroes (John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper and various other suspects), there are also countless filmmakers who toil bravely and with singular effort and invention in these fanciful and bloodied cinematic fields to the sounds of commentariat silence.
Many have already featured in the Unsung Auteurs column (Jack Sholder, Robert Hiltzik and John Carl Buechler are just a few recent examples), and you can add to that list the widely unrecognised and little-known writer, producer and director Ed Hunt. The director of a few salacious skin flicks, a small selection of wacked out science fiction movies, and one truly demented slab of horror, Ed Hunt’s fascination with UFOs and taste for the bizarre should have long ago marked him as an auteurist cult figure with a greater sense of cache, but he instead stands as the filmmaking equivalent of an artistic curio, dearly appreciated in small circles, but unknown to the wider world.
Ed Hunt was raised in Los Angeles, and became hooked on cinema while in his early teens. Hunt had dreams of becoming a movie director at the age of fifteen and began writing screenplays, but attended UCLA initially as a chemistry major. But he soon changed his studies to film. “When I was at UCLA, I was a chemistry major and a movie fan,” Hunt told Search My Trash. “I toyed with the idea of changing my major to film. While I was at college, there was a premiere of a movie in Westwood, LA. Louis Malle was the director. I watched him get out of a limo with Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau. That helped me decide. I changed my major to film, enrolled in a screenwriting class, and began to seriously study movies.”
Following graduation, Hunt began working in the film industry in various minor capacities, toiling as a set builder and microphone operator, while also editing and directing industrial and educational documentaries. “My early days in filmmaking were very wild and eventful,” Hunt told Search My Trash in 2015. “I worked at every crew and staff position, shot and edited, and cut the sound and negative on several very, very low budget movies. Very quickly after leaving UCLA, I was thoroughly experienced in the basic technical side of filmmaking. Some of the movies I worked on were shot in a weekend or four days. There were a lot of drive-in movies being made then.”
Well and truly across the basic tenets of filmmaking after his low-budget, on-set training, Ed Hunt slid quietly into the director’s chair. “On some of the first movies I directed, which purposely do not appear on my resume, I got the job directing because I promised to operate the camera, light the movie, edit it, and cut the sound and the negative for less money than a few hamburgers would cost now,” Hunt has admitted. His first official writing and directing credits came with a trio of cheap, sexy programmers in 1969’s The Freudian Thing, 1973’s Corrupted and 1974’s Diary Of A Sinner.
After these lurid titles, Hunt moved on to subject matter way more within his creative purview. Shot on a shoestring, 1976’s sci-fi thriller Point Of No Return mixes action, conspiracies, madness and aliens to such impressive effect that it saw Hunt receive a major budget bump-up for his next film. While certainly no blockbuster, 1977’s Starship Invasions did boast Hollywood names in Robert Vaughn and Christopher Lee, along with cheap but imaginative special effects, and an entertaining story about an advance team of aliens scoping out Earth as a possible target for a full-scale invasion.
Hunt kept his inventive connection with science fiction going for the propulsive 1979 virus thriller Plague and the freaky 1979 pseudo-science documentary UFOs Are Real, but then switched gears for what remains his perhaps best-known film with 1981’s Bloody Birthday. A bizarro horror flick of the first order, this light-on-motivation freak-fest takes the oft-visited “killer kids” concept and lights it up to frequently staggering effect. Ten years after being born under an eclipse of the sun, three demented little tykes go completely nuts, dispatching various kids and adults around them in inventive slasher-flick-style ways. While not hyper-gruesome, Bloody Birthday is unrelentingly disturbing, as its three cute-faced ten-year-old psychos kill with nothing short of gleeful abandon. It’s like The Bad Seed in triplicate and on steroids. Ed Hunt really “goes there” in Bloody Birthday in ways that he hadn’t before or since, and the film is nothing less than a landmark work of inherent perversity and endless fascination.
With the demented Bloody Birthday in his rearview, Ed Hunt returned to science fiction with 1985’s Alien Warrior (an actioner in the vein of The Terminator) and 1988’s The Brain (in which a TV psychologist attempts to brainwash his audience using…a giant brain!) before taking an extended break from filmmaking. “I spent a lot of time taking care of my sick mother until she died in 2009,” Hunt told Search My Trash in 2015. “I traded the stock and commodities markets and studied technical analysis which is basically the study of charts and chart patterns to predict future prices of stocks and commodities. I wrote a book about filmmaking and a manuscript for a book on screenwriting, which is unpublished. I also wrote several screenplays.”
Ed Hunt made a quick, one-film comeback in 2014 with Halloween Hell (a horror satire featuring Eric Roberts…as Dracula!), but has sadly been inactive since. A wonderfully peculiar talent with few legitimate peers – and a big, admirably nasty mark of fucked-up excellence on his resume in the deranged form of Bloody Birthday – Ed Hunt needs to be rediscovered and appropriately appreciated…right now!
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
