By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director William Girdler, who helmed Grizzly, Day Of The Animals and The Manitou.
The dark, eerie and occasionally sick and sadistic world of horror cinema is literally jammed-tight with Unsung Auteurs, filmmakers who make movies on their own terms redolent with continuing themes and stylistic flourishes that gain little to no recognition outside of the horror market, which, of course, provides musty, uncomfortable shelter for some of the most obsessive fans on the planet.
With horror filmmakers, it’s usually a case of you-might-not-know-them-but-we-sure-as-fuck-do. But even in horror circles, director William Girdler doesn’t quite get the credit he’s due. As with fellow Unsung Auteur (but non-horror player) James Bridges, there’s likely a fairly clear reason for this. In 1978, William Girdler was killed in a helicopter crash when he was just thirty-years-old after directing nine films in six years. If not a victim to this tragedy, the prolific William Girdler would very likely have made many, many more films. As his films were getting (mostly) better and better as he moved through his career, horror fans were also likely robbed of seeing considerably more impressive works from this enjoyably trashy but richly idiosyncratic writer/director.
William Girdler was born in 1947 in Louisville, Kentucky, and was fascinated with film from an early age, playing around with his family’s home movie camera from the age of just eight, and eventually making his cinematic debut proper when he was just 23. Under the auspices of his own company, Mid-America Pictures, Girdler released two films in 1972. Low in budget, high on imagination, and truly loopy, Asylum Of Satan is filled with ropey not-so-special-effects, defined by an air of nutty possibility, and punctuated by vivid splashes of surrealism in its tale of a demented doctor who sacrifices his patients to Satan. Far more downbeat and grungy is the wonderfully titled Three On A Meathook, a grimy spawn of Psycho and precursor to the gritty horrors of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The nasty story of an enmeshed father and son and the young girls that crash horribly into their sicko orbit, Three On A Meathook is for hardcore horror fans only.
After this bloody debut double-shot, William Girdler shifted gears considerably with 1974’s The Zebra Killer (aka The Get Man), an urban panic boilover (very popular in the 1970s) which tracks the efforts of a tough but decent African-American cop (a pre-Assault On Precinct 13 Austin Stoker) to apprehend a white killer (Jim Pickett) who commits a variety of crimes (bombings, murders) while wearing an Afro wig and black-face! Though a bottom-feeding exploitation flick, there’s a feverish quality to The Zebra Killer which represents something of a bump upwards from Girdler’s first two films.
The Blaxploitation touches that Girdler flirted with on The Zebra Killer were indulged even further on his next two films. 1974’s Abby is basically an all-African-American rip-off of The Exorcist as a black bishop (Blacula himself, William Marshall) unleashes a demon of some description while exploring in Nigeria, which then finds a home in the body of his eponymous daughter-in-law (Carol Speed). Cue vomiting, sordid sexual shenanigans, and reams of colourful “jive talk” as Abby’s friends and family attempt to sort her suddenly and inexplicably freaky shit out, which all leads, of course, to a crazy showdown between good and evil. Even by 1970s exploitation standards (a time when a white director could actually dare make a film like this), Abby is pretty crazy stuff, and William Girdler pumps the gas in every department, crafting a film of singular freakiness.
Girdler dialled it back substantially for 1974’s Sheba Baby, a PG-rated Blaxploitation actioner starring the great Pam Grier (Foxy Brown, Coffy) as the brilliantly named Sheba Shayne, a tough talking and hard-hitting (but decidedly glamorous) Chicago private eye who heads back to her (and Girdler’s) hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to get her father out of a jam, with a little help from her dad’s business partner (the excellent Austin Stoker, who also appeared in Abby). There’s plentiful action of the less bloody and brutal variety here, and Girdler (never one to miss an opportunity) makes the absolute most of Pam Grier’s voluble charisma, sexiness and presence, while her chemistry with Stoker is just as on-point as you’d hope it would be. Though it doesn’t strut on the same funky plane as Grier’s previous Blaxploitation belters, Sheba Baby is still a lot of fun.
It was with his final three films, however, that William Girdler really established himself as a filmmaker of true ingenuity. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 culture-shifter Jaws inspired a rash of rip-offs both good (1977’s Orca) and not-quite-so-good (1977’s Tentacles), and Girdler delivered one of the best with 1976’s Grizzly, which replaced Spielberg’s marauding shark with an equally terrifying grizzly bear to great box office success. Grizzly shamelessly but ingeniously follows the Jaws framework as a huge, murderous bear tearing shreds off the visitors to a national park is pursued by a trio of diverse men: a park ranger (B-movie tough guy Christopher George), a naturalist-type (character actor Richard Jaeckel) and a helicopter pilot (Andrew Prine). There’s even a greedy politician (Joe Dorsey) more concerned with money than keeping people safe. Like all of Girdler’s work, Grizzly is not great art, but it’s great fun.
Obviously spurred on by the success of Grizzly, Girdler upped the ante with 1977’s Day Of The Animals, in which a group of hikers (played by Grizzly alumni Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel, along with, yes, Leslie Nielsen, who also starred in Girdler’s sub-par 1976 thriller Project: Kill) are menaced by a whole host of animals that have been turned into murderous, human-hunting predators by a depleted ozone layer. Considerably crazier than Grizzly, the luridly compelling Day Of The Animals sees the hikers violently attacked by bears, birds, dogs, mountain lions, rats, snakes, and wolves in a bloody miasma of on-screen madness. One of the best among the 1970s wave of animals-attack movies (which featured everything from Frogs and Night Of The Lepus to Australia’s own Long Weekend, and can be seen pretty much as the rabid offspring of Hitchcock’s The Birds), Day Of The Animals is grade-A Girdler.
Somehow, William Girdler went even further with his next movie, which was also his biggest and slickest, and even featured big-name (but admittedly somewhat faded) movie stars like Tony Curtis, Stella Stevens and Burgess Meredith. 1978’s The Manitou is, well, nuts. In this bonkers adaptation of Graham Masterton’s novel, Susan Strasberg’s Karen discovers a tumour on her back, which is eventually diagnosed as a fucking foetus! After a little investigation by her fake psychic (!) boyfriend Tony Curtis, his real-psychic colleague Stella Stevens, and a crusty old doctor (Burgess Meredith), the foetus is determined to be a “manitou”, namely the reborn spirit of a Native American shaman. And from there, it gets even weirder, as Michael Ansara’s medicine man is brought in to battle the creature, with truly extraordinary results. When you watch The Manitou, you can only wonder at where William Girdler may have gone creatively.
William Girdler died in a helicopter crash in the Philippines about 30 miles from Manila on January 21, 1978 while scouting filming locations for a film about drug smuggling, tragically bringing to an end a truly fascinating career in genre cinema.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs 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.
