Norman J Warren
DIRECTOR Norman J Warren, who died last week aged 78, was a much loved figure on the cult movie convention circuit. He always cut an affable, avuncular figure at those gatherings and it was hard to equate the gentle man talking from a stage or patiently signing memorabilia for devoted fans with the grim and often gruesome films that he made through the 70s and 80s.
An enthusiastic would-be film maker from his teenage years in west London, Warren drifted through the sleazy but undeniably lucrative world of 60s sexploitation cinema, crafting his editing skills as he went, before finally making the much maligned world of horror and fantasy film production his home in the 1970s.
It was the seedy sensibility of the independently made gems he made within that world that were to make him a legend in cult movie circles. Titles like Satan's Slave, Terror and Inseminoid may have been rough and ready exercises in full-blown cinematic exploitation, but that only made them more attractive to rabid little cult devotees like me.
I still remember the frisson of illicit excitement I felt when I finally tracked down a VHS of Satan's Slave a good decade-and-a-half after it first arrived on cinema screens in 1976. A nasty little home counties horror film that was rooted in modern day realism rather than the Gothic fantasies of Hammer films, it boasted some pretty cheap but memorable gore effects. It was, as I remember, something of a badge of honour among horror hounds to actually own a copy back in the day.
That the film and indeed much of Warren's work isn't much good really hardly matters, if truth be told. It's the fact that he got to make such things at all that's really impressive.
Everything Warren made as a director was a proudly independent production and he was one of the last direct connections with a world where an individual without big studio backing could make a movie that would be distributed and seen at mainstream cinemas across the land. Such an achievement for a low budget film maker would be simply impossible today.
With the money he made from Satan's Slave, in 1977 he went on to make Prey, a lurid tale of a hungry extra-terrestrial who arrives on earth where he finds the taste of human meat to his liking, and Inseminoid, a frankly outrageous Alien rip-off from 1980 that marries sc-fi and sex in a manner that pretty much beggars belief.
After that, it was a case of diminishing returns, as truly independent film making bit the dust in Britain and the public appetite for cheap exploitation fare waned accordingly.
From there, the world of home video releases loomed, leaving the director to become a firm favourite on that aforementioned fan convention circuit.
"Big budgets really aren't an attraction to me," he once said, with typical understatement. "They don't help creativity."
How we could do with a few more creative types like Norman in the industry today.
