15 Best Horror Movie Directors Ever

By Ian Watson /

7. Frank Henenlotter

€œExploitation films have an attitude more than anything else,€ Frank Henenlotter says, €œan attitude that you don€™t find with more mainstream Hollywood productions. They€™re a little ruder, a little raunchier, they deal with material people don€™t usually touch on.€ With such films in his blood, Henenlotter made Basket Case (1982), a $35,000 exercise in bad taste dedicated to Herschell Gordon Lewis that he followed up six years later with Brain Damage (1988), your typical drug parable/brain-sucking parasite movie. They established him as one of the most inventive and outrageous directors of the 80s, whose films stood out in a marketplace overcrowded with slasher sequels. Following Frankenhooker (1990) and the Basket Case sequels, Henenlotter took a 15 year sabbatical from directing, in part due to the difficulties in financing such outlandish projects. When he returned with Bad Biology (2008), an everyday tale of a man whose penis leaves his body and attacks numerous showering starlets, it was like he€™d never been away.