10 Greatest Horror Movie Directors Of All Time

Notable films: Don't Torture A Duckling, Zombi 2, City Of The Living Dead, The New York Ripper, The Beyond

Italian horror filmmakers have a long established reputation for pushing the genre further than most of their contemporaries, as the zombie versus shark scene from Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (also known as Zombie Flesh Eaters) demonstrated clearly. Rather than use a shark animatronic, Fulci simply drugged a shark and threw a stuntman into the mix.

It's this dedication to outdoing his competitors which led Lucio Fulci to be widely regarded as the Godfather of Gore, as well as one of the key figures in the Italian giallo horror movie scene. In some ways Fulci's career resembled Roger Corman's: cutting his teeth on a wide variety of genres, he wrote and produced a large body of work over a period of 50 years, and from the 60s onwards helped define Italian horror with movies such as A Lizard In A Woman's Skin and Don't Torture A Duckling.

Fulci's later career became synonymous with the video nasty. Following up the seminal Zombi 2 with City Of The Living Dead and The House By The Cemetery, his career culminated in one of the most depraved and controversial horror films of all time, The New York Ripper. The poster child of the video nasty era, it was described by a member of the British Board of Film Classification as "simply the most damaging film I have ever seen in my whole life".

A ringing endorsement for any true horror fan.