10 Horror Movie Directors That Quit The Genre

Despite the fact that a handful of helmers on this list have won numerous accolades, there may be no filmmaker listed here whose career has cast a longer shadow on the history of Hollywood than Canadian cult director Bob Clark.

You may not recognize the name, but Clark was responsible for the enduring cinematic staples of both the teen sex comedy (thanks to his 1982 hit Porky's) and the slasher movie.

With 1974's Black Christmas, Clark took the raw material touched on by Psycho and Peeping Tom and brought together the lone location, killer POV shots, truncated time frame, and cast of young college-age victims which would all become staples of the slasher sub genre. The flick's influence was outsized enough to warrant a pair of (terrible, but in very different ways) remakes, as well as prompting The Thing helmer John Carpenter to pitch a potential sequel which would eventually become Halloween.

Despite Clark retiring from horror after the flick's success, the filmmaker never rested on his laurels, later making the Yuletide classic A Christmas Story as well as, er, Baby Geniuses.

Look he's Bob Clark, he can get a Mulligan.