Pete WALKER

In the 1970s, with Hammer studios in decline, the fate of the British horror film fell to a group of film-makers schooled in the lower reaches of exploitation cinema. Rising to the top was Pete Walker, who brought a sufficiently individual approach to the genre to establish a bloodsoaked cult reputation. His sombre, macabre oeuvre is testament to a strikingly pessimistic sensibility, perfectly mirroring the dreary disillusionment of the 1970s.

Walker was born in Brighton in January 1939. His father was the popular comedian Syd Walker and his mother a chorus girl, but following his father's death in 1945 he spent a dislocated childhood in orphanages, foster homes and Catholic schools. From the late 1950s he worked intermittently as a film actor and a stand-up comedian, as well as behind the camera on television commercials, before establishing his own low-budget production company, Heritage Films (he went on to produce and finance all but one of the films he directed). In the 1960s he churned out 8 mm ‘glamour’ films, before making his first properly distributed feature with I Like Birds (1967). He continued to work independently in soft-core sexploitation with School for Sex (1968) and Cool It Carol (1970), gradually moving into suspense thrillers with Man of Violence (1970) and Die Screaming, Marianne (1971). He even tried his hand with 3D on Four Dimensions of Greta (1972).