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(born April 5, 1926, Detroit, Mich., U.S.) U.S. film director and producer. He directed his first films, Five Guns West and Apache Woman,in 1955, and by 1960 he was one of the most prolific makers of low-budget "exploitation" films. His film versions of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, including The House of Usher (1960) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), won him a cult following as a master of the macabre. In 1970 he formed New World Pictures, an independent distribution company that produced the work of such struggling young directors as Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese.