Larry Cohen, Director of Garish Horror Classics, Dies at 82

Jeff Sanderson, a spokesman for his family, said the cause was cancer.

Cohen broke into show business as a writer. He earned his first television writing credits in the late 1950s, and by 1965 he had his first credit as series creator. The show he created was “Branded,” a Western starring Chuck Connors as a man trying to rebuild his reputation after having been drummed out of the Army because of a false accusation of cowardice.

He also created the series “Blue Light” in 1966 and “Coronet Blue” and “The Invaders,” both in 1967. In 1972, seeking more control over his work, he directed and produced his first movie, “Bone,” a social satire about a home invasion, from his own script.

Two years later he drew considerable attention in horror circles with “It’s Alive!,” in which a newborn baby wreaks havoc in the delivery room and then across Los Angeles. The music was by Bernard Herrmann, a veteran of “Citizen Kane” and films by Alfred Hitchcock, although Vincent Canby, reviewing the movie in The New York Times, was unimpressed. The score, he wrote, “sounds as if it might have been composed to accompany World War II.”

Yet Cohen’s horror movies attained a certain respect within the genre and even beyond. “It’s Alive!” was followed by two sequels, “It Lives Again” in 1978 (that one with three killer babies) and “It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive” in 1987.

“These flicks are far more compelling than any about wrestling toothy rubber mutants should be,” Rocco Thompson wrote on the website Rue Morgue last year, when the trilogy was released on Blu-ray, “and it’s all thanks to Cohen’s razor-sharp, timely writing.”

Even as he was thinking about delving into horror, Cohen wrote and directed “Black Caesar” and “Hell Up in Harlem,” blaxploitation films released in 1973.

“I don’t know what blaxploitation means,” he said in an interview seen in “King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen,” a 2017 documentary by Steve Mitchell. “Every movie’s exploitation. So what?”

Cohen also had success with more mainstream films like “Phone Booth,” a 2002 thriller he wrote; that movie, directed by Joel Schumacher, starred Colin Farrell as a man trapped in a phone booth by an extortionist who says he’ll be shot if he leaves.

Cohen’s most recent script credit was for another phone-related thriller, “Message Deleted,” in 2010.

“I just keep turning scripts out,” he told The New Yorker in 2004. “Some people, they stop. Even people who’ve had huge successes for years find themselves unemployed, going to film festivals and being told how great they are — but nobody’s giving them a job. It’s better to be me, who never got all that. I’m still working.”

Lawrence George Cohen was born on July 15, 1936, in New York. His father, Irving, worked in real estate, and his mother, Carolyn, was a homemaker.

As a child Cohen exercised his imagination by drawing his own comic books, and as a teenager he would often sneak in to the NBC studios to watch shows being filmed. “I trespassed so often that everybody finally believed I worked there and didn’t bother me,” he said. Eventually he did work there, as a page. But he aspired to something more.

As he told the story to The Daily News in 1958, he went into Talent Associates, a New York company that produced and packaged television shows, and told its president, Alfred Levy, that he was interested in writing. Levy suggested he try writing a script.

His first was rejected, but he kept at it, returning to Talent Associates twice a week for tutoring from a story editor. After a few more tries, one of his scripts was accepted for “Kraft Theater,” an anthology series, and more followed.

Cohen, who graduated from the City College of New York, was determined to make a career of writing.

“If I found a producer that had an idea that they wanted to develop, I would do it for nothing,” he said in a 2013 video interview. “I did a lot of free writing for people, knowing that if I did enough of that they’d probably be embarrassed into giving me a job eventually. And they eventually were.”

By the mid-1960s he was also writing screenplays. One of the earliest, in 1966, was for “Return of the Seven” (later retitled “Return of the Magnificent Seven”; it was a sequel to the 1960 film “The Magnificent Seven”). It was not well received by Canby, whose review in The Times called it “a pretentious western bore with a deadpan Yul Brynner, a mixture of spraying bullets and philosophical twaddle and absolutely no point.”

Cohen, though, continued to be in demand, thanks to vivid ideas easily conveyed.

“He could come up with a brilliant joke or a dazzling plot for a movie from the thinnest thread of an idea,” Merv Bloch, a longtime friend and veteran movie adman, said by email.

When Cohen became disillusioned with how some of his scripts were handled by directors, he decided to try directing his own work, beginning with “Bone.”

He often worked on a low budget, shooting scenes on location, with or without permission. Making the 1982 horror movie “Q,” about a winged serpent that nests atop the Chrysler Building in New York, he did get permission to shoot on the top floor, but he went a little higher, into the windy tower.

“We actually hired a stuntman whose main job was to walk around behind me at all times on the platform and hold onto my belt,” he recalled in an interview included in Michael Doyle’s 2015 book, “Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters.” Gunfire atop the building during that filming drew headlines in New York papers, which said the sound had created a panic, but Cohen said those reports were overblown. “We didn’t terrify anybody,” he said.

Among the other movies he both wrote and directed was “The Stuff” (1985) about a yogurtlike dessert that is no treat.

Cohen’s films tended to slip social commentary in among such ludicrous plotlines, and he eventually earned respect from critics and retrospectives at places like the Public Theater.

Cohen’s first marriage, to Janelle Webb, a co-producer on “It’s Alive!” and some of his other films, ended in divorce in 1980. He is survived by his wife, Cynthia Costas Cohen, whom he married in 1994; two daughters, Melissa Cohen and Jill Gatsby; two stepsons, Bobby and Louie Goforth; a stepdaughter, Pam Wagner; two grandchildren; and five stepgrandchildren.

The actor Michael Moriarty, best known for “Law & Order,” was in “Q” and several other Cohen movies. “It was skin-of-your-teeth filmmaking,” Moriarty told The New Yorker in 2004. “Larry tends occasionally not to look ahead. But genius is what you do with the mistakes, and nobody was better with mistakes than Larry Cohen.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.