In my effort to trump Andrew Sarris (Bazin rest him) as this country's preeminent list queen, I present my favourite directors of genre films. One needn't have worked exclusively in horror or westerns, but they need to have proved themselves capable of turning B-movie mill-grist into something at once personal and indelible. No one else performed the same magic when given a heist movie, an anti-western, a horror film or a revenge thriller. No one else had their eye for composition, their ear for dialogue, their nose for trouble. For better or worse, you know who's behind the camera. The list will probably evolve over time; this is a snapshot.
Barbara Peeters
Nicholas Ray
André De Toth
Byron Haskin
Stephanie Rothman
Jules Dassin
Sergio Martino
John Hough
Roy Ward Baker
Jacques Tourneur
Sam Fuller
Budd Boetticher
Fritz Lang
Michael Reeves
Michael Mann
John Carpenter
Walter Hill
Charles B. Pierce
William Friedkin
Robert Aldrich
Rian Johnson
Don Siegel
Monte Hellman
J.J. Abrams
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Jacques Becker
Joe Dante
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
Joseph H. Lewis
Juan López Moctezuma
Teruo Ishii
Joe D'Amato
Robert Siodmak
Matt Cimber
Clint Eastwood
Ridley Scott
Takashi Miike
Jean-Pierre Melville
John Hillcoat
Seijun Suzuki
Kihachi Okamoto
Tobe Hooper
Joseph Losey
John Brahm
John Flynn
David Cronenberg
Jorge Grau
Sam Peckinpah
Dario Argento
Neil Marshall
Giulio Questi
Takeshi Kitano
Greg McLean
Nic Winding Refn
Kathryn Bigelow
Ti West
Jack Hill
E. Elias Merhige
Tomas Alfredson
Park Chan-Wook
Andrew Dominik
Ben Wheatley
John Dahl
Brian Trenchard-Smith
Oswaldo de Oliveira
Arch Nicholson
Ida Lupino
Aside: John Ford, John Huston, Guillermo Del Toro and Stanley Kubrick, all capable hands at genre films, seem somehow wrong on this list, despite being far above average in the game. So here they are as an appendix. This, I suppose, is a topic for further discussion.
It's alright! It's alright! It's all been approved! I'm an American!
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