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Posted on 06/12/2002 6:31:58 PM PDT by dighton
Herman Cohen, the Hollywood producer who has died aged 76, founded a new cinematic genre as the man responsible for the schlock-horror classic I was a Teenage Werewolf, a hilarious farrago that combined the themes of teenage angst and monsters.
Made in 1957 as a drive-in quickie for less than $100,000, I was a Teenage Werewolf was pilloried by film critics for its tacky props, ham acting and corny lines. But it became a surprise hit, grossing more than $2 million at the box office.
Its plot concerns a troubled adolescent, Tony Rivers (Michael Landon), who turns to a hypnotherapist (Whit Bissell) to cure him of his aggression. Instead, the evil doctor gives him an experimental serum that turns him into a werewolf.
The film was notable for a series of scream-inducing moments of tension, including a game of cat-and-mouse during which the werewolf stalks a solitary gymnast in a school gymnasium, finally catching her as she hangs upside down from a trapeze.
The appearance of the werewolf - a furry beast with claws and fangs, dressed in jacket and jeans, became an icon of the teen horror genre.
Cohen ignored advice that the film would ruin his reputation and even made an uncredited cameo appearance in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock. Cohen went on to make a series of similar pictures, most of which featured teenagers being turned into monsters by adults.
These included I was a Teenage Frankenstein, in which Whit Bissell plays Dr Frankenstein in a version of the story set on a college campus, and Blood of Dracula, in which a hypnotised teenage girl becomes a vampire.
Herman Cohen was born in Detroit, Michigan, on August 27 1925. He began his career in film aged 12 when he became an assistant to a janitor at a local cinema, drawing his wages in free tickets. After service in the US Navy, he joined Columbia Pictures' publicity department.
He earned his first screen credit in 1951 as assistant producer of the unbelievably inane Bride of the Gorilla and was associate producer of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), in which Bela Lugosi meets a gorilla from Brooklyn.
In 1959, following the popularity of his teen horrors, Cohen moved to England and consolidated his success with a series of lurid exploitation movies, most of which chronicled with cheerful grisliness the sadistic excesses of serial killers.
In Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), for example, a crime writer orchestrates a series of gruesome murders using devices such as a pair of binoculars which jab spikes into the user's eyes.
In the late 1960s Cohen negotiated an uneasy alliance with the ageing and temperamental Joan Crawford to make Berserk! (1968), in which the actress plays a circus ringmistress whose performers are murdered one by one, and Trog, Joan Crawford's last movie, in which she plays a female scientist who tries to train a man-ape discovered down a pothole.
For both pictures, Cohen had to make the actress promise not to drink in the mornings before shootings, ignoring her protestations that she was just "a little sipper". For her part, Joan Crawford insisted on providing her own unsuitably abbreviated wardrobe: "Save your money, Herm," she told him, "I've been hustling clothes all my life."
After Craze (1973), a comic horror starring Jack Palance, Trevor Howard and Diana Dors, Cohen retired from producing and formed a film distribution company.
Cohen never married and died on June 2.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
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