Cult-classic filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler (or, as the New York Times calls him: “Low-Budget Auteur”) died 7 January 2009 of heart failure. Born 25 January 1938 in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was a director, producer, writer, actor, cinematography, editor, and more. He started making movies at the age of 15, with an eight-millimeter movie camera his stepfather gave him. His first effort nearly drowned his entire cast of friends, while they were making a movie about pirates on a handmade raft. Steckler studied photography while serving in the Army. In 1959, he wound up in Hollywood and found work as a movie prop man, soon moving on to cameraman. His first film, which he produced, directed, and starred in under a pseudonym, came in 1964. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? was, according to the Times, a “cinematic tour de force.” The paper goes on to call Steckler “a director whose surrealistically impossible plots went beyond zombies to display superheroes, rockers, bikini-clad beach girls—and flourishes of what some saw as inspired moviemaking.” In the 1970s, he relocated to Las Vegas, and moved into soft-core pornography, as well as teaching film classes at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The Times also quotes film author Michael Weldon on Steckler: “He had this way of mixing childish things with really bizarre kind of adult-oriented things. You didn’t know quite where he was coming from.”
Steckler’s sf/f/h films—in any (or all) roles—include: A-Z of Horror (1997), Las Vegas Serial Killer (1986), The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979), Sexorcist Devil (1974), Sexual Awareness (1972), Blood Shack (1971), The Horny Vampire (1971), The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire (1971), Sinthia, the Devil’s Doll (1968), Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (1965), The Thrill Killers (1964), The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), and Eegah (1962).
Some of the pseudonyms he used include Sven Christian, Christopher Edwards, Cash Flagg, Sven Golly, Sven Hellstrom, Max Miller, Harry Nixon, Michael J. Rogers, Wolfgang Schmidt, R.D. Steckler, and Cindy Lou Sutters. Steckler is survived by his second wife (whom he married 23 years ago): Katherine Steckler. He is also survived by two daughters from his first marriage (to Carolyn Brandt, which ended in divorce), two daughters from his second marriage, his sister, and two grandchildren.