Cult movie producer Richard Gordon has died, aged 85.

Alongside his brother Alex, Gordon was a life-long fan, becoming friends of the likes of Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi after moving from England the US in 1947, and later branching out into film production and distribution. In 1952, he came up wiuth the story for Lugosi’s Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire.

After working on several forgettable films in the 1950s, Gordon went on to produce a number of films, mostly in the UK and often uncredited – in 1958 he was behind the classic Fiend without a Face and Grip of the Strangler (the latter starring Boris Karloff), and would follow these with a stream of low budget, independent horror movies that remain admired today – Corridors of Blood, First Man Into Space, Devil Doll, Curse of the Voodoo, The Projected Man, Naked Evil and the magnificent Island of Terror. These films, generally dismissed at the time, all have a unique feel to them, worlds away from the Hammer movies of the era, and are ripe for rediscovery.

At the end of the Sixties, he was behind Anthony Balch’s astonishing Secrets of Sex (aka Bizarre), a remarkable collision of soft porn, gory horror and weirdness. The pair would later team again for hysterical shocker Horror Hospital. Gordon also produced the sleazy Tower of Evil, Radley Metzger’s sedate The Cat and the Canary and Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid.

After retiring, Gordon remained a visible figure on the cult movie scene, appearing at conventions and always happy to share his memories of making movies with magazines and on DVD commentaries. A fan to the end, he will be missed.