Jesus Franco

Born in the capital of Spain on May 12, 1930, Jesús Franco Manera was passionate about music from a young age. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, he studied piano at the conservatory, and later graduated in Law. While publishing crime novels under the pseudonym David Khunne, he enrolled at the Institute for Film Research and Experience. He furthered his directing studies in Paris, where he became a die-hard movie buff, while giving jazz concerts at various clubs.

Back in Spain, Jesús Franco made his debut as an assistant director and film composer in Cómicos , by Juan Antonio Bardem , with whom he would collaborate again in Death of a Cyclist . He made his debut as a director with various shorts on Spanish geography, and with the bizarre fiction feature We are 18 years old , where very young Isana Medel and Terele Pávez played two teenagers who spend a surreal vacation.

After dabbling in various genres, he achieved great international success with Screams at Night , an event that would push him to specialize almost completely in the genre. When the great Orson Welles moved to Spain to shoot Midnight with producer Emiliano Piedra Campanadas , he recruited Franco as second unit director. The brilliant director was so pleased with his work that he turned to him again for Treasure Island and Don Quixote , which, however, were never finished (long after Welles’s death, Franco was responsible for a montage with the shots that were made for the adaptation of the novel by Miguel de Cervantes).

But despite the high level of his work with the perfectionist Welles, Franco opts for shooting his own films quickly, without too many demands, so after the international success of the German production Succubus (Necronomicon) – lauded by Fritz Lang , according to Franco, inexplicably launches into a desperate race to release numerous low-budget films, such as Dracula’s daughter , Fu-Manchú’s castle or Las vampiras. Most are rushed and uninteresting, but have some success with the public. He films so much – at a rate of about six titles a year – that he decides to hide it by using various pseudonyms, such as John O’Hara, David Khunne, Pablo Villa, Chuck Evans, Clifford Brown or Lulú Laverne.

Fernando Fernán Gómez hired him as an actor to play one of the quirky brothers in El extraño viaje . Also, Franco used to make cameos in his own movies.

Since the mid-1970s, the director has also lavished himself in the field of pornography, which devalued his image among fans of B-series horror films. Furthermore, it makes his title of most prolific Spanish director questionable, since many of his films are pure successions of sex sequences shot hastily over a weekend (the Spanish director with the most real feature films would be Mariano Ozores ).

He was paired with the actress Lina Romay –who he regularly exhibited in his adult films–, he did not marry her until 2008, when they were both of advanced age. In 2009 the Academy awarded him the Goya de Honor. B-series filmmaker Pedro Temboury paid tribute to him by hiring him as a supporting actor in his films Karate to the Death in Torremolinos and They stole Hitler’s dick . He has passed away shortly after finishing Al Pereira vs. the Aligator Women , his last work as a director.