Larry Cohen

Born in Washington Heights, Manhattan, on July 15, 1941,  Larry Cohen  became passionate about cinema during his childhood, when he went to the movies at least twice a week, most of the time for double sessions. He was especially passionate about film noir movies starring  Humphrey Bogart . As a boy, he started writing stories, inventing comics and filming 8mm shorts. “Some kids were great at playing baseball, others played the piano, I was good at creating stories.” After graduating in film from the City College of New York, he signed up for the NBC television network in the 1950s. He began his long career as a screenwriter with episodes of  The Defenders  and  The Fugitive, followed by countless forays into series of the time.

He was enormously successful as the creator of the famous television series  Los invaderos, where Roy Thinnes played the architect David Vincent, who tries to convince the public that aliens exist, but can’t get anyone to believe him (at least until the second season. Older viewers will still remember the introduction. “The invaders, extraterrestrial beings from a dying planet. Their destination: Earth. Their purpose to conquer the planet. David Vincent (architect) knows that the invaders are already here and that they have taken human form. Somehow, Vincent has to convince him world in disbelief that the nightmare has begun”. Unfortunately, in those days the creative control of television news was not given to the one who invented them, so after selling the idea he was removed. “If they had let me direct the chapters,I would have put less aliens, but more difficult to kill, and it would have given him more sense of humor,” he lamented.

For the cinema, he composed the script for  The Return of the Magnificent Seven , the first of the three sequels to the famous western. He debuted as a director with  Bone , a comedy about a criminal, played by  Yaphet Kotto . It is followed by the proper gangster film Blaxploitation  The Godfather of Harlem,  a noir version of  The Godfather , shot a year earlier by  Francis Ford Coppola . It was so successful that the sequel, War in Harlem , would be shot soon after  . He led to fantaterror with  I’m alive, from 1974, a delirious film with a deformed baby who escapes from the hospital right after being born to sow terror. Right after its release it was not successful, but the producers opted for a strong advertising campaign, and it ended up being profitable, to the point that it had two sequels,  Stay Alive  (1978) and  La isla de los vivos  (1987). directed by  Larry Cohen himself . In 2009  Josef Rusnak  shot a poor remake. “Terror is just a resource to bring out people’s anxieties, problems and emotions”, declared the director.

Divorced in 1987 from Janelle Webb, who was the mother of his five children as a secondary actress in several of his feature films,  Larry Cohen  was united with Cynthia Costas, a psychotherapist and sculptor who has occasionally worked as an interpreter. She has accompanied him until her death.

He distinguished himself by including a scene shot in his own home in each of his films. His most surreal film was  The Flying Serpent  (1982), with two policemen ( Richard Roundtree  and  David Carradine ) investigating murders whose culprit turns out to be the Aztec god Quetzalcoati, a gigantic monster, a mixture of bird and reptile. The creature – created using stop-motion without much care – has its charm, although it is hardly credible that it constantly flies around New York, looking for victims, without the citizens looking up and managing to see it. Return to Salem’s Lot  continued the plot of  Stephen King ‘s vampire book-turned-series . His latest works My Mother’s Witch ,  The Ambulance  and  Hot City  only satisfied his fans, and he wrote  Maniac Cop , a cult film about a murderous policeman. Late in his career, he sold the scripts for two harrowing telephone thrillers,  Last Call  and  Cellular , for huge amounts of money, more conventional than those of the rest of his career, but quite effective.

After the fateful results of  Captivity , a story of his directed with little luck by  Roland Joffé  in his decadent phase, he retired from cinema after writing  Messages Deleted , where a certain Rob Cowan destroyed a script with possibilities of a meta-cinematic nature, since it had as its protagonist a script teacher, chased by a student who stole an idea for a movie. “Life has been good to me,” he declared shortly after retiring. “I’m still taking photos. I think my films have made some sense to someone, so they’ve been worth it.”