Andy Milligan (January 31, 1929 – June 3, 1991) was an American playwright, screenwriter, cinematographer, actor, film editor, producer, and director, whose work includes 27 films made between 1965 and 1991.
Born Andrew Jackson Milligan, Jr. in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Milligan was a self-taught filmmaker and was responsible for much of the creative activity on his films (including cinematography and costume design). His films often dwell on the topics of transgression and punishment, familial relationships, repressed sexuality, and physical deformity and include such titles as Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973), The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1973), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970), Gutter Trash (1969), The Ghastly Ones (1968), Depraved! (1967), and The Naked Witch (1964). Most of Milligan’s early works are currently considered lost films.
During the early 1960s, Milligan became involved in the nascent off-off-Broadway theatre movement, mounting productions of plays… read more
Andy Milligan (January 31, 1929 – June 3, 1991) was an American playwright, screenwriter, cinematographer, actor, film editor, producer, and director, whose work includes 27 films made between 1965 and 1991.
Born Andrew Jackson Milligan, Jr. in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Milligan was a self-taught filmmaker and was responsible for much of the creative activity on his films (including cinematography and costume design). His films often dwell on the topics of transgression and punishment, familial relationships, repressed sexuality, and physical deformity and include such titles as Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973), The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1973), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970), Gutter Trash (1969), The Ghastly Ones (1968), Depraved! (1967), and The Naked Witch (1964). Most of Milligan’s early works are currently considered lost films.
During the early 1960s, Milligan became involved in the nascent off-off-Broadway theatre movement, mounting productions of plays by Lord Dunsany and Jean Genet at the Caffe Cino as well as directing productions at Cafe La Mama La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. During the same period, he operated and designed for a clothing boutique named Ad Lib and used his dressmaking skills to costume many theatrical productions. Milligan began directing films in the mid-1960s. His first released film was a black and white 16 mm short entitled Vapors (1965). The film,set in a gay bathhouse, portrays the emotionally awkward and unconsummated meeting between two strangers. Milligan was later employed by producers of exploitation films, particularly William Mishkin, to direct soft-core sexploitation and horror features, many featuring actors known from the off-off Broadway theater community.
Milligan’s first movies were shot with a hand-held 16-millimetre Auricon sound on film news camera. This technique was inspired by Andy Warhol and allowed Milligan to move the camera around at will, at times punctuating violent scenes with his ‘swirl camera’ technique through which he would spin the camera and point it to the ground. Often working with budgets under $10,000, his movies feature very tight framing that helped cover up his very low budgets, particularly in the case of the period pieces that were most of his horror movies. His ability to make movies with such low budgets is why Mishkin often hired him and Mishkin’s power on the 42nd Street grindhouse circuit meant that Milligan’s pictures played there often.
In 1968 Milligan began to make horror movies featuring gore effects with The Ghastly Ones produced by JER and titled by Sam Sherman. In 1969 he made his next horror movie, Torture Dungeon, after which he moved to London to make movies there after having made a deal with producer Leslie Elliot. After directing Nightbirds in London, his partnership with Elliot collapsed as he was working on The Body Beneath. William Mishkin produced three more British pictures shot in 1969 before Milligan’s return to Staten Island.
On his return to New York, he directed Guru the Mad Monk, shot for the first time with a 35-millimetre camera in a Chelsea, Manhattan church. This movie was released on a double feature with The Body Beneath. Through the next years, Mishkin released Milligan’s British-made pictures, some with additional scenes shot in New York. The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! was Mishkin’s title for one of those movies in which Mishkin had Milligan insert new killer rat scenes shot in New York.
After 1972’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street, Milligan’s released output was only mostly gory horror movies as he moved to the southern tip of Staten Island, then to 39th Street in Manhattan where he ran a theatre until he left New York for good in 1985. He moved to California where he shot three more horror movies as he ran another theatre there.
In his non-fiction book about the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King gives a short assessment of one of Milligan’s films: “The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras.” Milligan developed a reputation as a maker of bad horror movies, as a purveyor of Herschell Gordon Lewis-type gore, as one of the worst directors of all time. The rediscovery of Fleshpot on 42nd Street in the 1990s and the release of his biography in 2001 has made more widely known his theatrical background and the context to his work. —wikipedia
