Jeff Burr, the director of numerous entries in cult classic horror franchises such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Puppet Master, and Pumpkinhead, died on Tuesday at 60.
Burr reportedly died in his sleep from complications of a stroke, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The news was reported by actor Eric Spudic, the director’s longtime friend.
Born in 1963, Burr became fascinated with movie monsters in high school and began experimenting with Super 8 film to make his own stories.
He started working toward a film degree at USC but ended up abandoning the effort to work on the 1982 Civil War short film Divided We Fall.
From there, he launched full-time into a film career, next working on From a Whisper to a Scream featuring famed horror actor Vincent Price. Burr also directed TV episodes such as Sid and Marty Krofft’s Land of the Lost ABC show in 1992 and films including Night of the Scarecrow (1995), Spoiler (1998), The Boy With the X-Ray Eyes (1999), Frankenstein & the Werewolf Reborn! (2005) and Tales of the Fantastic (2023).
It was the horror genre where he made his mark.
In 1990 he was brought on as the third choice for Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, a film so gruesome it reportedly took eleven tries to get an “R” rating from the MPAA. The film went on to gross $5.8 million on a $2 million budget.
He went on to direct a list of cult horror classics including Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings (1993) and Night of the Scarecrow (1995), as well as a number of entries in the Puppet Master series, including Puppet Master 4 (1993), Puppet Master 5 (1994) and Puppet Master: Blitzkrieg Massacre (2018).
“I do love horror films, genre films, but they are not the only kinds I want to make,” Burr said in 2018. “I am a lover of film and want to do all kinds of movies, but in the mainstream Hollywood world, very often filmmakers are typecast like actors.”
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