Jeff Burr, the horror specialist who directed Vincent Price in one of his last movies and entries in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Puppet Master, Pumpkinhead and Stepfather franchises, has died. He was 60.
Burr died Tuesday in his sleep in Dalton, Georgia, of apparent complications from a stroke, his longtime friend, actor Eric Spudic, told The Hollywood Reporter.
After several other directors had dropped out, Burr came aboard at the last minute to helm New Line’s Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), this installment starring former pro wrestler R.A. Mihailoff as the villain.
He said it took 11 tries before the MPAA would sign off on an ‘R’ rating for the film, which grossed $5.8 million on a $2 million budget.
Burr went on to direct Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings (1993) and Puppet Master 4 (1993), Puppet Master 5 (1994) and Puppet Master: Blitzkrieg Massacre (2018).
Outside of the horror realm, he helmed Eddie Presley (1992), a film about an Elvis impersonator that has Quentin Tarantino and Bruce Campbell playing asylum attendants, and co-wrote and directed the World War II drama Straight Into Darkness (2004).
The latter, shot in Romania, was Burr’s “dream project,” Spudic said. “He loved that one more than the others.”
Born in Aurora, Ohio, on July 18, 1963, Jeffrey Burr was raised in Dalton, where he became a fan of movie monsters and made his own Super-8 pictures while in junior high school.
He attended USC but left after three years to finish a short film, Divided We Fall (1982), about two brothers on opposing sides of the Civil War who meet on the battlefield. (Mihailoff was an actor in that.)
For the low-budget anthology film From a Whisper to a Scream (1987), Burr and a producer found Price through a celebrity address service, went to his home unannounced with a bottle of wine and were invited in. The horror legend “sat and talked with us for about 15 minutes, took the script, and that’s how it all started,” he recalled in 2012.
Price “was a great guy to work with,” Burr noted in the Joel Eisner’s 2021 book, The Price of Fear: The Film Career of Vincent Price, In His Own Words. “He had no reason to listen to me. He knew he was the biggest star there and he could have easily have run roughshod over me. But he was an incredible gentleman, and it was a great thrill just to have Vincent Price listen to my direction.”
Price, who played a Tennessee librarian who kept records of his town’s horrible history in blood — and on pages made from human flesh, no less! — enjoyed a reunion with Roger Corman during his two days of work on the film. (Burr had interned for the B-movie maestro and invited him to the set).
To finance From a Whisper to a Scream, Burr and co-writer/producer Darin Scott sold shares in the movie to local businessmen in Dalton. They had to pause midway through filming when the money ran out.
After that, Burr directed Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy (1989), starring Terry O’Quinn as serial killer Jerry Blake.
Burr also helmed episodes of 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).
“I do love horror films, genre films, but they are not the only kinds I want to make,” he said in a 2018 interview. “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.”
Spudic noted that Burr had returned to Dalton to take care of his mother, Jeanne, who for a decade had hosted a local radio show called Coffee Time from a lunch counter. She died in May 2020. His brother, Bill, who produced some of his films, died in 2012.
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.
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