David F. Friedman: 1923-2011

The cause was heart failure, said Mica Brook Everett, a relative who was also his caretaker. Mr. Friedman had lost his hearing and his eyesight about 10 years ago, she said.

Part carnival barker, part adman, part good-natured, dirty-minded adolescent, Mr. Friedman plumbed the low-rent depths of the movie business with a sense of boldness and a sense of fun. In the early 1960s he and a partner, the director Herschell Gordon Lewis, made a handful of films in a genre known as “nudie-cuties,” in which young women would perform ordinary household tasks or cavort in sun-dappled settings half-dressed or entirely undressed. (Some of the films were shot at Florida nudist colonies.) These movies were not openly erotic — there was no sex — but in their deadpan presentation of public nudity, they delivered a naughty, subversive wink at censorship standards.

In 1963, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Lewis made the gleefully gore-soaked “Blood Feast,” considered by many to be a groundbreaking film in the horror genre, the first so-called splatter film. It tells the story of a murderous Egyptian caterer in Miami who is especially fond of decapitating women. To promote the film, Mr. Friedman warned viewers that it might be sickening and supplied theaters with airline vomit bags to distribute to customers. Made for $24,500, the film reportedly earned millions.

Mr. Friedman and Mr. Lewis followed “Blood Feast” with two other gore fests that are exemplars of their ilk: “Two Thousand Maniacs!,” which takes place in a Southern town during a Civil War centennial celebration in which the townspeople take their revenge for losing the war on visiting Yankees; and “Color Me Blood Red,” about a painter who gets his distinctive reds from the blood of his murder victims.

Mr. Friedman made films in the soft-porn vein — they had titles like “Trader Hornee” and “The Erotic Adventures of Zorro” — and eventually, while serving as chairman of the Adult Film Association, made a handful of hard-core movies as well. Perhaps his most famous title was “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.,” about a sadistic and insatiable female Nazi prison guard, generally considered a campy classic of sexploitation.

David Frank Friedman was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 24, 1923. His father worked for The Birmingham News; his mother was a musician. After his parents divorced, she moved to Anniston, and young Dave — “Don’t say David, he hated David, it was always Dave,” Mica Everett said — often unsupervised, became interested in carnivals, card games and scams.

Mr. Friedman started college at Cornell — “He sat next to Kurt Vonnegut in a calculus class,” Ms. Everett said — and worked for a time as a film booker and projectionist in Buffalo before serving in the Army during World War II. It was in Army signal school that he was taught the technical basics of movie making. Eventually he went to work for Kroger Babb, a producer and a bit of a huckster whose best-known film, “Mom and Dad,” was a 1940s sensation, using medical footage of actual births and walking a line between sex education and sexploitation.

Mr. Friedman’s wife, Carol Virginia Everett, whom he met when they were both children in Anniston, died in 2001. Aside from Mica Everett and other members of his wife’s family, he leaves no survivors. Over the past 20 years, since his films started to reappear on video, Mr. Friedman enjoyed a bit of cult celebrity, appearing frequently at conferences and film festivals.

“He partied like an animal,” said Mike Vraney, whose company, Something Weird Video, distributed Mr. Friedman’s films. “He ate huge meals, drank and smoked enormous cigars. He lived with gusto.”

Mr. Friedman was proud of his work, in a manner of speaking.

“ ‘Blood Feast’ is probably the most maligned motion picture American critics have ever ripped asunder,” he wrote boastfully in his 1990 autobiography, “A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King.” He went on to quote the review in Variety:

“Incredibly crude and unprofessional from start to finish, ‘Blood Feast’ is an insult even to the most puerile and salacious audiences. The very fact that it is taking itself seriously makes the David F. Friedman production all the more ludicrous. It was a fiasco in all departments.”

Mr. Friedman then wrote: “Herschell and I have often wondered who told the Variety scribe we were taking ourselves seriously.”

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