Samuel M. Sherman, the writer, producer and marketing mastermind who partnered with director Al Adamson to squeeze success out of such low-budget films as Satan’s Sadists, Brain of Blood and The Naughty Stewardesses, has died. He was 85.
Sherman died Monday at his home in Freehold, New Jersey, David Sehring, his creative director, business affairs and sales agent since 2015, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Soon after Sherman and Adamson launched the production and distribution company Independent-International Pictures, they supplied drive-ins with such flicks as Satan’s Sadists (1969), Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970), Brain of Blood (1971) and Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), starring Lon Chaney Jr.
The pair worked not just in horror but in such other areas as biker films (1970’s Hell’s Bloody Devils, 1971’s Angels’ Wild Women), Westerns (1969’s Five Bloody Graves, 1972’s Lash of Lust), sexploitation (1973’s The Naughty Stewardesses), martial arts (1974’s Dynamite Brothers), chase pictures (1974’s I Spit on Your Corpse, also known as Girls for Rent) and blaxploitation (1976’s Black Heat).
Severin Films co-founder David Gregory, who directed the 2019 documentary Blood and Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, noted that Sherman and Adamson were great at “retitling and reselling the same movie over and over [and] at changing a work-in-progress picture to cash in on a recent trend.”
In the 1996 book It Came from Horrorwood, Sherman told author Tom Weaver that most of his films were made for less than $150,000. His company also gave veteran Hollywood actors much-needed work, among them Chaney and John Carradine.
Lon Chaney Jr. in 1971’s ‘Dracula vs. Frankenstein,’ one of the actor’s last films.
Courtesy Everett Collection
He and Adamson “had a wonderful relationship — like the brother I never had — and we enjoyed being together and working together,” Sherman once said. “Al always said that when we were both together in the same place (New York or L.A.), we always made great things happen.”
Born in New York on April 23, 1940, Sherman attended City College of New York, where he screened Flash Gordon serials and such films as the Boris Karloff-starring The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) for his fellow students. For a class project, he shot a short film in one day that he called The Weird Stranger.
While in college, Sherman worked as a film editor and as a writer/editor for James Warren, the publisher of such magazines as Famous Monsters, Wildest Westerns and Screen Thrills Illustrated, and said he came up with the idea of showing old Republic Pictures serials in theaters. Those wound up drawing huge audiences — and that, he claimed, led to the 1960s’ Batman show on ABC.
In 1962 on a work assignment for Screen Thrills Illustrated, Sherman visited Hollywood and first met Adamson, introduced to him by Adamson’s father, silent film star-producer Victor Adamson (known by his stage name as Denver Dixon). Two years later, he got into distribution with the elder Adamson to bring The Scarlet Letter (1934) back to theaters.
While working for Hemisphere Pictures in 1965, Sherman tried to secure distribution for Al Adamson’s first film, Echo of Terror. He couldn’t get it in theaters, but footage from that would be used for Blood of Ghastly Horror (1967), also known in various stages of production as Psycho A-Go-Go and The Man With the Synthetic Brain.
Sherman and Adamson realized they needed their own distribution company and in 1968 joined with former theater owner Dan Kennis to start Independent-International Pictures. Satan’s Sadists, about a ruthless motorcycle gang, was their first production, shot in California in 1968.
As was the case with Blood of Ghastly Horror, they often took films that Adamson had already shot, modified them and sold them. Sherman gave them catchy, easy-to-identify titles and marketed them with dynamic, often lurid campaigns.
“It was always my concept that if you have a very small budget, make the film different by very bizarre, crazy, looney elements — and this always worked,” he said.
A poster for 1975’s ‘The Naughty Stewardesses.’
Courtesy Everett Collection
As might be expected, Adamson and Sherman never won an Academy Award, but they did employ at least one future Oscar winner: cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Satan’s Sadists, Five Bloody Graves, Horror of the Blood Monsters).
“I grew up seeing his exploitation movies and wild and wacky trailer campaigns at my local drive-in the ’60s and ’70s,” said Sehring, a former American Movie Classics exec who helped Sherman’s films find new homes on Blu-ray and elsewhere. “Sam was quite a character — the ‘Broadway Danny Rose’ of the drive-in business.”
Along the way, Sherman amassed an impressive collection of 16mm and 35mm films and saw his memoirs, When Dracula Met Frankenstein: My Years Making Drive-In Movies With Al Adamson, published in 2021.
In 1995, Adamson, then 65, was murdered by his live-in contractor and found beneath his home in Indio, California.
Sherman’s survivors include his daughter, Stephanie. His wife of 52 years, Linda, died in November 2022.