Steve Miner

Miner directed the second and third films in the Friday the 13th series back to back, Friday the 13th Part 2 in 1981 and Friday the 13th Part III in 1982, which is the kind of start that fixes a reputation before a career has properly begun. He had been around a set well before that: the earliest credit on file here is an uncredited bit part, a hippie taunting a deputy, in The Last House on the Left in 1972, and another uncredited student in Breaking Away.

What he turned out to be genuinely good at is the studio horror picture that holds its tone. House is a haunted house comedy that never loses the plot to its own jokes. Warlock takes a seventeenth century witch hunt into the present day and refuses to wink at it. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later was the most coherent thing that franchise had produced in over a decade, largely because Miner treated it as a film about consequences rather than a delivery system for setpieces. Lake Placid works because he plays the absurdity as comedy on purpose rather than by accident.

The rest is a working director's ledger, and it is uneven. He made broad comedies, including a 1986 campus picture whose premise has aged into an artifact, My Father the Hero, Big Bully and Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous. He made the sentimental Forever Young, the Disney true story Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken and the western Texas Rangers. The 2008 Day of the Dead is the low point, a remake with nothing to add to what it is remaking. Alongside all of it he directed television, including episodes of The Wonder Years, Dawson's Creek and Smallville, which is where directors of his kind actually make a living.