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Born into a working-class Irish-American family in New York, John Hayes’ career in movies began auspiciously with the short film “The Kiss” (1958), a chronicle of loneliness and frustration in the big city that earned him an Academy Award nomination. This would prove to be Hayes’ first and last flirtation with the mainstream of American cinema, as he quickly headed for the depths of the B-movie gutter to get his start directing features.
The first of these emerged from his romantic and professional relationship with none other than Rue McClanahan, with whom he made three seamy hothouse melodramas in the early 1960s. The sexual revolution of the later ‘60s and the subsequent proliferation of nudity on the silver screen allowed Hayes to make a natural move into softcore-adjacent exploitation fare, where he created some of the genre's most enduring and underappreciated offerings.
While Hayes is probably best remembered today for a trio of low-budget ‘70s horror flicks (Dream No Evil, Garden of the Dead and the David Chase-penned Grave of the Vampire), this series focuses on the sexploitation films on which Hayes built his modest reputation as a purveyor of artful trash. Despite their tawdry appeal, these films reveal Hayes as a key contributor to the underbelly of American movies - a poet of the push and pull of desire and shame, a friend to losers and outcasts everywhere, and a deceptively ambitious artist who integrated a wide range of outside influences in locating the real pain at the heart of his seedy narratives.