General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

Larry Cohen

Larry Cohen (Lawrence George Cohen) was an American film producer, director, and screenwriter best known for inventive low-budget horror and science-fiction films shot largely in New York City, including It's Alive, God Told Me To, Q: The Winged Serpent, and The Stuff¹^•². He began in television in the 1950s, creating the series Branded and The Invaders, and late in his career reached a wider audience as the writer of the studio thrillers Phone Booth (2002) and Cellular (2004)². His birth year is disputed between 1941 and 1936, and he died on March 23, 2019²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Full name and profession	Lawrence George Cohen; American film producer, director, and screenwriter²^•³
Birth year	1941 in most industry sources; the New York Times obituary gives 1936, confirmed by family and census records¹^•³
Death	March 23, 2019, in California; aged 77 by the 1941 reckoning, 82 by the New York Times's²^•³
Television career	Created Branded and The Invaders; wrote episodes of The Defenders and The Fugitive²
First feature	Bone (1972), written, produced, and directed by Cohen¹^•⁴
Signature films	It's Alive (1974), God Told Me To (1976), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), The Stuff (1985)²^•⁵
Studio hits as writer	Phone Booth (2002), which grossed $98 million worldwide, and Cellular (2004)²
Documentary portrait	King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen (2017), directed by Steve Mitchell⁵

Early life and television career

Cohen was born in New York City; his official biography gives Washington Heights as the birthplace, and his family later moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx¹^•⁶. He majored in film at the City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1963⁶.

Television apprenticeship. While working as a pageboy at NBC in the late 1950s, he watched productions from what became known as the Golden Age of Television, several of them shot live⁴. Because he was well below the minimum age for television writers, he gave his birth date as 1938 so he could write for the medium⁴. He wrote teleplays between 1958 and 1961, several transmitted live, featuring performers such as Henny Youngman, Keir Dullea, Peter Falk, Jack Warden, and Nancy Kovak⁴.

After writing episodes of the series The Defenders, he relocated to Los Angeles and became a sought-after writer for television pilots⁴. He created the Western Branded, starring Chuck Connors, and the paranoid science-fiction series The Invaders, and wrote episodes of The Fugitive, The Defenders, and other shows²^•⁵. According to the film critic Tony Williams, Cohen conceived the premise of Branded by reworking The Four Feathers from an old movie catalog he browsed while waiting in a producer's office⁴.

The Hitchcock connection

Cohen met Alfred Hitchcock in the mid-1960s and wrote several treatments and screenplays that the director admired, including "Daddy's Gone A-Hunting", "The Cutting Room" (later filmed as Special Effects), and "Phone Booth"¹^•⁴. Universal executives vetoed the proposals, and only one of the projects reached the screen, directed by Mark Robson¹. Cohen's dissatisfaction with how other filmmakers handled his scripts led him to direct his own work⁴.

The 1970s films

Cohen's first feature was Bone (1972), a low-budget satirical allegory of Beverly Hills lifestyles starring Yaphet Kotto, Joyce Van Patten, and Andrew Duggan⁴. Poorly distributed, the film gained a cult reputation over the years⁴.

Blaxploitation and horror. When Sammy Davis Jr turned down Black Caesar, Cohen filmed it in 1973 with Fred Williamson in the title role, and scored by James Brown; he followed it with the sequel Hell Up in Harlem⁴^•⁷. His fame came with It's Alive (1974), a family horror film about a murderous infant that earned $7,000,000 and spawned two sequels for Warner Bros². The composer Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock's most frequent collaborator, wrote the score⁴.

In God Told Me To (1976), a New York cop played by Tony Lo Bianco investigates violent crimes committed by people who claim that God told them to kill⁵. In 1977 Cohen directed his most ambitious project, a biopic of FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, with Broderick Crawford in the title role¹^•⁴. The film critic Robin Wood acclaimed it as the most "intelligent political film" ever made, although it did not receive wide distribution⁴.

The 1980s and 1990s

During the 1980s Cohen collaborated with the actor Michael Moriarty on four films⁴. Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), about a giant flying serpent nesting in New York, came about after Cohen was fired from another movie he was directing, a big-budget adaptation of the pulp classic I, the Jury; Q beat I, the Jury into theaters, cost only a fraction of that film's budget, and was a bigger hit⁵. It screened at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival under the title "The Winged Serpent"⁵.

The Stuff (1985) satirized crass commercialism and corporate indifference through the story of a dessert product that turns out to be a living parasitic organism⁵. While Q and The Stuff received theatrical distribution, It's Alive 3 (1986) and A Return to Salem's Lot (1987) went direct to video⁴. In 1989 Cohen directed Bette Davis in her last film, Wicked Stepmother².

In the 1990s he directed The Ambulance (1990), with Eric Roberts and James Earl Jones, and Original Gangstas (1996), a blaxploitation revival reuniting Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Ron O'Neal, Richard Roundtree, and Pam Grier²^•⁵. Original Gangstas was his final film as a director⁵.

Later screenwriting career

From the 1990s onward Cohen focused mainly on writing¹. His screenplay for Phone Booth, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Colin Farrell, became a commercial success in 2002, grossing $98 million worldwide². He also wrote the 2004 film Cellular, with Kim Basinger, William H. Macy, and Jason Statham². His other screen credits from this period include Guilty as Sin, directed by Sidney Lumet in 1993, and the Maniac Cop sequels⁴.

Filmmaking style

Cohen was one of the early "guerrilla" filmmakers, shooting quickly and cheaply on location, often without permits, on busy New York streets⁴^•⁷^•⁸. Behind the camera he developed a reputation for getting high production value for little money, in part by hiring skilled older craftspeople who could no longer find work at the major studios⁹.

Social commentary ran through the genre premises. His films addressed institutionalized racism, self-perpetuating commercialism, opportunism within corrupt institutions, and public apathy¹⁰. With It's Alive, the monster in the American horror film emerged from within the family rather than from outside it, inverting the traditional horror story⁴. Cohen himself denied that his work belonged to the horror genre, arguing that his generic excursions transcended formula to criticize American society⁴. Like his friend Samuel Fuller, a Cohen film often bore the title "written, produced, and directed by Larry Cohen", which made him a fully-fledged cinematic auteur⁴. A useful comparison is Roger Corman, who industrialized low-budget production while Cohen simply lived in its margins¹¹.

Birth year and death

Most industry sources, including Cohen's official biography, the Television Academy, and the Los Angeles Times, give his birth date as 1941¹^•²^•⁷. The New York Times obituary instead gives July 15, 1936, stating that the 1941 year had often been reported but that his family and census records confirmed it was incorrect; by that account Cohen was 82 at his death³. IMDb and the library authority record derived from the Times give 1936 to 2019³^•⁶.

Cohen died on March 23, 2019; the Television Academy gives the place as Los Angeles, California, and the New York Times as Beverly Hills, California²^•³.

Legacy

Cohen's work returned to the spotlight in 2017 with the release of King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen, a documentary directed by Steve Mitchell in which Cohen recounts his career with testimonials from friends and coworkers⁵. The writer-director Edgar Wright praised him for "so many fun, high-concept genre romps with ideas bigger than the budgets"⁷. His guerrilla methods made him, like Roger Corman, a revered figure among later generations of independent genre filmmakers⁷. The University of California, Santa Barbara, preserves his collection of Bernard Herrmann material, including the complete original manuscript score to It's Alive¹².

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026