Motion Picture Director, Screenwriter, Producer. The most influential French filmmaker of the World War I era, celebrated for his crime serials. The best of them are "Fantomas" (5 episodes, 1913-1914), "Les Vampires" (10 episodes, 1915-1916), and "Judex" (12 episodes, 1916). "Les Vampires", a stark, uninhibited saga of a Parisian criminal gang, had a seminal influence on the thriller and suspense genres. It was acclaimed by the French Surrealists of the 1920s and its impact can be detected in the films of Hitchcock, Lang, Bunuel, Clouzot, Franju, and Resnais. Louis Jean Feuillade was born in Lunel, France. At his parents' insistence he spent several years studying at a Catholic seminary, which he left at age 18 for mandatory military service. He was a failed poet and struggling right-wing journalist when he began submitting scenarios to the Gaumont studio in 1905. Within a year Gaumont's chief director, Alice Guy Blaché, left for the United States and recommended Feuillade as her successor. Over the next two decades he was phenomenally prolific, writing and directing some 630 films and providing the screenplays for at least 100 others, while supervising the studio's entire output. "Fantomas", his first crime serial, was adapted from the pulp novels of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain about an international supervillain and the efforts to catch him; it was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Hollywood responded by announcing it would release the popular Pearl White serial "The Perils of Pauline" (1914) in France, and to beat the competition Feuillade rushed "Les Vampires" into production - resulting in what some historians have hailed as a triumph of "subconscious cinema". This time there was no literary source or even a written script. A likely inspiration for the nefarious Vampires was the Bonnot Gang, a group of bank-robbing anarchists who terrorized France in 1911 and 1912, but for the most part Feuillade made up the action as he went along; this included abruptly killing off characters when the actors playing them became unavailable from one episode to the next. Going only by his storytelling gut, he created such imaginative criminal exploits, and villains so enjoyably amoral - none more so than gangleader Irma Vep, played for the ages by Musidora - that the bland journalist hero and his comic sidekicks are insufferable by comparison. Feuillade himself was a pillar of bourgeois propriety, a strict Catholic and ultra-conservative, so he was shocked when critics accused him of glorifying outlaws in his films; for all he knew he was just trying to crank out an entertaining series. (Modern critics have had fun speculating about the roots of his inadvertent subversiveness). Hoping to placate his detractors and still cash in on the enormous success of "Les Vampires", he made "Judex" and its sequel, "Judex's New Mission" (1917). The titular hero is a mysterious avenger, the head of an underground organization that tracks down evildoers who have eluded justice. After "Tih Minh" (12 episodes, 1918) and "Barrabas" (12 episodes, 1919), he abandoned the crime serial genre he had made his own and focused on melodramas. Feuillade had no pretentions about cinema, and it was said he worked fiendishly hard at it only because he wanted to make enough money for a plush early retirement. If so, his plans backfired. In the summer of 1924 he collapsed from exhaustion and never fully recovered; his final films, "Le stigmate" (1924) and "Lucette" (1924), were completed with the assistance of his son-in-law Maurice Champreux. He died of peritonitis in Nice, France, one week after his 52nd birthday. Feuillade's second wife (from 1921) was actress Georgette Lagneau, who appeared in some of his films under the professional name Lugane.