Herman Cohen's motion picture career began at his local cinema, the
Dexter Theater in Detroit, during his preteen years--he worked there as
a "gofer" and later as an usher. He next became assistant manager of
Detroit's Fox Theater. After a Marine Corps hitch, Cohen worked as
sales manager for the Detroit branch of Columbia Pictures, then
relocated to Hollywood and worked in the publicity department of
Columbia there. He produced his first movies for
Jack Broder's Realart Pictures in the early
1950s and made several subsequent pictures for Allied Artists and
United Artists. Cohen made exploitation history in the mid-1950s when
he began producing some of American-International's earliest hits,
among them the cult favorite
Der Tod hat schwarze Krallen (1957).
Many of his later horror pictures were shot in England, among them the
Joan Crawford-starring
Zirkus des Todes (1967) and
Das Ungeheuer (1970).
