Dick Maas

Dick Maas (b. 1951, Heemstede, Netherlands) debuted with the black comedy Rigor mortis (1981), but his second feature, The Elevator (De lift, 1983), earned him international recognition; the B horror flick, with a murderous high-rise elevator as its absurd premise, became popular rental fare. In 2001 the director reformulated this audience hit into the coproduction remake Down starring Naomi Watts and James Marshall. Before that came Flodder (1986), a scatological community farce about a confrontation between a suburban family and the upper middle class, which gained cult status at home and spawned two sequels and a successful TV series. The peak of Maas’s filmography is the horror-action thriller Amsterdamned (1988), which makes use of Amsterdam’s canals to offer an original spin on the mass murder genre.

46. IFF Karlovy Vary