British exploitation filmmaker Stanley Long has died, aged 78.

Long was one of the pioneers of the much maligned but hugely popular British sex film, working as director, producer, writer and cinematographer on films from the end of the 1950s to the 1980s. After a few years as one of the kings of the 8mm nudie industry (alongside George Harrison-Marks and Pete Walker) he produced and shot Nudist Memories in 1961, helping open up the market for nudie films, and followed by writing, producing and/or shooting the classic Nudes of the World, Take Off Your Clothes and Live, Secrets of a Windmill Girl and the Mondo-influenced documentaries West End Jungle, London in the Raw and Primitive London. These latter films were perhaps inspired by his work filming Under the Table You Must Go, a documentary travelogue about London nightlife.

As censorship relaxed slightly, Long moved into more overtly sexual films, with the pseudo documentaries The Wife Swappers, On The Game and Naughty, alongside Sex and the Other Woman, Bread, Groupie Girl, A Promise of Bed and the classic comedy Eskimo Nell. In the mid-Seventies, he was responsible for the Confessions… imitations Adventures of a Taxi Driver, Adventures of a Private Eye and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate. Around the same time, he also shot the unlikely VD drama It Could Happen to You.

As the UK film market began to collapse and video made the scant erotic pleasures of the British sex film less appealing, Long teamed with regular collaborator Michael Armstrong to write, produce and direct three horror shorts that would play as supporting features: Dreamhouse (which played on the same bill as The Evil Dead in 1982), That’s the Way to Do It and Do You Believe in Fairies?, which would later be collected together as a feature film, Screamtime, with a newly shot linking sequence. Long was not new to the genre, having shot The Sorcerers and Blood Beast Terror in the 1960s. And his distribution company Alpha Films was behind the UK cinema and home video releases of movies like Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, The Black Panther, Maniac and The Exterminator amongst others in the early 1980s, making them one of the most influential pre-cert labels.

Having been retired from the business for two decades, Long returned in 2007 to film the video documentary series The Other Side of the Screen, about various aspects of filmmaking, and published his autobiography X-Rated – Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker in 2008.