Schlock horror! Meet the family who made lurid movies for the Lord

In 1986, Jimmy McDonough, the acclaimed biographer of Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, Al Green and Russ Meyer, was sent bundle of movie memorabilia in the post. Amongst the photos and posters was a black-and-white still from an obscure 1963 movie, of “a very voluptuous dame leaning over a guy without a shirt on,” says McDonough, speaking from his home in Portland, Oregon. “The guy has a ‘Myrtle’ tattoo on his arm, and she’s lighting a cigarette.” The words “and after the cigarette, we’ll …” ran across the image. “It looked very seamy,” says McDonough. Yet the title of the film, Please Don’t Touch Me, suggested otherwise.

There was a mysterious credit at the bottom: “Distributed by the Ormond Enterprises.” “My mind danced,” says McDonough. They were a family, he found out: husband and wife Ron and June Ormond, and their son, Tim, from Nashville. Operating independently on shoestring budgets, they handled almost every aspect of production themselves, as well as often appearing in the films alongside nonprofessional actors drawn from their social circle. Their output spanned a dizzying array of genres – westerns, country music jamborees, documentaries, monster movies and other grindhouse fare. But what really set the Ormonds apart was their commitment to a higher cause: God.

After a near fatal light aeroplane crash in 1967, the family found their own calling, making a series of outrageous films in collaboration with Southern Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle, which marshalled bad taste in the service of the Lord.

“She was very suspicious,” says McDonough of his first phone call to June. He wanted information about one of their racier pictures; the church people were in the dark about the Ormonds’ exploitation background. Their house in Nashville, he found when he visited, was “painted in garish colours”, stuffed full of movie props, posters and religious esoterica. “I knew the minute I walked in, I am at home here,” says McDonough. He spent a week in their company, watching their oeuvre on VHS, and taping interviews with June, an “owlish figure” draped in costume jewellery, who “talked like Cyndi Lauper”, and “cackled maniacally, like Burgess Meredith playing the Penguin”.

He learned that Ron and June were both showbusiness veterans. A former vaudeville child star, June was a dancer who had shared stages and screen time with Bob Hope and Milton Berle, while Ron was steeped in stage magic, hypnotism and the psychic arts. By the 1950s, they had moved seamlessly from stagecraft to screen, churning out cheaply made, lurid pictures, often stitched together from cannibalised footage.

Entranced by the films and charmed by June, McDonough became a true believer. But he initially found it hard to get a handle on Tim, who was far more reserved than his mother. “He always struck me as like a CIA operative,” McDonough says. “You expected him to start talking into a shoe and speak in code.”

Jacqueline Fontaine and friend in 1956’s Untamed Mistress. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Ron died in 1981, aged 70, and June in 2006, aged 94; Tim still lives in Nashville. He likens growing up with two immensely creative and driven parents to being “in the eye of a hurricane, where it’s calm, but all around you there’s a storm brewing”. He had an unusual childhood, to say the least. At seven, he recalls sitting in the back of a convertible driven by his mum, “with a man in a gorilla suit and a buxom babe”, and a loudspeaker blaring out, “See who will be her mate, man or beast”— old-school viral marketing for a 1956 ape/female love story entitled Untamed Mistress. Tim’s first screen appearance, at 17, was in a 1967 film entitled White Lightnin’ Road, a tale of backwoods lust, moonshine and illegal road racing, featuring Marilyn Monroe and James Dean lookalikes as leads. His next was a wild flick titled The Exotic Ones (“Exotic show girls panic when a monster escapes in a New Orleans strip joint”).

The 1967 plane crash, during a family flight to a film premiere in Louisville, Kentucky, caused the Ormonds to radically reevaluate their life choices. Shortly after takeoff, the engine stalled. Averting disaster, Ron, an experienced pilot, managed to land the plane in a tiny field. Tim pulled his parents, both with broken backs, clear of the wreck. Two years later, Ron received a call asking if he’d like to make a film for preacher Pirkle. It seemed preordained. The Ormonds stepped away from secular gore and moved into the world of Christian gore. “There was literally not a heartbeat of difference,” says McDonough.

The three films they made follow a simple formula. Pirkle delivers a fire and brimstone sermon straight to camera as disturbing images play out in the mind of a wavering parishioner, leading to a “come to Jesus” moment.

The poster for the first co-production, 1971’s If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, promised “A Frightening Prophecy of a Doomed America”. The movie, a masterpiece of John Birch Society-style paranoia about a communist takeover of America, more than delivers. A boy is decapitated by a uniformed commissar for refusing to stomp on a picture of Christ, another has a skewer put through his ears. There is no end to the depravity Pirkle imagines and Ron Ormond realises on screen.

The film screened in churches across the world, becoming something of a box office smash. A follow-up, The Burning Hell, upped the ante. Pirkle flew members of his congregation to the Holy Land to recreate Old Testament episodes – yet it retained the Ormonds’ trademark DIY feel. The flames of hell, populated by wailing lost souls dressed in rags, were realised by a ditch filled with burning tyres. Pirkle volunteered to play a corpse covered in live maggots. “He did it because he needed to prove it can be done without dying, before asking his parishioners to do the same thing,” says Tim. Imagine Herschell Gordon Lewis directing Bergman’s The Seventh Seal; the last of the trilogy, The Believer’s Heaven, is as beautiful and unsettling as the work of David Lynch and David Cronenberg.

A demonic figure in Tim Ormond’s 1982 film, It’s About the Second Coming. Photograph: FAB Press/byNWR

The family’s partnership with Pirkle withered after he falsely accused them of skimming profits and sued; the lawsuit dragged on for years.

Tim made his directorial debut in 1982 with It’s About the Second Coming, an ambitious vision of religious prophecy, shifting between ancient Babylon and a near-future US patrolled by death squads bearing “666” tattoos, who exterminate Christians with ray guns (fashioned from Star Wars toys). It was the last picture Ron worked on before he died; Tim and June soldiered on, but VHS hastened the death of the drive-in, changing indie film-making for ever.

Then, in 2010, a biblical flood swept through Nashville, destroying the entire Ormond film archive stored in Tim’s apartment. “Everybody and their dog was telling him to get the hell out of the house,” says McDonough. “Tim was going to stick in his heels, and there went all the Ormond negatives into the drink.” Their unlikely saviour was Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, who bought the rights to the films, financing restorations, a box set and McDonough’s lavish coffee table biography. It is, says Tim, “a gift from heaven”.