Biography

Roger Watkins was born September 17, 1948, in Binghamton, NY. The son of Leland and Elizabeth Watkins, Roger first started making movies at the age of ten. He attended the liberal arts college the State University of New York in Oneonta and continued to make films whenever he could. Noted SUNY professor and author Paul M. Jensen appeared in many of Roger's college shorts, which include an adaptation of the classic EC Comics killer Santa Claus story "And All Through the House."

In 1972 Watkins began work on his first feature, The Last House on Dead End Street (1973) , which was shot on 16mm film stock with talent gleaned from SUNY's film and theater departments. Widely considered one of the most grim, disturbing and nihilistic indie shockers to ever creep its sleazy way across the screen in the 1970s, it has since gone on to amass a substantial cult following. Roger went on to make a series of highly distinctive and stylized adult films under the pseudonym Richard Mahler, with the especially bleak and brooding Corruption (1983) rating as perhaps his most impressive hardcore picture. Moreover, Watkins also made the obscure horror thriller Shadows of the Mind (1980), which he subsequently disowned and attributed to the alias Bernard Travis. In addition, Roger directed several documentaries that include the harrowing "Heaven Knows", about life in a sanitarium. Watkins died at age 58 at his home in Apalachin, NY, on March 6, 2007.