Born and raised in
London, Gilling left a job in England with an oil company at the age of 17 and spent a period in Hollywood, working in the film industry some of the time, before returning to England in 1933. He entered the British film industry immediately as an editor and assistant director, starting with ''
Father O'Flynn''. He served in the
Royal Navy in the
Second World War. After the war, Gilling wrote the script for
Black Memory (1947), and made his directing debut with
Escape from Broadmoor (1948). Gilling also produced and directed
Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (a.k.a.
Vampire Over London /
My Son the Vampire) in 1952. Gilling continued through the 1950s making second features such as
The Voice of Merrill for
Monty Berman's
Tempean Films and entered television directing in several British series that received international distribution such as
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents and ''
Gideon's Way'', as well as Monty Berman's
The Saint,
The Champions, and
Department S. Of his films for Tempean, the film historians Steve Chibnall and
Brian McFarlane wrote: "Gilling shows in all of them a capacity for establishing the premises of his plots economically and evocatively, for developing them with clarity and speed, for giving competent players a chance to invest their characters with a feeling and detail that go beyond stereotype, and for making deft use of limited locations and settings". Perhaps his very best film as a director is
The Flesh and the Fiends (1959), the story of
Dr. Robert Knox and
the West Port murders, which starred
Peter Cushing and
Donald Pleasence. For his own production company, John Gilling Enterprises, he made ''
Fury at Smugglers' Bay'' in 1961. Gilling began directing for
Hammer Films in 1961, with
The Shadow of the Cat, following years of writing screenplays for the studio starting with
The Man in Black (1948). He achieved his greatest attention with several of their horror films such as
The Plague of the Zombies and
The Reptile, as well as making the non-horror Hammer films
The Pirates of Blood River (1962) and
The Scarlet Blade (1963). Gilling also directed the crime thriller
The Challenge starring
Anthony Quayle and
Jayne Mansfield, the science fiction film
The Night Caller (1965) starring
John Saxon and
Maurice Denham, and the second
Charles Vine spy movie
Where the Bullets Fly (1966). Following a final round of work in British television Gilling relocated to
Spain, where he came out of retirement in 1975 to make
Cross of the Devil, his final film. He died in
Madrid in 1984. ==Filmography==