Peter Medak, director of the hugely influential horror film “The Changeling” and the Peter O’Toole-led comedy “The Ruling Class,” has died at 88. His family announced his death.
Medak, who was Jewish, fled his native Budapest, Hungary, during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, settling in England with his family. He began as a trainee in the British film industry (described as “a long film industry apprenticeship that included work as sound editor, film editor, assistant director and second unit director”). In 1963, he signed a deal with MCA Universal Pictures to direct television films. By 1967, he had signed with Paramount to direct feature films.
His debut feature, 1968’s “Negatives,” based on Peter Everett’s 1961 novel of the same name, was not well received upon its initial release. “The movie, which starts off as a sort of highly cinematic ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ winds up as an episode right out of ‘Peanuts,’ with Snoopy, imagining himself as the gallant Red Baron, crashing to his death on top of his dog house,” scoffed The New York Times at the time. But like several of Medak’s films, “Negatives” gained appreciation in subsequent years, particularly through home-video releases. (Severin released it on Blu-ray in 2025.)
Medak’s breakthrough arguably came just a few years later with 1972’s “The Ruling Class,” a pitch-black comedy starring O’Toole “as an insane British royal who believes he’s the second coming of Jesus Christ,” as one retrospective review put it. Like “Negatives,” “it was a commercial failure upon its release, but — not altogether unexpectedly — has since become a cult classic,” wrote TCM.
In 1980, “The Changeling,” Medak’s haunting horror film starring George C. Scott, was released. It was a modest hit but proved hugely influential. Steven Spielberg reportedly screened the film for the crew of his ghost story “Poltergeist,” and its influence can be felt in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” and countless other films. Scott plays a grieving composer who moves into a house and encounters a sinister, otherworldly force.
By 1984, Medak was regularly directing episodes of television, including Shelley Duvall’s star-studded “Faerie Tale Theatre” and several episodes of the 1980s revival of “The Twilight Zone.” Among them was “Button, Button,” an episode that would later inspire Richard Kelly’s underappreciated 2009 feature “The Box.” In the 1990s, Medak oscillated between provocative thrillers such as “Romeo Is Bleeding,” starring Gary Oldman, studio assignments such as “Species II” and television films such as “The Hunchback.”
In the 2000s, Medak began focusing more on television, directing episodes of “The Wire,” “Carnivàle,” “Breaking Bad,” “House” and “Masters of Horror.” His installment of the latter, “The Washingtonians,” was based on a story by horror novelist Bentley Little. He also directed episodes of the first two seasons of “Hannibal.”
“He was such a gentle teddy bear of a Hungarian. I worked with him in his golden years, and he always had a twinkle in his eye, a click in his step and a love for filmmaking and storytelling that seeped through every pore,” said “Hannibal” creator Bryan Fuller. See photo below.
Medak’s last credit was in the 2018 documentary “The Ghost of Peter Sellers,” which recounted the tumultuous production of Medak’s 1974 pirate comedy “Ghost in the Noonday Sun.”
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