A double Oscar winner, Freddie Francis had one of the most remarkable careers in British cinema. As a cinematographer he was a key figure in creating the look of a new type of gritty, social realist drama at the end of the 1950s and start of the 1960s, shooting the classics Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and winning an Oscar for Sons and Lovers (1960).

Latterly he developed his career in Hollywood, working on a wide variety of films with the likes of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch and winning a second Oscar for the US Civil War epic Glory (1989), a portrait of the bravery and sacrifice of black Union soldiers.

In between he enjoyed a successful career as a director. He is not the only cinematographer to become a director and then return to the specialism of the camera, but what is remarkable about Francis’s output as a director is that he specialised so heavily in horror movies, working for Hammer and Amicus, and becoming one of the best-known names in the genre.

He had a shot at Frankenstein, Dracula and psychological horror and helped to promote the concept of the “portmanteau” horror film — which presented a series of stories, normally loosely linked by a spooky narrator — beginning with Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), in which Peter Cushing meets five strangers on a train and tells their fortunes with Tarot cards. The sub-genre and the title were affectionately spoofed by Steve Coogan on his television series Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible (2001).

Francis is revered by horror fans, though he maintained that his specialism was an accident and was dismissive of his work in the genre, and its fans. “The main reasons I got out of the horror genre were first that I never really wanted to get into it,” he told Sight and Sound magazine in 1992. “Those were the only films I was being offered as a director.

“I used to get invited to all these horror film festivals, and I’d start talking about the directors I most admire, the Billy Wilders and the William Wylers, and they didn’t know who I was talking about. So instead I’d start talking about the really great horror film directors, James Whale, Tod Browning and all these people, and they still didn’t understand who I was talking about. And I suddenly realised that most of these people were only interested in horror — not just horror films, but horror pure and simple. Well, you know, that wasn’t for me. I’m not a weirdo at all.”

Frederick William Francis was born in Islington, London, in 1917, and studied engineering before entering the film industry as an apprentice stills photographer at Shepherds Bush Studios in 1934. He gradually worked his way up through the industry at various studios, with spells as a clapper-boy and camera assistant.

The Second World War provided him with the chance to develop his career and he wrote, shot, directed and edited films for the Army, filming everything from drill and ack-ack installations to “operations on men who’d had their faces shot away”.

After the war he worked on several films as camera operator for Powell and Pressburger and the cinematographer Christopher Challis, including Gone to Earth (1950), and also for John Huston, serving as director of photography on the second unit for Huston’s spectacular Technicolor adaptation of Moby Dick (1956).

But it was with atmospheric black-and-white cinematography that Francis came to the fore, capturing the hunger, drive and rebelliousness of a new breed of postwar protagonist in the stark images of Room at the Top and most especially Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Although Sons and Lovers was set in an earlier period, it shared some of the virtues of these films and this emerging movement. It was an exciting time for British films as they began to attract international attention and acclaim.

Francis’s skilful manipulation of light, shade, tone and atmosphere was also put to good use on The Innocents (1961), an adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, recently restored and rereleased to acclaim, and the psychological thriller Night Must Fall (1964). It was to be his last film as DoP for 16 years, but a sign of the course his career would take as a director.

He got his first chance to direct when he was called on to provide uncredited additional scenes for the sci-fi film The Day of the Triffids (1962).

His first directorial credit came on Two and Two Make Six (1962), a romantic comedy with George Chakiris and Janette Scott, but it was quickly followed by a run of horror films and psychological thrillers, including Paranoiac (1963), with Scott and Oliver Reed, and The Evil of Frankenstein(1964), with Cushing, both of which he did for Hammer.

It was at Amicus, Hammer’s great rival, that he made his best horror films, however. Dr Terror’s House of Horrors was not the first portmanteau horror film, but it established a fashion within the genre, and Francis followed it with Torture Garden (1967) and Tales from the Crypt (1972), two films which have acquired a cult following. A quarter of a century later Francis would also contribute to the Tales from the Crypt TV series.

One of the few films with which Francis was completely satisfied was Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), a forgotten black comedy about homicidal children, which owed a little to Billy Wilder.

Other films as a director include The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1965), Trog (1970) and The Creeping Flesh (1973), starring Cushing, with whom Francis worked repeatedly. He also made several films with his son, Kevin, beginning with the Hammer film Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1968), on which Kevin cut his teeth as a runner. In the film Dracula is staked with a crucifix and famously cries tears of blood. Kevin went on to become a producer, and his father made Legend of the Werewolf and The Ghoul (both 1975) for his company, Tyburn.

Cinematography is especially important in horror movies in establishing atmosphere and tone, and the genre provided Francis with great opportunities to exploit his experience and develop wider skills as a film-maker. Several of his horror films are now highly regarded by critics and academics, though even his admirers would admit that his output was inconsistent. Generally he seemed more comfortable with the portmanteau format and contemporary settings than with the traditional, full-length, Gothic, period horror.

The genre lacked the critical respectability of mainstream cinema, even more so then than now, and was far removed from the prestigious projects on which he had worked as cinematographer. In the late 1960s Francis had attempted to broaden his range in television and worked for Lew Grade’s ITC company on the action-drama series The Saint (1967-69), Man in a Suitcase (1967-68) and The Champions (1969), which all now also enjoy a cult following. By the mid-1970s, however, he was desperately unhappy with his lot and turned his back on the film and TV industries.

He was lured out of retirement by the US director David Lynch, who wanted his distinctive brand of monochrome cinematography for The Elephant Man (1980), his drama about the deformed John Merrick (John Hurt) and the English Victorian society in which he lived.

Francis said: “People were warning him ‘Oh, you should not get Freddie because he hasn’t done a film for 20 years’, but David said, ‘Well, it’s a bit like riding a bicycle, isn’t it?’, and off we went.”

The Elephant Man effectively launched the third act in Francis’s story. It won the Bafta award for best film and brought Francis the first of four Bafta nominations.

He returned very occasionally to directing, most notably on the Burke and Hare story The Doctor and the Devils (1985), with Timothy Dalton and Jonathan Pryce, but he found himself in demand as a cinematographer with leading directors on both sides of the Atlantic. Lynch called on his expertise again for the ill-fated sci-fi epic Dune (1984) and his charming little drama The Straight Story (1999), a sort of OAP spin on Easy Rider, with a sit-on lawn mower instead of a Harley.

Francis received Bafta nominations for The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Glory (1989) and Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), though, strangely, he never won and had to make do with a belated special achievement award.

His later films underline his versatility as a cinematographer and put his status as one of the pre-eminent practitioners of his generation beyond doubt, while the reputation of his horror films has benefited from a gradual re-evaluation of the genre and were the subject of the book The Films of Freddie Francis (1991). He also co-wrote two books, Light ’Em Up: A Gaffer Remembers a Lifetime Making Movies (1996) and Inside Hammer (2001).

He was married twice and is survived by his wife Pamela, son, Kevin, and two children from his second marriage.

Freddie Francis, film director and cinematographer, was born on December 22, 1917. He died on March 17, 2007 aged 89