The Lost Boys director Joel Schumacher has died after a yearlong fight with cancer. He was 80 years old when he passed away.

Schumacher was born in Queens in 1939 and lost both of his parents very early in his life. He has stated that he was pretty much living on the streets by the time he was seven or eight years old. In spite of that, he would later attend design school and worked as a window dresser at Bendel’s department store designing macabre and often outlandish scenes for window shoppers as they passed by. This early taste for horror foreshadows what his later works would look like.

Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles and worked as a costume designer. By 1974, he was writing and directing for television before finally making the leap to film with 1981’s The Incredible Shrinking Woman starring Lily Tomlin. St. Elmo’s Fire soon followed, and in 1987 he directed the vampire classic The Lost Boys starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric.

Schumacher would step in and out of the horror genre for the remainder of his career directing Flatliners, The Number 23, and the big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. He is also credited with directing the much-reviled 1997 Batman film Batman and Robin. Some of his last works in the directorial chair were a couple 2013 episodes of House of Cards.

Joel Schumacher lived his life as an openly gay man through most of his career, a fact that influenced the themes and style of many of his films. His hits and his misses are both remembered fondly, even by people who never looked into him enough to find his full body of work. CGMagazine sends our condolences to the friends and family of Joel Schumacher,and we hope that they can cling together during this especially difficult time.