William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, died Monday. He was 87.

Friedkin died in Los Angeles, his wife, former producer and studio head SherryLansing, said.

His pictures, which also included 1977’s Sorcerer, 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. and 2006’s Bug, were marked by visual eye, a willingness to take what might have been a genre subject and treat it with high seriousness and a sense of how sound could add a subterranean layer of dread, mystery and dissonance to his stories — a haunted and haunting quality that lifted his visceral works into another realm, conveying a preternatural sense of “fear and paranoia, both old friends of mine,” as he said in his 2013 memoir, The Friedkin Connection.

When Hitchcock told him off for not wearing tie on the set (he hired the filmmaker in 1965 for an episode of NBC’sThe Alfred Hitchcock Hour), Friedkin got his revenge: The night he won the Directors Guild Award for The French Connection (1971), passing Hitchcock on his way from the podium, he yanked his snap-on bow-tie and quipped: ‘How do you like the tie, Hitch?’ “

It would have surprised Hitchcock that Friedkin revered the master’s work, as he did that of Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane he saw when he was 25. A true cineaste, he was revered by younger generation.

Even B movies, Friedkin could dazzle with skill and originality. The Exorcist (1973) begins in a Middle Eastern desert, where an old man stumbles through an archeological site toward a hole where something — who knows what? — has arrested others’ attention. The sequence is terrifying because of its desaturated images and the performances that capture the locale, but also because of a soundtrack in which a buzzing, insistent sound grows ever louder and more menacing.

Neither Friedkin nor Blatty, author of the novel, regarded it horror story but as a drama, Friedkin remained fascinated with the subject and returned to it for his final film, a docu about the oldest-living exorcist, The Devil and Father Amorth (2017), in which he himself held the camera during an exorcism.

A deep pessimism suffused his work–The Exorcist and French Connection, his most commercial films, in partial failure, with the death of a young priest in one and the escape of the narcotics mastermind in the other — even though he was witty, funny and fully engaged in life right to the end.

Friedkin was born in Chicago on Aug. 29, 1935, the only child of a former nurse whom he called a “saint” and a father who hopped between jobs, a man who “seemed to have no sense of purpose except day-to-day survival.” Both came from Jewish families that had fled Ukraine following the pogroms of the early 20th century.

After graduating from Senn High School in 1953, Friedkin replied to an ad posted by a local TV station looking for someone to work in the mailroom. He showed up at the wrong station, but it was the best thing that could have happened: He was hired by WGN, where he fell under the wing of a kindly writer and columnist, Fran Coughlin, who recognized his talent and opened his eyes to a larger universe of art and artists, teachers and politicians.

Promoted to floor manager, Friedkin became a director of live TV, earning the then-unimaginable sum of $200 per week.

His next break came when he met a prison chaplain. The man told him about Paul Crump, a death row inmate he believed to be innocent but who was scheduled for execution in six months. The documentary Friedkin made about him, The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) — replete with a re-creation of the alleged crime and montage featuring the electric chair in a fever dream, led Crump to receive clemency but to new career for Friedkin, who moved to Los Angeles and started making docus for David Wolper.

Leaving Wolper, Friedkin made his Hitchcock Hour episode “Off Season,” about a big city cop (John Gavin) who innocently kills the wrong man.

He then landed his first feature, Good Times (1967), starring Sonny and Cher. He deemed the former a genius, even though the musical comedy flopped.

Three features followed, each in a different style and genre: the Harold Pinter adaptation The Birthday Party (1968), the burlesque comedy The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970), one of the first mainstream movies to center on a gay cast. Each bombed, and the once-promising helmer was floundering — until he met Phil D’Antoni in the storied Paramount steam room.

D’Antoni, producer of the Steve McQueen thriller Bullitt (1968), had just optioned book about two real-life New York City police detectives who had busted an international heroin ring. Friedkin read it and was unimpressed, but when he met the cops, he was transfixed. Their salty personalities, their willingness to use dubious methods in the pursuit of justice, their wisecracking and obsessive commitment to their work fascinated him. Friedkin signed on.

After considering actors like Paul Newman (too expensive) and Jackie Gleason (loathed at Fox) to play Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, Friedkin cast Jimmy Breslin and spent days working with him, only for the New York newspaperman to vanish. He then reluctantly agreed to hire Hackman, with whom he fought constantly.

The film’s problems were compounded when the wrong actor showed up to portray the main villain, Alain Charnier. Friedkin had instructed someone on his team to get “that guy who played the gangster in Buñuel’s Belle de Jour“; in a misunderstanding, Spanish actor Fernando Rey (a Luis Buñuel regular) was booked instead.

Rey was suave, sophisticated and anything but the gangster as Friedkin had envisioned him. “I stared at [the team member] in disbelief,” he recalled. “I wanted to strangle him. I was convinced the film would be a disaster. Hackman was all wrong for Popeye, and now, God help us, [the movie had hired] Fernando fucking Rey, who looked like a character out of an El Greco painting.”

Friedkin operated a camera, almost killing passerby as his car barreled from one block to another. Looking back, he said he was horrified at what he was willing to do for his art. “I have not, and would not again, risk the lives of others as we did,” he noted, “but the best moments of the chase came from this one long run with three cameras; pedestrians and cars dashed out of the way, warned only by the oncoming siren. … I put people’s live at risk. I say this more out of shame than pride; no film is worth it. Why did I do it? … I shared [the cops’] obsession.”

He brought that same obsession to his next film, The Exorcist, an adaptation of Blatty’s best-selling novel. Friedkin got the job Mike Nichols and Kubrick, had rejected it. Warner was skeptical of a man who had a reputation for being difficult.

“There are times in the movie business when it pays to be thought of as a dangerously psychotic person,” Friedkin explained. “Blatty tried to cultivate that reputation, and on occasion, so did I.” The men shared the view that this “was a unique and original story. I didn’t see it as a horror film; quite the opposite, I read it as transcendent, as Blatty had intended.”

In the end, Friedkin cast Ellen Burstyn and then Blair, a newcomer, as her daughter. With Lee J. Cobb, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller rounding out the cast, photography commenced in New York, where disaster followed disaster. The production went over schedule, set was destroyed by fire, and at one point, when a nonprofessional actor (William O’Malley) struggled to find the right emotion as he performed last rites, Friedkin had to resort to extreme tactics, as he recounted in his memoir.

His next feature (his personal favorite), Sorcerer (1977), mediocre adaptation of the Henri-Georges Clouzot thriller The Wages of Fear about renegades driving truckloads of nitroglycerin through the South American jungle, flopped. Friedkin noted, “It would be years before I would again experience [the same] self-confidence on film set, belief in a kind of divine intervention.”

He continued to work regularly but never with the financial results. His later pictures included Cruising (1980), which caused controversy because of its negative depiction of a gay S&M world — leading to attacks by the LGBTQ community that once had lauded Boys in the Band — as well as Deal of the Century (1983), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Blue Chips (1994) and Rules of Engagement (2000).

Friedkin also turned to other avenues of creativity, most notably as an internationally admired director of operas, and in television, earning an Emmy nomination in 1998 for his remake of 12 Angry Men, starring Jack Lemmon, for Showtime.

In his late 70s, he experienced the thrill of having a cult classic with Killer Joe (2011), based on a play by Tracy Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright he had discovered off-Broadway. (In 2006, Friedkin had directed Bug from a Letts screenplay.)

Friedkin was wry about his mishaps and mistakes. He had tossed a Basquiat drawing in the trash and turned down the chance to direct a video for Prince, he noted: “I’ve burned bridges and relationships to the point that I consider myself lucky to still be around. I never played by the rules, often to my own detriment. I’ve been rude, exercised bad judgment, squandered most of the gifts God gave me, and treated the love and friendship of others as I did Basquiat’s art and Prince’s music. When you are immune to the feelings of others, can you be a good father, a good husband, a good friend? Do I have regrets? You bet.”

He blamed his own hubris for his fall from grace but had no bitterness about it, especially in his later years, following his 1991 marriage to Lansing, who survives him, as do his sons, Jack Friedkin and film editor Cedric Nairn-Smith.

He was earlier married to actresses Jeanne Moreau and Lesley-Anne Down and to newscaster Kelly Lange.

His most recent work was a new version of The Caine Mutiny, which had been accepted into the Venice Film Festival.

Throughout his career, he never lost his passion for the work. “I haven’t made my Citizen Kane,” he acknowledged in his autobiography, “but there’s more work to do. I don’t know how much, but I’m loving it.