The film world has lost two people who contributed to the genre in very different ways: Charles B. Pierce, the trailblazing independent filmmaker of the ’70s and early ’80s, and actor Corey Haim, who as a teen starred of a pair of high-profile horror features.

Variety reports that Pierce died last Friday, March 5 of natural causes in Dover, Tennessee. He’s best known for his 1972 regional classic THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK (pictured above), which was inspired by real-life accounts of the Fouke Monster that terrorized Texarkana, Arkansas in the early ’70s and employed a combination of documentary and horror tropes that inspired the later likes of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. More recently, movies like THE WILD MAN OF THE NAVIDAD have exhibited direct echoes of LEGEND, and the unofficial remake BOGGY CREEK filmed last year under director Brian T. Jaynes.

Pierce was not involved with the 1977 follow-up RETURN TO BOGGY CREEK, but did helm 1985’s BOGGY CREEK II. His ’77 feature THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN employed a similar docu style to recount the vicious crimes of the Phantom Killer, who stalked Texarkana in the ’40s, and he also directed the 1979 fictional horror flick THE EVICTORS.

Meanwhile, any number of sources reported this morning that Haim died late last night in Los Angeles at age 38, apparently of an accidental overdose of over-the-counter and prescription drugs. His best-known genre credit is playing Sam Emerson in THE LOST BOYS (pictured), one of numerous features in which he co-starred with Corey Feldman, and he briefly reprised the character in the recent direct-to-DVD sequel LOST BOYS: THE TRIBE. He also starred in a pair of literary-based horror films: SILVER BULLET, from Stephen King’s werewolf novella, and WATCHERS, from the Dean R. Koontz novel about a boy and his dog and a rampaging creature. as well as the low-budget chillers THE BACKLOT MURDERS and FEVER LAKE (a.k.a. DEMON KID).

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