Director whose B movies gained a cult following

Bert I. Gordon, who unleashed a parade of cinematic horrors as the filmmaker behind Atomic Age movies about mutant ants, 60-foot giants, rampaging grasshoppers and a bloodthirsty spider that proves too big to squash, died Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 100.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Christina Gordon, who did not cite a cause.

Mr. Gordon, a B-movie auteur who wrote and produced almost all of his two dozen films, was known for working quickly and cheaply — he shot his first feature, “King Dinosaur” (1955), in a single week for about $15,000 — while trying to terrify or titillate audiences in an anxious, paranoid age.

Critics called his storylines ludicrous and his special effects schlocky, and highlighted the absurdity of lines like, “You can’t drop an atom bomb on Chicago!” His film “The Food of the Gods” (1976), about a mysterious substance that causes rats, wasps and chickens to grow into giants, was “unintentionally hilarious” and “stunningly ridiculous,” wrote New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby.

But many of his films turned a profit and gained a cult following, attracting later generations of moviegoers with their imaginative monsters — rendered with the help of miniatures, mattes and rear-projection effects — and casts that featured actors who were on their way up, like a young Ron Howard, or seeking a paycheck near the end of their career, like Orson Welles, Ida Lupino and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Mr. Gordon “didn’t do much in the way of character development or psychological subtlety,” New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote in 2012, “but he sure knew how to make a visual metaphor — to convey extravagant emotions, indeed, the mental overdrive of youth itself, in simple images.”

That was especially true for “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957), about an Army officer (Glenn Langan) who is showered with nuclear debris while trying to save a downed pilot near the site of an atomic-bomb test. He loses his hair, and his mind, while growing ever taller, and rampages through a cardboard approximation of the Las Vegas Strip before falling over the Hoover Dam to his doom.

The film capitalized on the success of Universal’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” and its box-office returns were good enough to revive the character for a sequel, “War of the Colossal Beast” (1958), which took the colossus to Los Angeles.

Over the next two decades, Mr. Gordon continued to make movies about larger-than-life characters and creatures, earning the nickname “Mr. B.I.G.” because of his initials and his preferred subject matter. (One notable exception: “Attack of the Puppet People,” a 1958 horror film about a toymaker who shrinks his enemies to the size of dolls.)

Shooting gargantuan creatures on microscopic budgets, he often turned to rudimentary techniques. For “Beginning of the End” (1957), which starredPeter Graves as a scientist trying to stop a swarm of giant locusts from destroying Chicago, he ordered grasshoppersfrom Texas, then placed the bugs atop still photographs of the city’s downtown landmarks. He used a similar approach for “Earth vs. the Spider” (1958), employing a real arachnid for some shots and building a single, hairy prop leg for sequences in which the giant creature picks off membersof the cast.

At times he found it more difficult to deal with actors than monsters, as when he filmed “Empire of the Ants” (1977), in which Joan Collins is chased through a swamp by a swarm of irradiated ants. “She was not one of my most cooperative stars,” he recalled, adding in a 2003 interview with Marty McKee that he resorted to pushing the actress into a Florida river to get her into the water while shooting on location.

Mr. Gordon also made more realistic horror films like “Picture Mommy Dead” (1966), which featured Don Ameche, Martha Hyer and Gabor, and ventured outside the genre with movies like “The Magic Sword” (1962), a fantasy adventure.