Line #43 Creator/DougCampbell


1	[[quoteright:250:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/doug_campbell.jpg]]
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3	Doug Campbell (born 1964) is an American director, writer and producer.
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5	A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied filmmaking under Alexander Mackendrick (''Film/WhiskyGalore''. ''Film/TheLadykillers1955'', ''Film/SweetSmellOfSuccess''), Campbell directed his first film, the 1988 Erotic {{Thriller}} ''Season of Fear'', at age 24. After bouncing around between episodic television, documentaries and straight-to-video movies for a while, he found his niche in 2009 when he directed his first Creator/{{Lifetime}} movie, ''Accused at 17''. Since then, he's directed ''over 30'' films for Lifetime.
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7	Along with fellow Lifetime auteur Creator/DavidDecoteau, Campbell has a fair claim for being the modern Creator/RogerCorman, with his quickly-shot NoBudget films, revolving around lurid ExploitationFilm plots, but also with a knack for BlackComedy and {{Camp}}. Campbell's two main modes are movies centering on a deranged {{Yandere}} authority figure (a high school teacher, a nun, a heart surgeon) and TeenDrama where the NaiveEverygirl protagonist gets mixed up in nasty business (bank robberies, voyeurism, diamond smuggling).
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9	Campbell also teaches filmmaking at Academy of Arts University in UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco.
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11	!!Doug Campbell films on TV Tropes:
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13	* ''Film/DirtyTeacher'' (2013)
14	* ''Film/TheCheatingPact'' (2013)
15	* ''Film/BadSister'' (2015)
16	* ''Film/StalkedByMyNeighbor'' (2015)
17	* ''Film/StalkedByMyDoctor'' (2015), which became a full franchise for Lifetime. Campbell directed the first movie and its first two follow-ups:
18	** ''Stalked By My Doctor: The Return'' (2016)
19	** ''Stalked By My Doctor: Patient's Revenge'' (2018)
20	* ''Film/StalkedByMyMother'' (2016)
21	* ''Film/SmugglingInSuburbia'' (2019)
22	* ''Film/DeadlyMileHighClub'' (2020)
23	* ''Film/DeadlyGarageSale'' (2022)
24	* ''Film/DeadlyCheerMom'' (2022), an original movie for Creator/{{Tubi}} rather than Lifetime, but still in the Lifetime SignatureStyle
25	* ''Film/VanishedInYosemite'' (2023)
26	* ''Film/MyDoctorsSecretLife'' (2023)
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28	!!Tropes common to his films:
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30	* BeautyIsBad: His villains tend to be drop-dead gorgeous women or ruggedly handsome men.
31	* BlackAndGreyMorality: Campbell's movies are unusual in the Lifetime world because their heroines are sometimes flawed and imperfect. ''Film/StalkedByMyNeighbor'''s Jodi is a prime example of RapeAsBackstory, but she's also paranoid and starts taking secret photos of her neighbors, then does a 180 and falls in love with her prime suspect in her neighbor's murder when he tells her has a crush on her. Claire in ''Film/StalkedByMyMother'', rather than the morally impeccable MamaBear that Lifetime loves, is possessive and high-strung, and gets targeted by the villain because of one of her past confrontations that [[DrivenToSuicide drove the other person to suicide]].
32	* {{Camp}}: Campbell is probably Lifetime's most self-aware director, specializing in overbaked {{Melodrama}} with blatantly contrived plotlines, and some truly off-the-wall touches. Someone who writes and directs a scene (in ''Stalked By My Doctor: The Return'') where a stalker cooks and eats pancakes shaped in the letters of the name of his object of desire (AMY, in this case) is clearly in on the joke. In fact, his main flaw might be that sometimes he gets ''too'' campy. His contribution to Lifetime's Fear the Cheer event in 2021, ''Pom Poms and Payback'', got slammed for being way too over-the-top and deliberately cheesy (according to its Website/{{IMDB}} page, Allison [=McAtee=], who played the villain in the notoriously wacky ''Film/DeadlyMileHighClub'', turned down the villain role because ''she'' thought it was too outlandish).
33	* ComplexityAddiction: His villains tend to cook up insanely elaborate schemes, usually centered on a BatmanGambit, with fake identities, planting of evidence and benign characters who end up being secret accomplices being common ingredients as well.
34	* DarkerAndEdgier: ''My Daughter's Ransom'' stands out among his Lifetime movies for having a truly evil, disturbing villain (the heroine's convicted murderer ex-boyfriend), who's also a SmugSnake who WouldHurtAChild (he directly threatens the young daughter with a knife), plus a scene where the heroine narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a gang rape at a bar.
35	* DescendedCreator: Via appearing in a TragicKeepsake photo, he plays the role of the late husband[=/=]father of the mother-daughter protagonists of ''Secrets in the Building''.
36	* ImprovisedWeapon: A lot of his movies feature amusingly bizarre examples, like the heroine of ''Stalked By My Doctor'' fighting off the doctor with his own set of golf clubs, or the villainess of ''Revenge For My Mother'' using a cardboard box filled with her father's ashes to beat one of her rivals to death.
37	* ItsPersonal: One his favorite recurring premises is a young woman suddenly showing up in the life of another woman, with the two women becoming close confidants, only the second woman isn't aware that the first woman blames her for the death of someone close to her, and her ''real'' agenda is to get {{Revenge}}. He's used it in ''Home Invasion'' (the girlfriend of a burglar goes after the woman who killed him as he was robbing her home), ''Film/DeadlyGarageSale'' (same as ''Home Invasion'', except it's ''sister'' of the dead burglar), ''Look Who's Stalking'' (the sister of a man who who suffered a fatal heart attack while stalking a woman becomes the woman's personal assistant and tries to ruin her life, with the vengeance-seeker played by the same actress, Juliana Destefano, as the vengeance-seeker in ''Deadly Garage Sale''), and ''My Doctor's Secret Life'' (the daughter of a man who got into a relationship with his psychiatrist and died in a drunken car crash after the doctor broke up with him becomes the psychiatrist's patient solely to ruin her life).
38	* LifetimeMovieOfTheWeek: He's become one of the most prolific directors of these in the last decade, and among the most successful, with ''Stalked By My Doctor'' and ''Deadly Mile High Club'' gaining cult followings.
39	* MythologyGag: A FreezeFrameBonus moment in ''My Doctor's Secret Life'' has that film's protagonist Dr. Veronica West looking through patient information forms, and one of the patients is named Marcia Clattenburg, which is the name of the heroine of ''Film/DeadlyGarageSale''.
40	* NaiveEverygirl: His favored protagonist type, who ends up getting victimized by a {{Yandere}} or a ManipulativeBastard (or both). She usually ends up needing to be rescued by a MamaBear.
41	* NeverTrustATitle:
42	** ''Stalked By My Mother'' implies that teen Maddy is the protagonist and her mother Claire is the villain. Claire ''does'' stalk Maddy in the first act, but after that the story shifts to having a VillainProtagonist target both Claire and Maddy.
43	** ''My Doctor's Secret Life'' similarly implies that the doctor is the villain and the story is going to be told from the POV of one of their patients. In fact, the doctor (a psychiatrist named Veronica West) is the protagonist, and the patient [[spoiler:is the vengeful daughter of one of her former patients who plots to ruin her life]] (Lifetime changed the title from ''The Doctor's Secret'', which was more accurate).
44	* NoBudget: His films are largely shot on location without any real "name" performers. Since he tends to focus on a genre ({{Thriller}}) that doesn't rely too much on special effects, Campbell can usually succeed in making his films look polished, but SpecialEffectsFailure can happen sometimes (the overdone CGI explosion in ''Stalked By My Mother'', the radio control model airplanes for the wide shots in ''Deadly Mile High Club'').
45	* ProductionPosse: Campbell works with Johnson Production Group on his Lifetime movies, and their producers Timothy O. Johnson and Robert Ballo. Campbell writes a lot of his own scripts, but has also worked multiple times with writers Christine Conradt and Barbara Kymlicka. A lot of actors and actresses pop up multiple times in his movies, like Creator/AmyPietz, Creator/CynthiaGibb, Josie Davis, Darlene Vogel, Lesli Kay, Barbara Niven, Damon K. Sperber, Crystal Allen, Anna Marie Dobbins, Diane Robin, Shelby Yardley, Juliana Destefano, Kelcie Stranahan (basically his Creator/GraceKelly, having starred in six of his films) and of course Creator/EricRoberts as ''Stalked By My Doctor'''s Albert Beck.
46	* PsychologicalThriller: His favored genre, often with extremely convoluted plots.
47	* SelfPlagiarism: Some blatant examples in his filmography. ''Bad Sister'' is basically ''Dirty Teacher'' set in Catholic school, while ''Driven to Kill'' (aka ''Wheels of Beauty'') is nearly a ShotForShotRemake of ''Deadly Mile High Club'', simply performing a GenderFlip on the two main characters and changing the vehicles from planes to race cars.
48	* ShoutOut: Campbell clearly loves the work of Creator/AlfredHitchcock, and will usually stick a Hitchcock homage somewhere in his movies. Sometimes it's obvious, like ''Stalked By My Neighbor'' basically being a TeenDrama version of ''Film/RearWindow'', the finale of ''Deadly Mile High Club'' being based on the crop duster scene of ''Film/NorthByNorthwest'', or [[Film/{{Psycho}} murder in the shower]] in ''Bad Sister''. Other times, he picks less famous Hitchcock films, like borrowing the "car with sabotaged brakes careens down a steep, winding mountain road" scene from ''Film/FamilyPlot'' in both ''Pom Poms and Payback'' and ''Film/VanishedInYosemite''. There's also Creator/DianeBaker (Lil Mainwaring in ''Film/{{Marnie}}'') appearing in ''The Surrogate''.
49	* ShownTheirWork: A lot of his movies have plot points based on arcane facts. ''Film/BadSister'' and ''Film/StalkedByMyDoctor: The Return'' both have villains whose real identities are exposed in part because they're unaware of certain details about cities where they claim to have lived before (Missoula, UsefulNotes/{{Montana}} and Salt Lake City, UsefulNotes/{{Utah}} respectively). ''Double Mommy'' is about a teen girl who becomes pregnant with twins fathered by two different boys, a very rare but completely genuine phenomenon called "heteropaternal superfecundation".
50	* {{Yandere}}:
51	** Several of his movies revolve around a stalker with a MaskOfSanity who goes to incredible lengths to get into [[SingleTargetSexuality his or her intended target's pants]], as well as to [[MurderTheHypotenuse eliminate any potential romantic rivals]].

Context Creator / DougCampbell