Jack Sholder
director
Jack Sholder (born June 8, 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a retired American director, best known for his work in the horror film genre, notably Alone in the Dark, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, The Hidden, and Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies.
In the DVD commentary of The Hidden, Jack Sholder states that his favorite film director is Jean Renoir.
In September 2004, he joined the faculty of Western Carolina University in the Department of Stage and Screen, retiring in 2017.
During his interview for Behind the Curtain Part II (2012), he confessed that of all the films he had made, Arachnid (2001) was his least favorite. In the same interview, he cited Alone in the Dark (1982), The Hidden (1987), By Dawn's Early Light (1990), and 12:01 (1993) as his favorite of his own films.
Career
Jack Sholder studied English literature, but fell in love with movies while in college. He made a number of short films, one of them being The Garden Party (1973), based on the short story by Katherine Mansfield. The film starred Jessica Harper, Beatrice Straight, and Tracey Walter. In a 2020 interview Sholder declared that The Garden Party shows "the director I wanted to be, instead of where fate has taken me."
After graduating college, Sholder moved to New York City, with plans of becoming an editor. Through a mutual friend, he met Robert Shaye of New Line, for whom he edited trailers, foreign films, and title sequences on a regular basis.
“Jack Sholder” enters the record as director. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jack, Sholder and director can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11338. VIAF identifies the subject as 22337322. The Library of Congress control number is no96047261. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 2004, 2017 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jack Sholder” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.