WITHOUT him there would be no Animal House toga party, no "stay off the moors" jokes thanks to An American Werewolf in London, no dance routines from the The Blues Brothers ... no Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, for heaven's sake. Let's face it, John Landis was the 1980s – without him the decade would never have had its day-glo and demented edge.

Now Chicagoan Landis, aged 67, is on his way to Scotland where he will be guest of honour at this month's Edinburgh’s Dead by Dawn horror festival – now in its 25th year – thanks mostly to An American Werewolf in London, seen by many fans as the greatest comedy-horror film ever made. Landis also made the horror film Twilight Zone: The Movie in the early 80s, but that is a film he would rather forget as we explain later.

Landis was just eight when he knew that he wanted to be a film director, having been bewitched by Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. He later dropped out of high school and became a mail boy at 20th Century Fox, which led to him making his way to Belgrade, via London to work on the second unit of the war film, Kelly’s Heroes. He sneaked through the Iron Curtain by hooking himself to the underneath of a railway carriage, and he ended up spending nine months on the film’s first unit.

He then went to Spain where he had various jobs on the sets of spaghetti westerns, including Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

Returning to America, he made his breakthrough directing Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977, a compendium of zany sketches and spoofs written by David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, who would later write Airplane. The film is both outrageous and thoroughly filthy. Suffice to say it would be unlikely to get a screening in the current PC era.

It was comedies which made his name – and Animal House in particular, with John Belushi dominating the riotous comedy about a notorious fraternity house on a American college campus. Next up came another movie which has become something of an immortal hit – the Blues Brothers – telling the story of two loveable ex cons, with a gift for Motown-inspired song and dance routines, called Jake and Elwood.

Landis went on to solidify his fame as a king of comedy with a string of commercial hits. There was Trading Places, which Landis describes as "a 30s screwball comedy" – a star vehicle for both Dank Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy. He directed the Steve Martin comedy ¡Three Amigos! and teamed up again with Murphy in Coming to America and Beverly Hills Cop III.

As UK film magazine Empire said in 2016, Landis “rocked the 80s, creating a string of terrific comedies that today are cherished as iconic all-timers.” The man himself said: “I’m lucky. I have movies that still play.”

But in 1981 he took comedy and did something very different with it. Landis had written An American Werewolf in London when he was just 18 but the film finally came out when he was 31. It is still a masterpiece – mixing brilliant gags with visceral horror. Make-up artist Rick Baker – today seen as one of the greatest special effects practitioners ever – won the inaugural Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling for his work on it.

After Werewolf, the world was Landis's oyster. Skip forward a few years and it's 2am one morning in 1983 when Landis, asleep in London, gets a phone call from Michael Jackson. Yes, that Michael Jackson. Jacko, then the world’s biggest pop star, told him how much he admired Werewolf and asked if Landis could make a music video in which Jackson could “turn into a monster”. Landis patiently explained that Los Angeles was eight hours behind London time and that he would call him later.

Once back in LA, Landis and Baker showed Jackson film books with photographs of monsters – which the singer found too scary. Landis said Baker eventually devised a “WereCat” design for Jackson’s costume. Jacko himself suggested that zombies be included. The resulting 14-minute-long video sold a record nine-million-plus copies and has been viewed 502,226,663 times on YouTube. It was added to the 2009 National Film Registry, which preserves films as cultural, artistic and/or historical treasures for future generations.

If Landis' life seems blessed – then you'd be wrong. One of the most shocking and horrifying events in Hollywood history occurred on the set of his film Twilight Zone: the Movie when a helicopter fell on actor Vic Morrow and two young child actors, aged six and seven. Morrow and the seven-year-old were decapitated with rotor blades; the other child was crushed to death. Charges of involuntary manslaughter were brought against Landis and others involved in the filming. It was the first time in Hollywood history that a director had ever been charged with a criminal act because of a fatality on his set.

The event marked Landis for the rest of his life. "The tragedy," he said, "which I think about every day, had an enormous impact on my career, from which it may possibly never recover."