The Cultural Impact of Blood Feast
Turning on the television you will likely find a Law and Order or Criminal Minds marathon playing on an extended cable network. Regardless of the procedural drama, you will see that the victim in question, who the episode will revolve around, was brutally killed in the opening scene. The visceral reaction you get from seeing a dismembered body on screen is a testament to the pioneering and unfamiliar filmmaker, Hershell Gordon Lewis. The “Godfather of Gore’’ as he is known in cinephile circles pushed the boundaries of American narrative cinema 58 years ago by showing glorified violence on screen (Split Screen 1997). Although Lewis died at 90 in 2016, a recently published retrospective of his work was issued in a Blu-Ray box set from Arrow Video. This collection is worth every dime for its restorations of 14 films and special features. Of this set, the film which stood out the most was Blood Feast which, when released in 1963, shook its drive-in audiences to their core (TV Guide 2007). This film, which served as Herschell Gordon Lewis’s calling card, deserves reexamination for its long term cultural impact on mass entertainment.
Lewis got his start working in advertising and television for several Midwestern stations. First, as a local news studio director in Oklahoma and then as a writer/director of commercials and industrial films for Swift & Company in Chicago (Tammy S Gordon 2019). His 1959 industrial film Carving Magic stars Harvey Corman (of future Carol Burnett Show fame) and frequent collaborator William Kerwin playing two actors satirizing their own film in which they sell knives for Thanksgiving (Lewis 1959). Lewis, who frequented the cinema and saw the films of Alfred Hitchcock requarly, thought about what he could make that the studios would never allow (Baker 2009). But it wasn’t until after watching Psycho in a Miami Beach cinema that the lightbulb in his head went off. Lewis believed that the intentions of Hitchcock’s low budget 1960 film were good, but it fell short on its promise to the audience. In a 1988 interview with film critic Jonathan Ross he said, “The film was billed as extremely violent and yet everyone died peacefully in it. Janet Leigh’s eyes were closed and she was smiling during the shower scene. Not to mention that the scar from the knife was so small.’’ This inspired Lewis to make his own film in rebuttal of Psycho, but first he needed to find a producer.
David F Friedman, a producer of pornographic movies in Miami financed the project after an initial meeting with Lewis (Ross 1988). The project cost $24,500 to make and was shot on location throughout Miami-Dade County over nine days with no permits and unknown actors. The only caveat being that he would cast William Kerwin in the leading role as the homicide detective (Split Screen 1997). The plot of the film focuses on a caterer named Faus Ramses, a serial killer that sacrifices his victims to the Eqyptian goddess Ishtar by baking them into food. Clearly, author Thomas Harris of the Hannibal Lecter novels was onto something with his title character’s obsession of cooking human flesh. The trope of sacrificing women to some “exotic” figure certainly predates this project, but has been a part of Hollywood’s colonalist DNA since its origins. Just take a look at films such as King Kong (1933), Gunga Din (1939), The Stranglers of Bombay (1959) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). I would suggest watching Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro and Extremite All the Brutes which gives an extensive dive into racism on screen.
Following an extremely short post-production period of a month, the film premiered on July 6, 1963 in Bellevue, Illinois (Split Screen 1997). Despite its microbudget, the film made $4 million at the box office, which would be the equivalent of $34,272,895 in 2021. Although the film was a massive hit, Variety Magazine called the work “ a totally inept shocker” and “senseless” for its depiction of violence on screen (Bowker 1983). For a long time after its release this film was hard to find, but its influence on the culture at large was not. As the 1970s approached and the images out of the Vietnam War were being distributed all over the world, people’s numbness to explicitly horrific iconography began to grow. On the global cinema stage, films such as Cannibal Holocaust (Italy, 1980) takes its gore to the most disturbing extreme. Cannibal Holocaust was essentially banned or highly censored on all five continents and was sued over charges ranging from murder to animal cruelity (Kennedy 2020). Ruggero Deodato’s film was not given a re-release until 2001, and has since developed a cult following and a fantastic Blu-Ray from Grindhouse Releasing. On a commercial front, Lewis spawned a genre called “splatter films” which deliberately focuses on the mutilation of the character’s body done through graphic violence (Ross 1988).
David Simon, the showrunner of HBO’s The Wire said in an interview to the Criterion Collection about Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, “Every great war film is an anti-war film. The suffering is so heroic.” Films such as Halloween II, Saw, Silence of the Lambs, A Serbian Film, Haze, Brain of Blood and Body Puzzle all show suffering in its most gruesome and unheroic form. Yet, all of the prior mentioned films would not have existed had Herschell Gordon Lewis not paved the way. Next time you see gore on screen think of this Florida-based filmmaker who made a low budget film that made $4 million and forever changed the visual narrative of American cinema.
Bibliography
Baker, Sean, dir. 2009. Meet the Filmmakers: Herschell Gordon Lewis. Criterion Collection, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvVdOzDn8ao.
Bowker, R. R. 1983. Variety’s Film Reviews 1964–67. United States: Variety Magazine.
Deodato, Ruggero, dir. 1980. Cannibal Holocaust. Italy: F.D. Cinematografica.
Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1960. Psycho. United States of America: Shamley Productions.
Kennedy, Michael. 2020. “Why Cannibal Holocaust Was So Controversial.” Screen Rant, Janurary 24, 2020. https://screenrant.com/cannibal-holocaust-movie-controversy-explained/.
Lewis, Herschel G., dir. 1963. Blood Feast.
Lewis, Herschell G., dir. 1959. Carving Magic. 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOExSiDykHc.
Ross, Jonathan, executive producer. 1988. The Incredibly Strange Film Show. ITV, 2021. TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQzV8FbaLvA.
Split Screen. 1997. Season 1, episode 1, “John Water and Hershell Gordon Lewis.” IFC Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cXytvY-tYw&t=635s.
Tammy S Gordon. 2019. “Martha Logan : Department of Cultural Difference.” http://tammysgordon.org/DCR/items/show/38.
TV Guide. 2007. “Blood Feast Reviews.” March 28, 2007. https://www.tvguide.com/movies/blood-feast/review/2000001498/.
Under the Influence. 2018. “Under the Influence: David Simon.” Criterion Collection. Aired May 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9Kc7U4mzE&t=257s.
