Changing Horror Forever: Blood Feast

One spring while I was still in college I was looking for something to do between classes, so I drove down to a local video game/music/movie resale store, Dave’s Video. With probably something like $20 to my name, too much time to kill, and general curiosity, casual browsing quickly turned to scanning the shelves of DVDs and Blu-ray discs one by one. It was then that I pulled out the most gnarly looking multi-disc set of horror movies I’d never heard of, on sale for a staggering $6.99 plus tax: Blood Feast Collection–featuring titles like Pieces, The Undertaker and His Pals, and It Happened at Nightmare Inn. Of course, I had to get it. By this point, most of my personal horror staples were things in the vein of The Blair Witch Project, Jennifer’s Body, or John Carpenter's Halloween, so from the descriptions on this box alone, I could tell that these were something different. So that following weekend on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I remember stowing myself away in my bedroom, popping disc 1 into my DVD player, and sitting back in pure awe as I watched 5 back-to-back features chock-full of blood, carnage, horrific acting, and murderous sickos. This sparked within me a bloodthirsty expedition to find and watch all the goriest classics I could get my hands on, which is when I stumbled upon the sleazy splatter flick that spawned them all and a movie that changed my taste in horror movies forever: the aptly-named Blood Feast. 

Truly “nothing so appalling in the annals of horror” before, “Godfather of Gore,” Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast was the first of its kind to be exploitative and gruesome just for the hell of it and is highly regarded as the first “splatter” film. Leading up to Lewis and collaborator David Friedman’s most notorious work was mainly a slew of screwball comedies and “nudie-cutie” films (as well as the first nudist musical?), but the two wanted to shock the audience in a way that hadn’t been done before–to come up with a concept so crude, so vulgar, that no one else would touch it. At a time where censorship in the film industry was suffocating, a lot of what audiences were seeing would be considered good clean fun by today’s standards. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was breaking ground for horror flicks to come, but even then it was still missing something vital: the violence! The blood! In horror features past, audiences knew what was about to happen to their unsuspecting victims. There was always implied bloodshed or carnage, but never did they get to actually see what happens on camera. With this in mind, Lewis and Friedman landed on a schtick that was guaranteed to shock and turn stomachs: gore.

The movie follows a young caterer named Fuad Ramses (played by Mal Arnold) who is planning to serve up quite a large dinner feast. His secret ingredient, you ask? Nubile young women he’s been murdering and stealing the body parts of for a ritualistic sacrifice that will revive the Egyptian goddess Ishtar. The crowd knows exactly what they’re in for a whopping two minutes into the film when Ramses goes to town hacking away at our first victim while she’s in the bathtub reading her women’s-issued copy of Ancient Weird Religious Rites, but it gets even more heinous after that. Let’s just say there’s one scene that involves a sheep’s tongue, and if you hate gallons upon gallons of oversaturated fake blood that resembles melted crayon wax and ketchup, this may not be for you. 

If you ask most horror fans, they’ll likely tell you by technical standards, this isn’t a great movie. There’s some absurdly over-the-top acting with duff dialogue, the plot is…maybe in there somewhere if you’re looking really hard, there’s truly not a genuine fright to be had, and, not to mention, it was thrown together in a handful of days on a shoestring budget. But technical prowess aside, Blood Feast contains a certain finesse that could only be captured by the tender hands of an ex-nudie director. Lewis, though a self-proclaimed businessman rather than artist, manages to shoot even the most brutal of severed limbs in a nearly poetic fashion, lighting them just right so that not a singular gory detail can be overlooked, shot so tight the viewer has nowhere else to look other than in the face of these butchered babes. Blood Feast effectively does what it sets out to do; it revolts, it makes us squirm. Despite its obvious flaws from being made cheaply and in the ‘60s, it remains a genre-pioneering masterpiece.

Blood Feast helped to pave the way for the genre as a whole and inspired some of the most well-known names in Hollywood like master FX makeup artist Tom Savini, exploitation film enthusiast Quentin Tarantino, and fellow gore aficionado John Waters. That’s not to mention its direct successors like 1980’s and 81’s Maniac and The Evil Dead, the entirety of the Saw franchise, and The Hills Have Eyes (2006). And while I can thank the film for inspiring some of my favorites, I will always appreciate it most for its daring leap into the unknown territory of gore and guts and for encouraging me to spiral further into the depths of the horror genre. Blood Feast fueled my interest in the absurd, the comically grim, the experimental—it opened my world to an endless array of cinema that I might otherwise never have bothered to explore.