We live in a media environment where violence, including extreme gore, is relatively commonplace. It’s part of video games, movies, and television shows including prestigious award-winning programs. That wasn’t always the case. For a long time, brutal violence and especially gore was kept off of movie screens. That changed for a variety of reasons, including the rise of television and changing cultural mores.
Filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis led the way in introducing gore to the artistic palette.
Lewis was born in Pittsburgh in 1926 and grew up in Chicago. He was educated, earning bachelor and master degrees at Northwestern University before achieving a Ph.D. is psychology. He worked in radio and television and taught college courses in advertising before getting into the film business. Lewis’ early films were not horror but they were concerned with the flesh. He produced and directed a lot of softcore adult films in the late 1950s and early 60s, including Living Venus, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Daughter of the Sun, and Nature’s Playmates.
Lewis made a name for himself with 1963’s Blood Feast. The film featured gory effects that were unlike anything audiences had seen in a movie to that point. Blood Feast was a hit that shaped the trajectory of Lewis’ career. He made more films in a variety of genres but Lewis never strayed far from sexuality and gory violence. Between 1963 and 1972, Lewis directed nearly thirty films including Two Thousand Maniacs!, Color Me Blood Red, A Taste of Blood, Something Weird, She-Devils on Wheels, The Wizard of Gore, Just for the Hell of It, How to Make a Doll, and The Gore Gore Girls.
Lewis produced his films independently, raising money from investors or using funds from businesses he had founded. He was a hands-on filmmaker, often writing, directing, producing, and shooting his films as well as creating the music. Although he lived in the upper Midwest for much of his life, Lewis shot a lot of his films in Florida. Lewis left filmmaking in the early 1970s and went back to work in advertising where he achieved considerable success and he wrote over twenty books, most of them on advertising and public relations.
Late in life, Lewis returned to filmmaking with 2002’s Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat and 2009’s The Uh-Oh Show! He was also enlisted for cameo appearances in films such as Smash Cut starring Sasha Grey, The Gainesville Ripper, and the 2016 remake of Blood Feast.
Herschell Gordon Lewis died in 2016 at the age of 90.
The Gore Movies
Herschell Gordon Lewis made a lot of movies in various genres but he was best known for his gory horror films. The most significant of these movies was his first effort, 1963’s Blood Feast. The film is about a homicidal Egyptian caterer who murders women and harvests their body parts to be served at a cannibalistic dinner that will resurrect the goddess Ishtar.
Of his first horror film, Lewis said, “I’ve often referred to Blood Feast as a Walt Whitman poem. It’s no good, but it was the first of its type.” Lewis was right, at least about his own work. 1963’s Blood Feast is not good. The story makes little sense, the acting is bad, and the filmmaking is clumsy. Many scenes of Blood Feast are almost televisual in style. A lot of it is filmed in medium shots with flat lighting. However, the color pops (especially red), some of the attack sequences include interesting camera angles, and the gore is filmed with ingenuity.
That was the real draw. Blood Feast is often credited as the first splatter film. The advertising copy promised gore and that’s what was delivered. In that respect, Blood Feast anticipated the body horror and slasher films that became popular about a decade and a half later. It also presaged the way those movies mingled violence and sexuality.
Lewis did not have an artistic commitment to gore or a philosophical interest in horror. He was a businessman and a showman in the same spirit as P.T. Barnum and Don King. Lewis did take the work seriously and he tried to make the best movie he could with the resources that he had but Lewis’ reliance on sexuality and gore was really a commercial calculation. As Randy Palmer put it, “Lewis believed that the only way he could achieve real success in the film business was to ‘make a picture that was either so loaded with sex or so loaded with horror’ that it would virtually demand to be noticed.”
That rationale was integrated in the Blood Feast marketing materials.
Following Blood Feast, Lewis made a few non-horror films including Goldilocks and the Three Bares and Scum of the Earth before returning to the genre with 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs! A rural southern town welcomes a carful of young Yankee tourists and then tortures and kills them in gruesome fashion. This is not a consciously political film but the community is celebrating its centennial anniversary. Killing these Yankees is an act of revenge for the sacking of their town during the Civil War. The lyrics of the title song make this plain.
The fact that Two Thousand Maniacs! was made during the civil rights era, which is when a lot of the Confederate monuments were erected, and the same year that three civil rights activists were killed in Neshoba County in Mississippi, makes this film an interesting artifact of its era.
Ironically, Lewis said many of his films got better distribution and did better business in the southern United States then they did in the north. According to Randy Palmer, this is probably due to the fact that the distribution options for independent filmmakers were better in the south at that time. Two Thousand Maniacs! was banned in Chicago in 1964 although it was released there a couple of years later.
1965’s Color Me Blood Red is a story of a frustrated artist who discovers that he’s able to create great work when he paints with human blood. The artist resorts to murder for his blood supply. The premise of Color Me Blood Red is familiar. Roger Corman had made something similar in 1959 with Bucket of Blood and other versions of the core idea can be found in Mystery of the Wax Museum and House of Wax and in the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Color Me Blood Red was made during a difficult period in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ career. To this point he made movies through the Jacqueline-Kay Corporation, of which Lewis was one of four partners. The partners had a falling out and the company fell apart. In the end, Lewis lost ownership of Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! and the post-production of Color Me Blood Red was finished without him. Lewis was unhappy with the result.
Lewis’ next gore film was one of his most ambitious. A Taste of Blood was a sequel to Dracula, set in the then-present-day. The scion of Count Dracula seeks revenge on the decedents of the people who killed the vampire a century earlier.
A Taste of Blood is better scripted and acted and produced than Lewis’ other movies (although that’s not saying much). It has gore but the violence is more integrated into the story than in Lewis’ other horror films. It’s lit and shot pretty well. The key flaw of A Taste of Blood is that it is too long. Where most of Lewis’s movies run between 80 and 95 minutes, A Taste of Blood is nearly two hours. The pacing is slow and is has a lot of dialogue scenes which Lewis rarely shot in an interesting way. A Taste of Blood failed at the box office but Lewis regarded it—correctly—as one his best films.
One of the wackiest films in Lewis’s filmography is 1967’s The Gruesome Twosome. The owner of a wig shop and her demented son kidnap and scalp young women and then use the hair for their merchandise. The gore scenes are especially effective. In some of Lewis’ other movies the gore is so overdone that it becomes comical or it’s lit and shot in ways that take on the style of a comic book. The viscera of The Gruesome Twosome is much more realistic, especially the scalping scenes.
As violent as it is, The Gruesome Twosome also has a sense of humor. The movie opens with an extend precredit scene of two wigs mounted on Styrofoam heads and talking to each other through voiceover. It’s a ludicrous sequence that was added because the movie was too short. Filmmakers John Waters is a known Herschell Gordon Lewis fan and The Gruesome Twosome resembles some of Waters’ early work. The characters of The Gruesome Twosome could easily fit into Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs.
After The Gruesome Twosome, Lewis stayed away from gore for a few years, concentrating on making non-horror movies like Blast-Off Girls, How to Make a Doll, and Just for the Hell of It.
When Lewis made Blood Feast, no one else was including this kind of gore in their movies. By the early 1970s, the culture and the film industry had changed. Night of the Living Dead had pioneered the zombie film with cannibalism scenes that rivaled Blood Feast in their awfulness. Last House on the Left included scenes of torture and violence that were shocking in their realism. At this time, Italian filmmakers were producing giallo movies like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Don’t Torture a Duckling, mixing whodunit stories with bloody violence.
When Lewis returned to gore films he had competition. The solution was to go even further which he did by creating some of his more gruesome films.
1970’s The Wizard of Gore is about an illusionist who performs sadistic acts of mutilation on female volunteers like sawing a woman in half or making them swallow a sword. To the spectators everything appears fine but hours later the damage manifests in each woman’s body. The Wizard of Gore has some of Lewis’ most extreme set pieces with women being tortured and eviscerated.
This may be giving the film too much credit, but The Wizard of Gore plays as a self-aware commentary on Herschell Gordon Lewis’ own career. The movie is about a carnival showman who mutilates women for the entertainment of his audience. As film critic Joe Bob Briggs put it, Lewis was more of a carny than a filmmaker. Viewers don’t have to dig too deep into The Wizard of Gore to find the parallel with Lewis. The movie opens with the illusionist delivering a long and pompous speech about violence, suffering, and entertainment.
That speech along with the extremity of the violence could be taken as a proclamation—or a resignation—by Lewis of what had become of his career. It can also be taken as a response to some of his critics. Taken that way, The Wizard of Gore may also hint at why Lewis stepped away from the film industry.
Lewis’s final horror film in his initial cycle of movies was 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls. Again mixing sex and violence, a serial killer murders the exotic dancers at a cabaret. The Gore Gore Girls plays a lot like the Italian giallo films that were made at that time. As in many of those Italian films, The Gore Gore Girls is a murder mystery in which an unseen killer wearing back gloves murders women.
The Women of Herschell Gordon Lewis
Any discussion about Herschell Gordon Lewis’ filmography has to account for his portrayal of women. In this regard, Lewis was consistently and uniformly terrible.
The legacy of Lewis’ work manifested about twenty years after Blood Feast. Starting in the 1970s and peaking in the 1980s, horror filmmakers produced a wave of slasher movies about young people who are killed in hideous ways. These films were heavily criticized at the time by activists, critics, and moral watchdogs who claimed slasher movies were misogynistic and pornographically violent. Some films of the 1980s fit that description but the misogyny charge was mostly a bum rap. First, a lot of these films had gender parity in their casting and featured women in lead roles. (In 2026, women in lead roles is still a novelty in Hollywood pictures.) Second, female characters were often the protagonists of slasher films, acting with heroism and volition. Third, contrary to popular assumptions, the victim pool of 1980s slasher films split evenly between men and women.
None of those defenses apply to the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Virtually none of his movies, horror and otherwise, regard women as characters. They are props. That’s obvious in his sex comedies like How to Make a Doll (which is remarkably similar to the premise of 1985’s Weird Science) and in his gore movies. The victims are almost exclusively women and the violence of the films is sadism for its own sake, the definition of pornographic violence.
If there is a defense to be made of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s gore movies, it starts with their artificiality. The movies are not real. The gory effects are magic tricks and that’s what Lewis was doing. There is an argument to be made that getting hung up on the gender politics misses the point. Like watching a magician saw a woman in half, the audience’s pleasure isn’t in the torture. The pleasure is in the illusion and the emotional experience that the illusion creates.
There is also a case to be made that Lewis’ real sin was his refusal to dress up the violence in the veneer of drama. A lot of our entertainment is rooted in the base appeals of sex and violence which are wrapped in human interest. The story, the characters, and the themes give the audience an out. They are able to convince themselves that all of this is really about some higher purpose when it’s really about touring the carnage. This is especially true of the current popularity of police procedurals and true crime content.Herschell Gordon Lewis didn’t bother with respectability. He cut right to the blood and guts and did not apologize for it. This is why The Wizard of Gore is probably key to understanding his work.
If we accept that our media and our films are all really about the prurient thrills of sex and violence and the rest is just window dressing, then we have to ask what the difference is between a Herschell Gordon Lewis gore movie like Blood Feast and The Gore Gore Girls and an Alfred Hitcock thriller like Psycho and Frenzy. There is certainly a difference in craft and quality. One of these is a lunch special at a corner diner and the other is a plate prepared by a master chef. But they are both chopped meat designed to satiate the same appetites.
The counter argument is that all of this is reductio ad absurdum. That is, to argue that Alfred Hitchcock and Herschell Gordon Lewis are interchangeable requires us to ignore not only the craftmanship but also the context that gives the content of the movie its meaning. It’s true that both Hitchcock and Lewis put women in danger and had a leery, fetishistic regard for their subjects. But Hitchcock’s films also had complex characters and his better movies explored the human psyche. Lewis never got any deeper than the gore.
The Legacy of Herschell Gordon Lewis
After 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls, Herschell Gordon Lewis left filmmaking to work in advertising where he was very successful. In the decades that followed, home video changed entertainment, making his films more accessible than they had ever been, and horror fandom began recognizing his contributions to the genre. Lewis began appearing at conventions and several biographies were published.
In the 2000s, Herschell Gordon Lewis experienced a minor renaissance. Her returned to filmmaking, directing the sequel Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat and 2009’s The Uh-Oh Show! and the 2017 anthology film Herschell Gordon Lewis’ BloodMania. Several of Lewis’ most popular films were remade.Two Thousand Maniacs! had a 2005 remake titled 2001 Maniacs which starred horror genre icons Robert Englund, Lin Shaye, Eli Roth, and Kane Hodder. The Wizard of Gore was remade in 2007 starring Bijou Phillips, Crispin Glover, and Brad Dourif. A remake of Blood Feast was released in 2016.
Lewis’s return to filmmaking coincided with the popularity of the torture movies of the 2000s like Saw and Hostel. In fact, Blood Feast 2 predated the start of that fad by a couple of years. Between his classic films and his new ones, Herschell Gordon Lewis really lived up to his nickname as “The Godfather of Gore.”
But what to make of Lewis’ legacy? His films weren’t good. They were gross but not scary and in many cases the movies were amateurish, silly, and sexist.
In the echelons of American filmmakers, Herschell Gordon Lewis probably belongs somewhere above Ed Wood but beneath Russ Meyer. Lewis’ work had greater impact and popularity than other independent filmmakers like Bill Rebane and William Grefé although some of Rebane and Grefé’s films were more artistically accomplished than Lewis. But watching Lewis’ body of work closely, a style becomes evident. Gore was part of that style. And in some cases, the artistic merit of a movie or a filmmaker’s oeuvre is surpassed by their importance to history.
Pioneering gore effects might seem like a minor accomplishment but in the 1960s no one else was attempting what Herschell Gordon Lewis did in Blood Feast. And it was a risk insofar as the violence and nudity put Lewis and his cohorts on a collision course with the law. At this time film censorship boards were still active and movie houses could be raided by police with the patrons and projectionists arrested or fined. This was outlaw, maverick moviemaking. The films weren’t in service of any higher aim than making a buck. They were a softcore pornography of blood. But as Lenny Bruce and Larry Flynt evidence, free-speech battles are often initiated by the creators of supposedly low culture and then the rest of us benefit from it.
Herschell Gordon Lewis and his crew deserve credit their role in initiating an interest in makeup effects techniques which would be seized upon and expanded in the subsequent decades by artists like Tom Savini, Rick Baker, and the KNB EFX Group.
Blood Feast and Lewis’ subsequent gore films were transformational. Lewis’ gore films had an important part—not the only part but an important part—in making cinema more visceral.
It was a change in character for the art form similar to the advent of hip hop or punk rock music. Adding gore to the cinematic palette paved the way for everything from The Wild Bunch to The Exorcist to Saving Private Ryan. It changed what cinema could be.
Herschell Gordon Lewis left filmmaking just as the industry was about to change. His movies played in independent theaters and drive-ins. Those venues disappeared in the 1980s and 90s as the whole movie industry became corporatized. But the success of recent extreme horror films indicates that there is still a place for gory showmanship. The Terrifier series is very much in the tradition of Blood Feast and the unrated theatrical release of those movies and others demonstrates that the independent and carnivalistic spirit that defined Herschell Gordon Lewis is very much alive.
Sources
I want to acknowledge the books Herschell Gordon Lewis, Godfather of Gore: The Films by Randy Palmer and The Godfather of Gore Speaks: Herschell Gordon Lewis Discusses His Films by Lewis with Andrew J. Rausch as well as the documentary Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore and the bonus content of the Arrow Video Blu-ray box set The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast.
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