Blood Feast (1963)

Tagline: ‘Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror.’
UK Running Time: 67 Minutes

Film Quality: 2/5
Gore Content: 4/5
Entertainment Value: 4/5
Originality: 4.5/5

Introduction

Following the sad news of director Herschell Gordon Lewis’s death at the ripe old age of 90 it seems a good time to talk about his most infamous film, widely regarded as the first ever splatter movie and the oldest film to make the UK’s notorious ‘Video Nasties’ list. About as low budget as you can imagine (just south of $25,000!) but highly influential, the story and reason for being was purely down to stuffing in as many gruesome and graphic images as they thought they could get away with at the time which, as it turned out, was quite a lot. This was no Hammer movie, although it is incredibly hammy. It gave audiences something it had never really seen before…a whole barrel of rouge!

Yep...definitely insane!

In a nutshell

An insane caterer (!) plans to resurrect the ancient Egyptian Goddess Ishtar by collecting body parts to prepare for a bizarre ‘blood feast’ by murdering young virgins and hacking them up, much to the bemusement of the local police force and Mrs Fremont, who was expecting mini sausages on sticks. What follows is some pretty full on gore, bright red blood and a few laughs – this is, after all, not to be taken seriously which, thankfully, the cast and crew duly obliged.

She was a headbanger...

What’s good about it?

It’s the blood again! Let’s not forget that this film was made whilst ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ was still hugely popular on UK television screens, audiences were simply not conditioned to seeing this level of violence. You witness limbs hacked off, tongues removed at the throat and brains scooped out of scalped heads. You see close ups of broken and skinned bodies, bloody limbs, faceless heads…all in glorious technicolour. It’s still pretty shocking because the quality of film and fashion design places it firmly in the late-50s/early 60s so you don’t expect images like this thrust upon you in that context.

One thing that smashes you over the head with a glass vase as soon as you press play is how utterly terrible the film is in almost every way! Why am I putting this inn the ‘What’s good about it?’ section? Because it’s undoubtedly at the heart of what makes this film so enjoyable. The music sounds like a one man band blowing a trumpet out of his arse whilst banging a drum (incidentally, if you thought it was impossible for a drum to be of out of tune then think again!) at the other end. The acting is so wooden you wonder why the detectives didn’t round up the local lumberjack as a suspect and the dialogue is so tedious, long winded and slow that if they’d spoken at a normal speed the movie would have just about scraped 50 minutes.

I genuinely have no idea what this is!

But you forgive all of that because it’s such an honest film. If you’ve ever been frustrated with those older movies that depicted violent acts and didn’t show it, including such auteurs as Val Lewton Alfred Hitchcock and Terence Fisher, then you certainly won’t be with Lewis’ flick. Yes, they were better films but cheated the audience with the promise of violence that never delivered. A look of terror, an off screen glance of disgust, a camera pan in the opposite direction…Gordon-Lewis took that away, stuck the camera firmly in the middle of the action and screamed at the audience “Look…this is what you’ve been imagining throughout all of those other movies. Horrible, isn’t it!”. For that reason ‘Blood Feast’, despite almost everything in front of your eyes causing brain fatigue, will forever be regarded, quite rightly so, as a horror classic.

What about the bad?

As I’ve said above, pretty much everything! Music, acting, script, storyline, logic, production values, editing, pacing, direction…all abject but mercifully short. It’s like the cinema equivalent of blancmange…nothing about it is good and it probably should have stayed in the past, but every now and again you can’t help giving it a go, even if you feel a bit queasy before, during and after.

Any themes?

Some vague ramblings about Egyptology and you could argue that they were taking the staples of Grand Guignal theatre and thrusting it straight into a cinema setting but no, there were no delusions of grandeur going on with this film other than the knowledge that they were doing something that had never been done before, ever.

Would you trust this man with a wedding breakfast?

Release History

Panned on its initial release by a completely bemused and perplexed audience who had no idea what they were letting themselves in for, it was one of those early films that revelled in those inventive publicity stunts such as vomit bags and disclaimers.

Astra Video released an uncut print in 1982 which very quickly fell foul of the DPP and was one of the 39 films banned outright which didn’t see another release until Tartan brought out an 18 rated DVD in 2001. It was cut by 23 seconds (as with ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, because it had been prosecuted within 10 years, compulsory cuts were needed) which despite all of the on screen gore was to remove repeated whipping! It was finally released uncut in 2005 through Odeon, more recently featuring in the ‘Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast’ box set in 2016.

Cultural Impact

Massive! As the first of its kind, how can we possibly speculate how long it might have taken for somebody else to splat the screen with brains, and who would have done it if Lewis hadn’t made ‘Blood Feast’. The fact that he kind of made a hash of it didn’t really matter, it took off and paved the way for the likes of George A. Romero to fling full on gore at us in his seminal ‘Night of the Living Dead’.

Lewis himself made much better films later in his career, also featuring copious amounts of blood and guts, most notably the fun ‘Two Thousand Maniacs’, brilliant ‘Wizard of Gore’ and ‘Colour Me Blood Red’. The 70s was a boom year for horror movies as we were bombarded with visceral movies such as ‘The Exorcist’, ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead’…yes it was ‘Night of the Living Dead’ that inspired those films but would that have come about were it not for the earlier blueprint that Lewis forged with this feature?

It was the first splatter film…Hollywood directors Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone started out with cheap and gory flicks, Tarantino has cited Lewis as an inspiration, his films have had a massive impact on today’s cinema, particularly the 90s and early 00s propensity for ‘torture porn’ such as ‘Hostel’ and the ‘Saw’ set pieces which were there purely for the purpose of letting the red stuff flow…precisely the philosophy behind ‘Blood Feast’.

Final Thoughts

"I'm doing this for you Ishtar..."

It’s shocking in every sense of the word but as Lewis himself once 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’. Made with good humour but little else it will forever be a piece of film history, treasured by many and discussed at length. Thanks Herschell…your legacy will forever live on!

Memorable Quotes

Captain: “He died a fitting end for the garbage that he was”

Ramses: “Have you ever had…..an Egyptian feast?”

Captain: “I’m afraid this feast is evidence of murder.”
Mrs Fremont: “Oh dear…the guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight.”

Pete: “The killer must have thought she was dead, it’s a miracle she wasn’t.”
Captain: “Well, she is now.”

You’ll like this if you enjoyed…

‘Blood Diner’, ‘Bad Taste’, ‘Evil Dead’, any other Lewis film!