The Daily Telegraph

Herschell Gordon Lewis

‘Godfather of gore’ responsibl­e for ‘splatter’ movies such as Blood Feast and The Gore Gore Girls

- (billed as “the first nudist

HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS, who has died aged 87, was credited with inventing the “splatter” genre of horror film with works that revelled in full-colour gore with a dash of titillatio­n, including Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs! and The Gore Gore Girls.

Blood Feast, which Lewis directed in 1963, concerns a club-footed Egyptian caterer who dismembers nubile young women and adds their limbs to a dish he is preparing in honour of a deity called Ishtar.

Considered the first splatter film, it introduced many of the genre’s distinctiv­e features – chiefly lashings of bright-red gore and gruesome special effects with an emphasis on mutilation. The visceral force of the images was what mattered to Lewis, not the quality of the acting. The film was shot in suburban Miami in fourand-a-half days.

“I’ve often compared Blood Feast to a Walt Whitman poem,” Lewis said many years later. “It was no good, but it was the first of its kind.” He also claimed it was the first film in which “people died with their eyes open”.

After attending the premiere at the Bellevue Drive-In, Peoria, Illinois, Lewis’s wife pronounced Blood Feast “vomitous”. The director and his producer, David Friedman, distribute­d airline sick bags to be handed out at cinemas labelled “You May Need This When You See Blood Feast”.

The film appalled most critics, with one describing it as “an insult even to the most puerile and salacious audiences” and “a fiasco in all department­s”. But it was a huge hit in the comparativ­ely unregulate­d drivein market, making several million dollars in its first few years for an initial outlay estimated at $24,500.

He followed Blood Feast in 1964 with Two Thousand Maniacs!, which was even more repulsive in its violence than its predecesso­r. In a plot inspired by Brigadoon, Yankee tourists get lost in the southern swamplands and find themselves in a redneck town, whose swivel-eyed inhabitant­s promptly set upon them and elaboratel­y torture and kill them. Matthew Sweet in The Independen­t hailed the film as “the Citizen Kane of drive-in schlock”.

The following year, with Color Me Blood Red, Lewis completed what connoisseu­rs described as his “Trilogy of Blood”. It featured another psychopath, an artist this time, who paints with the blood of his victims.

The films of the “godfather of gore”, as Lewis became known, influenced later cult film-makers such as John Waters, as well as Quentin Tarantino, but he had no artistic pretension­s and professed himself amazed that anyone took his films seriously. “Anybody can aim a camera,” he said. “That doesn’t require any talent… To get people to say, ‘I want to see that’, you have to have a mastery of primitive psychology. I wasn’t a director, I just wanted to get people into the theatre.”

Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in Pittsburgh on June 15 1929. His father died when he was six and Herschell was brought up by his mother, who never remarried, in Chicago, where he went from high school to Northweste­rn University to take a master’s degree in Journalism and a doctorate in Psychology.

By the mid-1950s he was teaching English and Mass Communicat­ion at Mississipp­i State University, but in search of better paid work he gave this up to move into radio and television, and then advertisin­g copywritin­g.

It was David Friedman, a streetwise publicist and distributi­on agent turned independen­t film producer, who introduced Lewis to the profitable concept of the “one-reel nudie”. Together in the early 1960s they turned out a series of “nudie-cutie” pictures for screening in adult cinemas, including The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Goldilocks and the Three Bares musical”) and Boin-n-g!, a sex farce. But the market for erotic exploitati­on pictures was soon saturated, so the pair decided to add violence to the recipe.

“We were competing against MGM and Paramount,” Lewis recalled. “How could we get a theatre to book our pictures? The answer was to make the kind of movie that the major studios either would not or could not make. And here comes that lovely four-letter word ‘G-O-R-E’. The rest is history.”

Color Me Blood Red was Lewis’s last film with Friedman, but he carried on in the same low-budget, bad-taste vein with luridly titled pictures such as A Taste of Blood, The Gruesome Twosome, The Ecstasies of Women, She-Devils on Wheels and The Gore Gore Girls, his last film for 30 years.

He also directed two children’s features, a film on the theme of wifeswappi­ng and another on birth control.

Lewis was an entreprene­ur with varied business interests – in 1974 he went bankrupt and was charged with defrauding investors – and after moving out of film he became an advertisin­g-industry guru, running his own agency, Communi-comp, and publishing books on direct marketing.

In Chicago, in the early 1970, he got to know the critic of the Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, and they watched classic films together. “I never saw one of his movies or discussed it with him,” Ebert remembered. “Although [he] was notorious as the director of violent and blood-drenched exploitati­on films, I remember only a thoughtful lover of the movies.”

In 2002 Lewis was persuaded to make a sequel to his most famous work, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat.

He is survived by his wife, Margo, co-author with him of Everybody’s Guide to Plate Collecting, and by a son, a stepson and four stepdaught­ers.

Herschell Gordon Lewis, born June 15 1929, died September 26 2016

 ??  ?? Lewis: ‘ How could we get a theatre to book our pictures? Make the kind of movie that the major studios either would not or could not make. And here comes that lovely four-letter word G-O-R-E’
Lewis: ‘ How could we get a theatre to book our pictures? Make the kind of movie that the major studios either would not or could not make. And here comes that lovely four-letter word G-O-R-E’
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