Herschell Gordon Lewis’ chosen filmmaking aesthetic was more or less a marketing decision. Lewis started directing feature films in the late 1950s, putting out a few cheap exploitation flicks with lurid titles like Living Venus, Bell, Bare, and Beautiful, and the hilariously monikered Boin-n-g! While these films did make money, Lewis actively sought that one special something to set his films apart from his contemporaries. His solution was simple and elegant: up the gore by a factor of fifty. Stage blood and gore effects were incredibly inexpensive, you see, and Lewis saw no reason not to include as much of said things as possible.
As such, Lewis began directing a series of incredibly bloody, dark, and nonsensical gore films, and in the process, inadvertently created an entire subgenre unto itself: The splatter film. Lewis took tiny amounts of money, made a few cheap flicks for the grindhouse crowd, and managed to change the face of what was deemed permissible in cinema. All of a sudden, people were getting their eyeballs ripped out on camera. Holes were bored through torsos. Limbs and heads were hacked off with merry abandon. In one notable Lewis-filmed sequence, a person was placed inside a rain barrel that had been hammered all throughout with nails and then rolled down a hill in what might amount to a hillbilly iron maiden.
B.I. & L. Releasing Group
Lewis was certainly an auteur, very much along the lines of Russ Meyer or John Waters, who pursued his aesthetic interests while remaining blissfully dismissive of all notions of standardized good taste. This, paired with the marketing savvy of Roger Corman. Lewis knew how to sell a film. He would lure audiences into the theater with the promise of an extremity hitherto unseen on the big screen. However, unlike most B-movie hucksters of his era, Lewis actually made good on the promise.
Lewis continued to direct films throughout the 1960s and into the early ’70s, eventually making one full-blown pornographic film in 1972 (Black Love) before retiring from filmmaking to become a marketing guru. Lewis spent the next 30 years authoring dozens of books on effective marketing practices, how to write good ad copy and other “insider” tomes for the publicity industries. One can only imagine what his motivational lectures must have been like, as one assumes he would show clips from his movies to rooms full of suits and pencil-pushers. In the 1990s, he founded his own benign-sounding advertising firm, Communicomp.
In 2002, Lewis returned to filmmaking with a sequel to his 1963 masterpiece Blood Feast, and began to actively participate in the cult of hero worship that had sprung up around him. Notably, cult New York filmmaker Frank Henenlotter co-directed a 2010 documentary film about Lewis called Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore. People like John Waters, Frank Henenlotter, and Rob Zombie were created or influenced by Lewis.
Lewis died today at the age of 87. His legacy will live on in the bloody hearts of underground horror fans everywhere.
Slideshow | Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Essential Films:
Top Image: Something Weird Video
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
Herschell Gordon Lewis
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Blood Feast (1963)
Infamously one of the Video Nasties, Blood Feast is about a mad Egyptian with giant eyebrows (Mal Arnold) who uses the corpses of human women as fodder for his catering business. He sees the cannibal feasts as sacrifices to the goddess Ishtar. Arnold's overacting is a highlight. Image: Box Office Spectaculars
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Scum of the Earth! (1963)
The first film in a subgenre referred to as “roughies” (nothing to do with the fish), Scum of the Earth! featured implied rough sex, and an extremely sleazy tone of near-pornographic luridness. Somehow, Lewis made this fun to watch. Image: Box Office Spectaculars
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Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)
Perhaps a prototype for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Two Thousand Maniacs! is about a group of ignorant cityfolk who travel to a remote Southern town only to learn that the entire town is involved in a carnival of murder. Imagine if an entire village was related to Leatherface. The film was remade/sequelized in 2005 as 2001 Maniacs. As is usually the case, the remake isn't as notable. Image: Box Office Spectaculars
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Monster A Go-Go! (1965)
Lewis is not credited as the director of this film, and it's easy to see why: It might be one of the worst monster movies ever made. But it's so baffling, one can help but be kind of hypnotized. Monster A Go-Go! was featured prominently on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the show's makers maintain that it is the worst movie they have ever seen. And they've seen a lot. That's no small feat. There was no monster. Image: B.I. & L. Releasing Group
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Color Me Blood Red (1965)
This is considered to be the third part in Lewis' “Blood Trilogy,” a series that includes Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!. In it, a mad painter uses human blood as paint. It all goes how you might expect, but it's more enjoyable than you might expect. Image: Box Office Spectaculars
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Something Weird (1967)
The film that gave Something Weird Video its name is just as baffling as you might expect. It's about a disfigured man who develops psychic powers, makes a marriage deal with a sexy young lady (who appears as an old crone only to his eyes), and gets involved in LSD somehow. This is perhaps Lewis' best, weirdest movie. Image: Something Weird Video
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A Taste of Blood (1967)
Lewis considered A Taste of Blood to be his magnum opus, running, as it does, 117 minutes (while most of his catalogue clocks in at about 80). A sequel to Dracula, the film is about a man who drinks magical brandy, becomes a vampire, and sets out on a quest to kill off the descendants of Dr. Van Helsing. Image: Creative Film Enterprises, Inc.
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The Wizard of Gore (1970)
A film that doesn't understand hypnotism, The Wizard of Gore is about a mad stage magician who hypnotizes women on stage, and then rips their bodies apart for an appalled audience. He then restores the women's bodies, and they walk away okay. Then, later in the evening, they literally fall apart. The dismemberment sequence will make you squirm. It was remade in 2007 with Crispin Glover and The Suicide Girls. Image: Mayflower Pictures
