Dissecting Slashers: Blood Feast (1963)

Cody digs into the original gore film.

BACKGROUND

Journalist and professor turned independent filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis and his producing partner David F. Friedman were dedicated to offering the movie-going public sights that the mainstream studios weren't providing. That’s why they made a series of "nudie cutie" sexploitation movies in the early ‘60s, because the studios weren’t showing the audience enough bare flesh. And that’s why, after seeing director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho, they decided to shift gears. Lewis felt that the film had cheated by holding back from showing the bloodshed during the shocking murder scenes. There are only glimpses of blood in that black and white film, because really showing the blood flow could have gotten the movie rejected by theatres, and it was too big of a production to risk that. Lewis and Friedman, on the other hand, could make a movie that showed bloodshed on a small enough budget that rejections wouldn’t be too harmful – and the project would have a high chance of being successful, because it would be delivering the blood and gore that the studios were afraid to show.

The duo scraped together a budget that was somewhere in the range of $24,500 to $60,000 (sources vary). They crafted a story for their gore movie, then had A. Louise Downe, who had worked with them on some of their nudie cutie projects, flesh it out into a very simple screenplay. Production took place in Miami, Florida – and it only took Lewis nine days of filming to get the movie in the can. 

Lewis improvised much of the special effects that the story was built around, using real animal organs procured from local butcher shops to stand in for the body parts of victims. He also came up with his own blood mixture, which included the stomach-relief medicine Kaopectate, resulting in a bright red liquid with an unusually thick consistency. 

The blood-splattered finished film is crudely put together, featuring some laughably bad acting and dialogue... but it served its purpose. Lewis viewed filmmaking as a business venture rather than an art form, so the packaging didn’t really matter. The movie’s sole purpose was to give viewers a gory spectacle, and that’s exactly what it does.

SETTING

As mentioned, filming took place in Miami, which is also the setting – but don’t expect it to get a whole lot of use out of the picturesque locale. Many of the scenes take place in either drab areas or inside closed rooms. We get scenes that take place in the homicide department, which are shot in one direction to show us a desk sitting in a corner. We also get to see the inside of a hospital room, the lead character’s house, a motel (and its rooms), and the villain’s catering business – where he has an idol of the ancient Egyptian goddess Ishtar, the mother of the veiled darkness, set up in a back room.

There’s a scene where the action shifts to a beach, but it takes place at night and is shrouded in darkness, so Lewis didn’t gain any ocean views from that portion of the shoot. The nicest looking location we get is a swimming pool in a peaceful residential area, which allows us to see some creepy action that takes place in the warm Florida sunshine.

KILLER

Mal Arnold plays caterer and homicidal madman Fuad Ramses – and his performance alone is enough to make this movie worth watching. Tasked with playing a cannibalistic killer, Arnold used his own unique, and some would say bizarre, approach to bringing the character to life. He makes goofball expressions and bugs his eyes out, and his appearance is made even more amusing by the fact that Arnold was younger than the character is meant to be, so an obvious layer of white has been plastered over his dark hair, including his Groucho Marx-esque eyebrows. The actor gave the character a limp for good measure, even though the climactic sequence involves Fuad running for his life. When you see how this guy moves, it’s clear that he’s not going to be able to get very far.

5000 years ago, Ishtar's followers would offer up human sacrifices to their deity, sacrificing female virgins to appease her and then feeding on their flesh and blood. Fuad’s devotion to the goddess compels him to stalk young women across Miami, killing them to harvest ingredients for the feast. His commitment to replicating the ancient rituals, as covered in the book Ancient Weird Religious Rites, causes him to collect a variety of grotesque trophies from his victims - a leg, a brain, a tongue. Despite all this, the absurdity of Arnold’s performance brings an unintentional campiness to the character, making him both unnerving and comically odd.  

VICTIMS 

This is not a film where you get to spend time with the victims and get to know them before they get attacked. They’re not really characters, they’re just bodies for Fuad to collect parts from. They’ll be introduced in one moment and killed off the next. A woman strips down and gets in a bathtub, and suddenly Fuad is there to hack her up. A girl is sitting on the beach with her boyfriend, and when they start making out, Fuad attacks. A woman has just gotten into her motel room when Fuad comes busting in. A girl frolics in the swimming pool with her friends... but when she leaves, Fuad knocks her out and takes her back to his catering business. We’re not meant to care about any of these people.

FINAL GIRL

There’s barely even any reason given to care about the final girl, Suzette Fremont. She’s played by June 1963 Playboy Playmate Connie Mason, who gives one of the most lifeless performances you could ever hope to see – quite a contrast to the over-acting that Mal Arnold does as Fuad Ramses. Mason had trouble remembering her lines, but she managed to get them out by the end of the day and demonstrates her ability to pose in most of her scenes. She did well enough to earn the $175 she was paid to be in the film.

Suzette is a student of Egyptian culture and attends a weekly lecture on ancient history. She has met her love interest, homicide detective Pete Thornton (William Kerwin) at these lectures, and is able to talk to him about how disturbed she is about the string of murders Pete has been investigating. The murders viewers know are being committed by Fuad. But there’s not much to her as a character, and she only ends up being the final girl because her mother has hired Fuad to provide an Egyptian feast for a dinner party she’s throwing for Suzette, not knowing what ingredients go into such a feast. She went to Fuad Ramses Exotic Catering because she wanted the dinner party to be something unusual that could end up becoming the talk of the town. Fuad recommends an Egyptian feast, and since Suzette is interested in Egyptian culture, her mom figures that would be the perfect choice. It helps that Fuad is able to do some hypnosis to make Mrs. Fremont even more agreeable.

Problem is, Suzette is the intended final sacrifice in Fuad’s ritual. Which technically makes her the final girl, even though she accomplishes nothing and is so unaware that she nearly gets herself sacrificed on purpose.

DEATHS

This is what Blood Feast is all about. The death scenes. The entire reason the movie was made in the first place was to show viewers a bunch of bloody kills. Each murder is as bloody and gross as Lewis could make it. A woman gets stabbed in the bathtub (which is probably a reference to the Psycho shower scene), then Fuad cuts one of her legs off. Another victim has her tongue ripped out of her mouth, an effect that was accomplished by having the actress stick a marinated sheep tongue in her mouth. The beach victim has her brain removed.

Lewis hadn’t figured out special effects well enough to show Fuad’s blades penetrating flesh, but he slathered his blood mixture on animal parts real well and was able to get his hands on a fake leg. The most violent blows we see on screen come when Fuad has a victim tied up by his Ishtar altar and whips her to death so he can collect blood from her wounds. We see the whip hitting the woman’s back, because that’s an easy effect to fake.

These bloody deaths seem quaint now, but they were something new and disgusting in 1963.

CLICHÉS

The set-up of a killer being motivated by ancient rituals might have been fresher at the time as well, but it’s something we’ve seen here and there ever since. We get the cliché of clueless authority figures who aren’t able to figure out what’s going on until it’s almost too late – but, of course, Pete cracks the case just in time for us to get the “narrowly averted final sacrifice” cliché. There’s also the helpless female victims cliché, as none of Fuad’s victims are able to fight back.

POSTMORTEM

When Blood Feast premiered in 1963, it was met with harsh criticism. Reviews called the film “inept” and “disgusting” – and since “disgusting” was what Lewis was going for, that label was a compliment. Critics weren’t pleased with it, but it found an enthusiastic audience at drive-ins and grindhouse theatres, becoming a cult hit. Its success inspired a wave of splatter films, establishing gore as a viable niche within horror cinema and earning Lewis the nickname of “The Godfather of Gore.”

Because it was the first of its kind, Blood Feast has earned a lasting place in horror history. Punk bands have referenced it and filmmakers continue to pay homage to its legacy. Joe Bob Briggs, a long-time fan, is so fond of the movie that he even tracked down some of the film’s shooting locations during a visit to Florida... only to find that they have been demolished and replaced by Trump properties. Lewis became a beloved figure in the horror community and decades later he would attend conventions where adoring fans celebrated his work, much to his surprise. 

Blood Feast may not be as polished as later slasher films, but its boldness and willingness to shock paved the way for the entire sub-genre. As Herschell Gordon Lewis once said, “It’s no good, but it’s the first of its type” - and sometimes, being first is all that matters.