Odd this day

15 June 1926

Cinematic history was made on this day — or, at least, set in motion — because Herschell Gordon Lewis was born, and he went on to create what Matthew Sweet called “gleefully savage” low-budget horror movies.

He started out making ‘nudie’ pictures, like ~ahem~ this one:

…but found they didn’t make enough money, because so many other people were doing the same thing. So he decided to invent splatter movies, beginning with Blood Feast, in which, Roger Ebert said:

a peculiar Miami Beach caterer murders hapless nubiles and prepares their organs and limbs as a tribute to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar.

It cost $24,500 to make, and made $7m. Or $30m. Or somewhere in between. Depends who you ask. Either way, Lewis (and the splatter movie) had arrived.

Happy birthday, "Blood Feast": digging into the guts of the very first "splatter" film | Features |…

It came out not long after the groundbreaking, but comparatively restrained (and, crucially, b/w) Psycho. This was in colour, and one scene showed someone having their tongue ripped out – the actress in question apparently cast because she had a mouth big enough to hold the sheep’s tongue used for the ‘effect’. You can see the trailer on YouTube, with its COMPLETELY SINCERE warning about taking impressionable young people out before it begins.

And you can see the whole damn thing on Daily Motion…

…but I have to tell you, it contains not much more gore than the trailer. Lewis was ‘selling the sizzle, not the steak’.

Next came his favourite of his works, Two Thousand Maniacs!

a rollicking tale of a confederate ghost town whose population rises from the grave every one hundred years to avenge the Yankee massacre of their settlement.

Some people took him seriously. Cahiers du Cinéma loved these two works, and declared Herschell Gordon Lewis “worthy of further study”. (“Yeah”, he noted. “That’s what they say about cancer.” He was, you may not be surprised to hear, more interested in money than art.)

In 1972, he made The Gore Gore Girls and then…

I’d include a plot summary for Gore Gore Girls, but if it doesn’t involve young women in peril, and probably in their underwear while in peril, and feature some unpleasant, exploitative, and clumsily staged deaths, I think we’ll all be surprised

…er, quit filmmaking for marketing. His gimmicks to promote his movies had included sick bags printed with

You might need this when you see ‘Blood Feast’.

…which he hired actors dressed as nurses to hand out in cinemas, so I think we can agree that it was in promotion that his skills really lay. The evidence does not suggest it was scriptwriting or direction.

Anyway, Lewis became a junk mail guru and public speaker, and what he knew about commemorative collectible plates could fill a book.

And, in fact, did:

So, basically, we have him to thank for the genre that gave us this:

So, you can argue among yourselves about whether it was a life well lived, but you can say he wasn’t boring.