That popular horror subgenre, the gore movie, first appeared on American screens in July of 1963 with the release of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Z-grade horror film Blood Feast, which reveled in unflinching onscreen violence and its visceral consequences. True to its title, blood did flow, while exposed intestines and internal organs glistened, limbs were crudely severed and people died with their eyes wide open. Moviegoers had never seen anything like it and critics (those who deigned to review the film in the first place) were united in their contempt, with one wag slamming the production as "amateur night in the butcher shop." Four months later, US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had his brains blown out in front of spectators gathered for a public appearance in Dallas, Texas – a horrific moment captured on frame 312 of the infamous "Zapruder film," an 8mm home movie that preserved the killing for posterity. The impact of the mortal injury spattered the motorcycle cops riding behind JFK and even First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy sitting beside him with blood and gray matter. It was an occurrence that, had it happened in a narrative film, could only have come from the mind of Herschell Gordon Lewis, a former director of nudist reels making the career jump to exhibiting extreme violence. (In 1963, "Bloody Sam" Peckinpah, whose reliance on filmic brutality would characterize Hollywood filmmaking toward the end of the decade, was still directing benign episodes of The Dick Powell Show.) Of course, there is no real connection between these milestones (one cinematic, one historic) apart from the coincidental fallout that nothing in America would ever be the same.

At the end of the opening credits for Terence Fisher's Dracula (US: Horror of Dracula, 1958), the United Kingdom's Hammer Studios spattered a bit of bright red stage blood onto the nameplate of the Undying Count's stone sepulcher – a gory non sequitur communicating the warning that all bets would be off for the following 90 minutes. The early "Hammer Horrors" (starting with their Technicolor take on Frankenstein in 1957) polarized critics expecting the tame shudders of the Universal classic monster cycle but primed strong-stomached horror fans for a gauntlet of taboo-shattering shocks. While Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein had collected brains but left the rest of his "To Do" list to the imagination, Peter Cushing's amoral Baron F. blithely scrounged for limbs and organs in plain sight. Lewis and producer David F. Friedman had likely seen these widely-distributed and hotly-discussed films and (like their Egyptian UnSub Fuad Ramses) taken the best bits for their own use, tripling the amount of Hammer's arterial spray for the opening credits of Blood Feast. The infamous shower murder that occurs a third of the way into Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was another inspiration, prompting Lewis and Friedman to stage their first murder scene in a blue-tiled motel bathroom, against which the victim's outstretched hand slides lifelessly in a manner made immortal by Janet Leigh. If Blood Feast couldn't match the production values of the films that urged it on, it seemed hell-bent on bettering the instruction in wretched excess. George Romero's black-and-white Night of the Living Dead (1968) is often credited with turning the tide of American horror and reflecting a darkening national state of mind but Blood Feast did it five years earlier...and in color.

Shot cheaply (for $24,000) and quickly (in just nine days), the production had to make do with actual locations – mostly motels on Miami Beach – which give the setting a sterility perfect for a depiction of middle class America in the acquisitive "Camelot" era. The repression of the characters/victims is perfectly illustrated by the showroom perfection of their homes; even the stilted acting hints of a population burying their untidy emotions and passions with Brylcream and Playtex. Into this lifeless milieu the predations of Fuad Ramses work like a Deux ex machina, exposing the lie of the American Dream by hacking its acquisitive complacency to the bone. If Harpo Marx had made a film about Wisconsin serial killer/cannibal Ed Gein (whose true crimes inspired both Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974), he might have looked like Mal Arnold, who plays Ramses as an ungainly "funny little man," a method to his madness. Yet for all his victims, Ramses is no Hannibal Lecter; his powers of hypnosis allow for a single application (squandered on getting a patron of his exotic food store to agree to the catered affair she came in to arrange), forcing him to cosh subsequent victims over the head. His red curtained inner sanctum lighted by aluminum Tiki torches and the Goddess Ishtar represented by a department store mannequin sporting two coats of Rust-Oleum Gold, the limping Ramses is no less pathetic or disturbing in his cobbled-together catechism than the Miami tight-asses he hunts as ingredients for his Egyptian feast.

Producer: David F. Friedman, Stanford S. Kohlberg, Herschell Gordon Lewis
Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Screenplay: Allison Louise Downe, David F. Friedman, Herschell Gordon Lewis
Cinematography: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Film Editing: Frank Romolo, Robert L. Sinise
Music: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Cast: William Kerwin (Detective Peter Thornton), Mal Arnold (Fuad Ramses), Connie Mason (Suzette Fremont), Scott H. Hall (Police Captain), Lyn Bolton (Dorothy Fremont), Christy Foushee (Trudy), Ashlyn Martin (Marcy), Gene Courtier (Tony), Astrid Olson (Motel Victim), Louise Kamp (Janet Blake/Egyptian Sacrificial Victim), Al Golden (Dr. Flanders), Jerome Eden (Egyptian High Priest), Herschell Gordon Lewis (Radio Announcer).
C-67m.

by Richard Harland Smith