Blood Feast (

1963

) ½

What does it take for a film to be banned for obscenity two decades after its original release? Keep in mind that we’re not talking about the gap between the 1980s and the 2000s where horror films became significantly less graphic and disturbing, but rather the gap between 1963 and 1983. A gap where cinematic violence went from, Psycho (1960) to Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985). What film from the early 1960s could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with such titans of sleaze as Cannibal Holocaust (1980), The Last House on the Left (1972), Antropophagus (1980), and SS Hell Camp (1977)? You can be damned sure we’re not talking about The Birds (1963) or X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963). No, it’s the one and only Blood Feast, the primogenitor of the whole damn splatter subgenre and the film with the dubious distinction of being by far the oldest film on the Video Nasties list (with the closest rivals The Nasty Ones (1968) and The Night of the Living Dead (1968) coming out half a decade later). No small feat for a film made with pocket change ($24,000 being minuscule even in 1963 dollars) by a director and crew whose previous work was limited to softcore pornography.

The director in question is, of course, the godfather of gore himself Herschell Gordon Lewis, thought at this time he was just another guy making nudie cuties at the fringes of the cinematic industry. Of course, the early 1960s were a tough time to make nudie cuties, as by this time the burgeoning pornographic film industry was beginning to give serious competition, and moreover, nudie cuties had always been dull as dishwater. As soon as there was a chance to see tits in literally anything else the genre was all but doomed. Lewis did not have the editing talent of a Radley Metzger or the personality of a Russ Meyer, so he had little chance of making this tripe marketable, and it seems he wasn’t particularly interested. What he did have though was a keen insight into the next big thing, and a screening of Psycho (1960) got him thinking: ‘What if we do the same thing as Hitchcock, but show all gore of the killing? And maybe throw in a couple of nude women to boot.’ It’s a formula so simple and so effective that it can still put butts into cinema seats six decades later.

So, naturally, the film begins with a lady stripping down to her remarkably unflattering mid-century underwear, hoping in the bathtub (presumably so Lewis could claim with a straight face that it wasn’t a total knock-off of Psycho’s famous shower scene), before being murdered in a gruesome fashion by some weirdo who seemingly teleported into the room with her. The killer starts by gouging out her eye and holding up the bloody, gore-covered knife in plain view of the camera before he gets to work sawing off her leg. The realistic gore effects here are achieved in what has to be the crudest and most effective method I’ve ever seen. It seems that Lewis just raided the local butcher shop and repurposed left-over bits of offal and carcasses as movie props, and covered them in a goopy slather of fake blood. I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work, the gore effects here are not only extremely realistic but deeply unpleasant to boot.

With the homage/knock-off of Psycho (1960) out of the way, it’s time to set the stage with an exposition dump, this one delivered by a couple of cops. As it so happens, the murderer we saw in the introduction is a vicious serial killer that has been terrorizing the city for weeks. So far there has been a whole string of murders, all beautiful young women, and each time the killer has taken a different body part or organ. The cops have yet to realize that all these women have a common connection, they are members of a book club specializing in ancient Egyptian mythology. The single men in my readership should keep this in mind, all the hotties are into Hellenistic cults. Somehow, the cops have completely failed to make this basic connection, even when the latest victim’s sole social obligation is her membership in this book club.

Of course, the audience doesn’t need to do any detective work to figure out who the killer is, we saw him in the first scene. It’s not long before we know he’s named Fuad Ramses and he runs an exotic catering business. The only mystery left is why his eyebrows look so fake, but that sadly is one question the film won’t be answering. Ramses is killing girls, and taking bits from them so he can combine them all in the Blood Feast of Ishtar (the Egyptian goddess of love roughly corresponding to the Greek Aphrodite or the Roman Venus). Before long he’s on the move again, this time tearing the brains out of a young girl who was recreating From Here to Eternity (1953) with her creepy boyfriend (he tells her to “Prove you Love Me” in a sinister tone that would make me think he’s the real killer if I hadn’t already watched Ramses hack a woman’s leg off).

It’s at this point that the film introduces us to our protagonist, Suzette Fremont played by Connie Mason, the previous month’s playboy centerfold (Lewis’ history in softcore pornography had not been completely abandoned when he made the switch to horror). Suzette is just a regular girl with a passion for ancient Egyptian history and a burgeoning romance with Detective Pete Thornton, one of the cops currently failing to catch Ramses. The pair go to a lecture on the Egyptian cult of Ishtar and the odious ritual of the Blood Feast, where young girls would be carved up and choice bits of their flesh offered to the goddess in a form of ritual cannibalism. Incidentally, the professor delivering the lecture does so while flanked by goofy statues and in front of a huge mural of hieroglyphics. It looks like he’s hosting a sub-par Egyptian-themed game show rather than lecturing on academic topics. Building this bizarre set is one of the stranger expenditures that Lewis opted for with his meager budget.

I suspect Pete is only bothering to attend these lectures so he can have a shot at getting his hand up Suzette’s skirt as if he paid the slightest bit of attention he’d probably notice that certain aspects of the Blood Feast ritual bear an unusual resemblance to the case he’s currently investigating. Particularly the way the priest would remove certain portions of the victims’ bodies and prepare them for the charnel feast. The fact that he eagerly offers to drive her home and then parks on the side of some deserted road for a little heavy petting only fortifies my theory.

Still, the police incompetence will continue, as they blunder about without any leads until one of Ramses’ victims manages to survive her encounter with the killer. Sure, she’s lost half her face, and is mortally wounded but before she manages to choke out a single word: “Etar” before finally expiring. Even then, the police are left utterly befuddled until Pete remembers the lecture about Ishtar and realizes that this was the word the sole survivor was trying to say. Too bad that it’s taken him so long that Ramses now has everything he needs to complete the Blood Feast, and he’s just about to deliver it to Fremonts at Suzette’s birthday party. He just needs one more sacrifice: a young woman’s heart and Ramses thinks that Suzette’s will do nicely.

Aside from all the graphic gore and occasional sex appeal, the chief draw here is the laughably bad acting. Presumably, Lewis scoured the local community theaters in search of the film’s remarkably large supporting cast. These actors give the film a faintly surreal tinge. Theater actors can’t rely on close-ups and careful camera angles to convey their subtler emotions, when they act they have to deliver their emotions with enough force that it’s obvious what they’re feeling even for the guys in the cheap seats. Professional theater actors usually have enough craft to modify their performance when they are put in front of a camera, but matures like the ones featured in Blood Feast have no such skillset. As a result, everyone in Blood Feast feels like they are slightly mentally deficient even when handling mundane day-to-day interactions. It becomes downright ridiculous when any of them are asked to grieve for one of the murdered girls, something that happens quite regularly.

The overacting from all the extras just makes the odd joke come across in all the sharper relief. When for instance, the cops inform Mrs. Freemont that the food for her daughter’s birthday dinner is actually human remains she responds with an aww shucks and “I guess the guests will just have to have hamburgers.” It’s moments like this where you begin to appreciate what John Waters saw in the film when he borrowed aspects of it for his dark comedy Serial Mom (1994).

Outside of that, Blood Feast boasts an original soundtrack that can only really be compared to Mesa of Lost Women (1953). While the bizarre musical cues here are nowhere near as loud or distracting as what was in the earlier film they do frequently result in moments of unintended hilarity. The most notable instance of this happens early on in the film the soundtrack breaks out in a drumroll and the audience is left wondering what the hell it’s building up to. The dramatic crescendo in question is the reveal of a newspaper telling us about a murder we just witnessed in the previous scene. Then there is the moment where the soundtrack inserts a trombone slide as the killer slides a knife between a woman’s ribs and cuts out her heart. Quite frankly, I’m speechless. The soundtrack was composed by Lewis himself, who was about as experienced a composer as he was a filmmaker at this point, which explains some of these more ridiculous decisions.

For film historians, Blood Feast is an interesting case study. It sits neatly at a crossroads for American horror cinema. On the one hand, it is a gore-soaked psychological horror film about a crazed, knife-wielding lunatic carving up young women. It’s an admitted imitator of Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and a predecessor not only to gruesome grindhouse fare like Maniac (1980), mainstream horror-cheese like Friday the 13th (1980), and even bloody thrillers like Silence of the Lambs (1991). On the other hand, it’s also a story of an Egyptian priest seeking to honor his pagan god. The kind of wrath of the Pharaoh's plot that wouldn’t be out of place in The Mummy (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1940), or the deliberately retrograde hammer adaptation: The Mummy (1959). In being neither fish nor fowl, Blood Feast retains a charm all its own, that seems at once modern and at once hopelessly dated. Sure, a film like Targets (1968) might better capture the changing landscape of horror films in the 1960s, but Blood Feast is more interesting because it does so not out of a conscious decision but seemingly by accident.