Why "Blood Feast"? Some thoughts and memories by Father Geek
It isn't often outside of film school that one gets a chance to see really seminal films on the big screen. You know, the movies that changed all of the films that followed them. 1903's "The Great Train Robbery" was one of those. Outdoor scene changes just didn't occur before it introduced 7 of them. "The Battleship Potemkin" is another. Before this 1925 Russian classic, editing was just what you did to put bits of film together. Afterwards, editing was used to tell the story, to charge emotion, and compress time. In 1927 the "Jazz Singer" introduced us to all singing, all talking motion pictures. Then in 1940 "Fantasia" was the pioneer of multichannel stereophonic theater sound. Real seminal films. There is a group of films that rest a hair below the ones mentioned above and their brothers in vision. One of them might well be 1940's "Doctor Cyclops", noteworthy for it's special effects and the fact that it is the 1st color science fiction feature. Another, though more recent, is Herschell Gordon Lewis' gore fest, the classic "Blood Feast".
I first saw "Blood Feast" in the summer of 1966 when I was a junior advertising major in college. A local Drive-in was going to show a dusk till dawn HORROR-THON. 6 or 7 (maybe more) of us guys decided to give it a try, we didn't even know the names of the movies, we didn't care. We filled a couple of coolers with cheap brew, snagged a few dozen donuts, jumped in 3 cars full of fold-up lawn chairs, and struck out for the Longhorn Drive-in. We would never be the same again.
1st on the line-up was a fistful of sex exploitation trailers followed by a Roadrunner Cartoon, then another of Lewis' breakout splatter films, 1964's "2000 Maniacs". We were shell-shocked. None of us had ever seen anything like it and we were caught totally off guard in the same way your grandmother would be if she stumbled across a hardcore sex flick. This was followed by another 1964 film, "I Eat Your Skin". Which was followed by 65's "Bloody Pit of Horror". The beer was disappearing, but most of the donuts were still there when the 4th feature begin to roll. It was something called "10,000 feet of Bloody Guts". Oh, My, God!!! We were dying. How could they make these movies, why? Why didn't we just leave? We couldn't. Texas faux macho forced us to stay. No one wanted to be the 1st to drive away, so we sat, mute witnesses to horror after horror after horror. The beer was gone! Most all of the donuts remained. We just weren't very hungry. We checked our watches, it wouldn't be lasting much longer. Then, when we thought we had been subjected to the worst imagery we would ever see, "BLOOD FEAST" dripped from the giant outdoor screen. It was 4am, the beer was wearing off, and I was about to see images so shocking for the times that they are still firmly planted in my head today, over 30 years later, even though I have never seen the film since. That is until tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, with special Tongue Sandwiches.
I felt it was my duty as Father Geek to make sure Harry attended this rare presentation of the grand daddy of the glutted gore genre. Created in 1963 by the self- described "Guru of Gore" this film broke all the rules of bloodletting in cinema and it did it in vivid color and long lingering shots. He may have put Playboy playmates in the film but Lewis knew that blood was his real star. Is this a really good movie, is it well written, or well constructed? No it isn't. Well, is there great photography, or outstanding music? No there isn't. How about the effects and makeup? No, not really very good. Why then, why go see it? Because without "Blood Feast" and "2000 Maniacs" there might never have been a "Night of the Living Dead" and without that there may never have been a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", or a "Halloween", or the "Gates of Hell", and without them there may never have been "Scream". Its a true landmark film, and weather you like it's genre or not it has changed cinema, all of cinema, forever. Without Herschell Gordon Lewis' pioneer rule breaking Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, George Romero, Lucio Fulci, and even Quentin Tarantino might well have found the doors closed to their styles of film making, and we would be the poorer for it.
So thanks and a toast of blood red wine to Tim and the rest of the Alamo crew, you're bringing rare gems, celluloid jewels into the light for new generations of film fans and your doing it with style and loads of fun.
Father Geek
