Stephen King has been crowned the King of Horror for a reason. The best-selling author intimately understands the vignettes of terror that have the power to induce fear and anxiety within the human mind. Banking on this expertise, King often takes to Twitter to recommend a horror title or two and highlight overlooked genre gems from time to time. Sometimes, he even tweets about movies he doesn’t like, like that one time when King mentioned the only movie he ever walked out of as an adult. In a 2021 tweet of a similar flavor, King name-dropped the worst horror movie he has ever seen:
“What is the worst horror movie you ever saw? For me, BLOOD FEAST.”
The characteristically blunt nature of King’s statement might feel a bit too scathing at first, but “Blood Feast” undoubtedly lives up to its infamy. Not a competent horror film by any stretch of the imagination, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ “Blood Feast” enjoyed unimaginable success on release due to purely circumstantial reasons, as its popularity had little to do with its limited merits. Having said that, Lewis’ film takes on a historical significance that is impossible to ignore: it is the first American splatter film, pushing the boundaries of onscreen blood, sex, and gore to its limits.
When the film was released in 1963, the Hays Code had already started to taper off, and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” had begun to shape and popularize the slasher genre. With audience sensibilities more receptive to onscreen violence and shock value than ever before, Lewis made the calculated effort to make a film that would shatter the threshold of what was deemed acceptable on the big screen. To put it simply, “Blood Feast” is an exploitation horror movie that verges on being incoherent, but it’s also an undeniably important film in the history of horror cinema.
Blood Feast established the splatter genre
The plot of “Blood Feast” — if you can even call it that — centers on Fu’Ad Ramses (Mal Arnold), a serial killer who targets women and harvests their organs to resurrect the Egyptian goddess Ishtar. Detective Pete Thornton (William Kerwin) is assigned to the case, and he notes that bodily mutilation is a consistent pattern shared by the victims, whose crime scenes always look like a bloodbath. Ramses’ motivation is to concoct a “blood feast” with the blood and limbs of the murdered women, but we are never told why he’s so obsessed with resurrecting an Egyptian deity and would go to such extreme lengths. Everything that happens during the film’s 67-minute runtime is distastefully schlocky and over-the-top, its depravity being too mean-spirited to take on an ironic or satirical flavor.
Lewis was acutely aware that “Blood Feast” was one-of-a-kind, in the sense that nobody before this had dared to shamelessly situate exploitation as a horror flick’s primary selling point. The marketing strategy employed was a conscious effort to generate lurid hype: barf bags were handed out during the premiere, and Lewis advertised the film as a turning point in horror history. “Nothing so shocking in the annals of horror” was plastered across the posters, and this sentiment was backed up by the relentless gore and explicit salaciousness (which overshadows the narrative on purpose). This clearly worked in the film’s favor, as it racked up $4 million at the box office against its meager $24,500 budget.
What “Blood Feast” did manage to do was normalize extreme onscreen violence to an extent, as it proved that there was an audience for machete-wielding killers who hacked away at bodies without remorse. Ramses, no matter how hollow or unrefined his character may be, emerged as a precursor to iconic horror antagonists like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. The only difference is that “Blood Feast” is not actually good, it’s merely the first of its kind.
This post was originally published on here
