Herschell Gordon Lewis revolutionised the Underground American horror movie with a series of lurid classics such as Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs. With these titles now on DVD release in their uncut versions from Tartan, Lewis talks exclusively about his movies with Xavier Mendik for kamera.co.uk
Prior to the gruelling cinematic excess of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in a time before splatter auteurs such as George Romero and Wes Craven turned the human body into a disposable artform, there was Herschell Gordon Lewis. The original pioneer of the American gore film, Lewis revolutionised underground horror with a series of lurid titles such as Blood Feast (1963), 2000 Maniacs (1965) and The Gore-Gore Girls (1972).
For those fortunate to have seen any Lewis productions, it is specific (splatter) scenes rather than the narrative as a whole which imprint themselves on the viewer's memory. In the case of his most infamous movie Blood Feast, it is the forced extraction of a female victim's tongue by a crazed killer that gained the film instant notoriety, as well as securing its long time outlaw status on the UK 'video nasty' list. 2000 Maniacs went further, with Lewis even concocting a series of fiendish torture weapons to be used by the crazed country bumpkins who populate the film. Most famously, these included a barrel full of spikes in which one poor unfortunate brillcreamed beefcake is forced to lie, before being rolled down a hill in order to maximise his suffering.
Although Herschell Gordon Lewis' films were clearly saturated with gouts of blood, they also contained a startling film style where bodily dismemberment jostling for attention alongside crimson clad film frames. In this respect, it comes as little surprise to find the title of his 1965 as Colour Me Blood Red. Although this tale revolves around a crazed artist who starts using blood instead of paint to create his works of art, the title applies as much to Lewis as to any of his crazed creations. While the typical Lewis production pushed the image track into frenzied and gruesome overload, his productions were also marked by high-pitched and hysterical soundtracks that the director frequently scored himself as a way of keeping production costs to a minimum. For instance, in Blood Feast, he composed a near tuneless, experimental bass drum score to accompany the devilish crimes of Fuad Ramses an 'exotic Egyptian caterer' who is using prime slices of American womanhood to revive his long dead love. For 2000 Maniacs, Lewis turned in a high tempo, high tension, hillbilly theme entitled 'The South's Gonna Rise Again'. This perfectly fitted the tale of a set of suburban thrill-seekers, who get waylaid and wasted by a town of Southern degenerates celebrating a centenary of local carnage.
Although Gordon Lewis' maverick production tendencies and quest to expose the viewer to new heights of visceral overload made him an easy target for critics, his movies do retain an archaic charm lacking from many recent splatter productions. Indeed, despite their swinging sixties locations, moods and design, the films appeared curiously dated as soon as they rolled out from the production lines of Lewis' long-time producer and associate David F. Friedman.
Arguably this is because in a period where American cinema was shifting towards increasing characterisation and complexity, Lewis' work was rooted in the very different traditions of theatrical excess and narrative suspension that defined 'primitive' silent cinema. For instance, Blood Feast contains many of the features associated with very early silent film: camera movement is minimal (an effect that is most marked in the a-typical construction of dialogue scenes), while characters frequently break the film's fictional illusion by looking directly into the lens. Equally, in his frequently grotesque and contorted realisation of the gestures of Fuad Ramses, actor Mal Arnold even emulates the 'facial expression movie' popular in the silent years. (As with Lewis' other films, Blood Feast even 'silences' the narrative's soundtrack and dialogue as if to underscore its basis in the traditions of early cinema.) While these features effectively doomed Lewis to the vanishing underground ghetto of exploitation and B-movies, his work retained a shocking vitality (re)captured on the current DVD collection of his movies on the Tartan Terror label.
Xavier Mendik: Your films are long associated with the underground American exploitation cinema. Do you think being outside the mainstream is central an 'underground' status?
Herschell Gordon Lewis: Well, let me give you the example of The Blair Witch Project. Is this an underground film? Well, clearly yes it is. It has every identifying characteristic: handheld camera, no star names, poor colour, and production values that are close to zero. All these features are professionally exploited so in this sense it is a masterpiece of exploitation. So what does that indicate? It indicates that what is actually on film is secondary to an audience perception of what they expect to see. Now the flip side of that is what happened when they made Blair Witch Project 2. Why was that a resounding failure? It was a resounding failure because the first film depended so much on hype. When the second one came along, they said it's probably going to be the same as the first, so the hype could no longer apply
Was the failure of Blair Witch II not also associated with the fact that it has a bigger budget and a more mainstream basis to it? It does seem to be the case that horror is never fully satisfying when its safe.
I would certainly agree with that. But from a filmmaker's point of view, we writhe in envy when we see big budget effects we could never have been able to afford. I look at some of the special effects that, say George Lucas's company can do and I think "Oh where was that when I was making my movies." Now it's possible to make a movie without people, it is possible to do all that and never have an actor on the set. The whole thing is now done in some computer world.
Is that a good or a bad thing?
Well, actually, those are the wrong adjectives to use. Is it effective? It's effective until like everything else it's overused. One reason why Blood Feast has survived was not that that it was well made. In the year 2001, no one can say that the acting in the film is very good, or indeed the special effects are good. But for its time, it was a breakthrough. For its time, it trod new ground. For its time, it provided effects that had not been seen before. Aristotle once said that drama provides a catharsis of the emotions and I sometimes think that our movies just provided a catharsis! Forget about the emotions!
Do you feel that being at the margins of film production assisted in making Blood Feast so disturbing?
If you can disturb an audience, without outraging the audience, then you have an absolute winner! If you outrage the audience, the word of mouth will kill you second time around. It is possible to disturb the audience; we did with Blood Feast. Here, the viewers did not come out of the theatre saying "What terrible acting!". What they said was "Did you see that tongue scene, I can't believe it!" I was talking to one fellow named Charlie Cooper. He owned a theatre in the ghetto section of Chicago. He made what I regard as the penultimate comment on Blood Feast. He said "I showed your picture, and there were these guys sitting there slashing the seats and shooting bullet holes in the screen. But up came that tongue scene and all I saw was a bunch of white eyeballs!" The ultimate comment on Blood Feast is that even after all these years; it's still showing! People are still buying the video. It has not become just a museum piece. And all the expensive films that have come after, where are they?
I don't think that it was just the fact that it was the first kind of movie to do what it did. Also, there is a raw, primitive aspect to it, which is hard to duplicate today.
The acting style of the movie is quite bizarre, some critics have argued that it has an almost 'otherworldly' feel to it.
Well, I don't mind being otherworldly or surreal! But to be honest, I am beyond critics. These were not critics' pictures to start with. If I were to make a picture for critics, the public would not go. That is because most critics look for elements about which they can write and show off their interpretative skills. That may be an unfair comment, but I have been treated unfairly by them, so it's my turn! I don't see that there is a great disparity between what we did then and what we do now in terms of generating an audience reaction. The key difference is that audiences of the 21st century have become so sophisticated that it is increasingly difficult not to scare them, but to surprise them. They're not surprised by any big budget effect: such as when drops of mercury form themselves seamlessly into a person, the audience are likely to respond by saying "Oh yes, well we expected that." Rather, what should happen in movie making, is that you have got to hit the audience in the gut! One benefit of low budget primitivism is that it is more 'gutsy'.
Does this gutsy approach apply to the colour coding of the film, which seems somewhat exaggerated?
Well, the question of colour did come up early in my career. We had made a movie called Scum of the Earth, which was a rough; tough little picture. Here, we had one frame in colour to correspond to the scene where a heavy sticks a gun in this guy's mouth, and then we have this red frame which had been hand painted. But when it came to a 'blood film', I remember making a movie called Living Venus, which was black and white and in it we used stage blood. I remarked how purple and unrealistic it was -even in black and white. For Blood Feast, which was the first ever gore movie, I insisted that the blood look like blood. So, we went to a cosmetics laboratory and compounded this stage blood, which we put together by the gallon. In fact, I understand that they are still selling it! This was because I wanted saturation of colour, which meant that the blood could flow as red as blood could flow. The idea was that gouts of blood, which was a phrase I picked up from Shakespeare, are more effective if they are more colourful.
Sticking with movies like Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs for a moment. In many respects they are very much ahead of their time, yet the monsters which they depict are curiously out of step with the 'swinging' sixties period in which they were produced. Would you agree that they seem to hark back to a much earlier tradition of movie monster?
Well spoken! Yes I definitely agree with you. We did not want them to be mainstream people. The Fuad Ramses killer from Blood Feast is a throwback to the very earliest days of cinema: with his bushy eyebrows, exaggerated limp and overacting. This was because he was supposed to be a caricature. Once again, this was because I was not making the movie for critics, but I knew the audience would be quite comfortable with that. When we were making The Gore, Gore Girls, I think you see far more subtlety in deciding even who the evil person is in that movie. That was because the whole genre had advanced to such a point that I could not longer get away with bushy eyebrows and dragging one leg!
The Gore-Gore Girls is both subtle and European in flavour. I wondered if Italian genres such as the Giallo were in any way an influence on your work here?
The film was different to what we had done before and this was mainly because I felt that we had better go that one step beyond what we had done before. In terms of extremism, yes that is where you find it. Italian cinema was never afraid of going to extremes. Going way, way back to films like Eight and a Half, which although were not a horror movie, would do something that while not impossible was unexpected.
The other thing about these European genres was that they were not afraid of showing nudity. In many respects, beyond your gore reputation, you also pioneered much of the erotic imagery associated with early American underground cinema.
Yes, but in no film did I ever have full nudity, I had bare breasts in one, that was in The Gore-Gore Girls, because by that time it has become acceptable. But I never had four letter words in these movies. But these days films are loaded with them.
Some of your early films such as 2000 Maniacs and Moonshine Mountain (1962) have a clear theme of rural perversity running through them. I wondered if that was a feature that particularly interested you.
Yes, it does. Moonshine Mountain for instance, was a labour of love. I have always been a fan of what people call 'Hillbilly music' and unsophisticated people. I do think it is easy to project the notion of evil as one that is more and more bucolic. And that explains part of the success of The Blair Witch Project. If that had been shot in midtown London or Manhattan, there would be nothing to it all.
Some people have said that the idea of rural perversity pops up in many seventies American horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Do you see 2000 Maniacs as a blueprint for these films?
Yes I do. I have been told that its theme has been used a great number of times. I think this is because it's easy for an audience to identify with someone from a highly civilised background, riding in an open convertible, to wind up in an area where all of this is foreign. So these individuals find themselves on a different planet. If you land on the planet Mars you are never quite sure what its inhabitants are going to do, because they don't have that same element in their background. So this provides an automatic plus for the suspense factor.
Here of course is an interesting paradox. How can anyone feel alien within the United States? What is there about the collective American imagination that allows this to happen?
Well spoken! Someone can go from New York to Chicago, to Los Angeles, To San Francisco, to Miami and not be in the least bit uncomfortable. But if your automobile breaks down in the middle of some rural area and some local comes along and says, (adopting Southern accent) "Help you with your car, mister?" at that moment, fear suddenly emerges.
So are we saying that the true source of horror is that of geographical perversity? Whether its city folk breaking down in 2000 Maniacs Hicksville or Egypt invading small town USA through the catering of Fuad Ramses?
Yes we are. Geographical perversity is as old as civilisation itself. We have evidence of geographical perversity still surrounding us today. Here, prejudice based on geography is flourishing in a way it never has before. You can cross a border from one country to another and the geography may seem to be the same, but there is still a border. Whether it's the border that separates the ethic Albanians or the people in Cuba. Once you cross that border you are in never-never land and you are never quite sure what is going to come up against you.
Your films always attempted to be stylish, despite their modest budgets. Were you ever afraid of compromising what you wanted to do?
With my movies, I tried to get every dime into the production itself. Which is admirable in one respect and despicable in another. Its admirable in that the film gets finished, that has to be the goal. And if you run one dollar short the film doesn't get finished. Yet, its despicable in that there were times when I knew that we needed a second take to get a second effect, and so I had to settle for less than I know could be done. But in guerrilla filmmaking there is always compromise.
The Gore-Gore Girls was your last movie and it came at the time that the gore, gore period of horror was really taking off. Why was this?
It was not intended as an ending. I had not known when I made The Gore, Gore Girls that it was going to be the last film I was going to make. At least up until now. That's the way life went and as the Bard said, "Sweet are the uses of adversity".
Since this interview was conducted it has been confirmed that Hershell Gordon Lewis is scheduled to direct a sequel to Blood Feast. Scream Theory readers will be informed of details as they emerge.
I wish to thank Herschell Gordon Lewis for his time and patience, as well as the staff of the International Festival of the Fantastic Film in Brussels for organising the above interview.
This interview is extracted from a longer interview with Herschell Gordon Lewis to be included in the forthcoming Wallflower Press volume Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon, which is being edited by Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider.
