Blood Feast (1963)

(On Cable TV, March 2022) The job of a full-time film enthusiast is to watch everything, no matter personal preferences—after all, what if there’s something magical in an unpromising title? But there are times when this omnivorous drive becomes self-punishment, and Blood Feast certainly feels like a masochistic experience. An early work by the “godfather of gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis, it’s widely considered to be the first splatter horror film (i.e.: the first to show so much gore) and I’m not sure that’s a milestone worth recording in the grand book of human creativity. It’s a hard film to watch on many levels: never mind the brutal, blood-splattered murders and psychopathic protagonist: the film was made on a very low budget and every shortcut shows. Amateurish only begins to describe the slap-dash cinematography, special effects and acting talent on display here: Blood Feast is profoundly ugly, and that also applies to the contrived plotting in which the serial killer (and writer-director) feels compelled to butcher several people to assemble their organs for a ritual sacrifice. There’s some degree of bizarre comfort in the film being so low-budget that nothing feels real, but the ugliness lingers on despite the unconvincing visuals. Blood Feast is far more significant than good—it was the first horror movie to be this explicit, bridging the gap that would take cinema in a few years, from the artful shocks of 1950s horror to the cheap ultraviolence of 1970s slashers. It’s a milestone, but I’m glad I’ll never have to see it again.