The Essential Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis (1929–2016)

Herschell Gordon Lewis’ chosen filmmaking aesthetic was more or less a marketing decision. Lewis started directing feature films in the late 1950s, putting out a few cheap exploitation flicks with lurid titles like Living Venus, Bell, Bare, and Beautiful, and the hilariously monikered Boin-n-g! While these films did make money, Lewis actively sought that one special something to set his films apart from his contemporaries. His solution was simple and elegant: up the gore by a factor of fifty. Stage blood and gore effects were incredibly inexpensive, you see, and Lewis saw no reason not to include as much of said things as possible.

As such, Lewis began directing a series of incredibly bloody, dark, and nonsensical gore films, and in the process, inadvertently created an entire subgenre unto itself: The splatter film. Lewis took tiny amounts of money, made a few cheap flicks for the grindhouse crowd, and managed to change the face of what was deemed permissible in cinema. All of a sudden, people were getting their eyeballs ripped out on camera. Holes were bored through torsos. Limbs and heads were hacked off with merry abandon. In one notable Lewis-filmed sequence, a person was placed inside a rain barrel that had been hammered all throughout with nails and then rolled down a hill in what might amount to a hillbilly iron maiden.

B.I. & L. Releasing Group

Lewis was certainly an auteur, very much along the lines of Russ Meyer or John Waters, who pursued his aesthetic interests while remaining blissfully dismissive of all notions of standardized good taste. This, paired with the marketing savvy of Roger Corman. Lewis knew how to sell a film. He would lure audiences into the theater with the promise of an extremity hitherto unseen on the big screen. However, unlike most B-movie hucksters of his era, Lewis actually made good on the promise.

Lewis continued to direct films throughout the 1960s and into the early ’70s, eventually making one full-blown pornographic film in 1972 (Black Love) before retiring from filmmaking to become a marketing guru. Lewis spent the next 30 years authoring dozens of books on effective marketing practices, how to write good ad copy and other “insider” tomes for the publicity industries. One can only imagine what his motivational lectures must have been like, as one assumes he would show clips from his movies to rooms full of suits and pencil-pushers. In the 1990s, he founded his own benign-sounding advertising firm, Communicomp.

In 2002, Lewis returned to filmmaking with a sequel to his 1963 masterpiece Blood Feast, and began to actively participate in the cult of hero worship that had sprung up around him. Notably, cult New York filmmaker Frank Henenlotter co-directed a 2010 documentary film about Lewis called Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore. People like John Waters, Frank Henenlotter, and Rob Zombie were created or influenced by Lewis.

Lewis died today at the age of 87. His legacy will live on in the bloody hearts of underground horror fans everywhere.

Slideshow | Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Essential Films:

Top Image: Something Weird Video

Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.