[Film Review] Blood Feast (1963)

In Blood Feast sinister caterer Fuad Ramses stalks and slaughters women for an ancient Egyptian feast in the honour of the goddess Ishtar. Taking a body part from each victim, Ramses must complete his task in time for his latest client Dorothy Fairmont’s surprise birthday party for  daughter Suzanne.

Police detective Pete Thornton is desperate to solve the case, alongside flirting with Suzanne at the weekly lecture series on Ancient Egyptian culture he attends. After a ridiculously bumbling delay, Pete eventually connects the dots, and the race is on to stop Ramses before he completes his grisly rite.  

Blood Feast (1963) is the first of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman’s ‘blood trilogy’, followed by Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965) and sets the tone for Lewis’ Godfather of Gore reputation. It has all the classic hallmarks of the early horror movie, clunky drums to build tension, sinister funhouse music soundtrack, subtle nudity and gloopy gore supplied by a grinning maniac.

Reception of Blood Feast has been mixed since its release, with Stephen King calling it the worst film he’s ever seen, but this criticism seems unfair. Blood Feast, as well as Lewis’ later work, is supposed to be tongue in cheek, campy and fun. As Friedman himself stated, the aim was never to make high art, or to take themselves seriously, and so to view Blood Feast through a lens of serious filmmaking is to doom it to failure.

However, that is not to say that there is nothing beneath the gore and violence. There is a wry sense of humour to the film, set in the pastel suburbia of 1960’s Florida and a subversive challenging of the ways in which people turn a blind eye to the daily reality of violence. When Suzanne and Dorothy discuss the serial killer who is randomly and brutally killing young women, Dorothy states, “this dinner party will take our minds off all this terrible killing” and later, upon discovering that they were to be served a cannibalistic feast of murdered women she gaily suggests that they will just have to have hamburgers for dinner. This commitment to maintaining the status quo is accompanied by a thinly veiled hysteria that some may put down to bad acting. It’s true that the performances are never in danger of winning awards, but rather than making it difficult to watch, it only adds to the fun. 

It has been suggested that Lewis’ style, in both screenwriting and cinematography, are heavily influenced by his previous history as a director of pornography. It is an interesting point, and it is easy to find evidence for this perspective. The scenes of gore and bloodshed are brightly, almost forensically lit, allowing the viewer to fully see the violent desecration of women’s bodies. The splattery gore is lurid and over the top. The male gaze is in full effect, in one scene the camera slowly pans across a woman’s bloody corpse, taking an uncomfortably long time to shift away. Elements of this film have not aged well, from the focus on Ancient Egyptians as murderous, cannibalistic cult followers, and the portrayal of Fuad Ramses as a limping, grey haired, heavily accented weirdo. But, if taken in its context, much of the film holds up, from its relentless pacing (it is only 67 minutes long) to the incredible effects on display. Clever camerawork, bags of presumably animal offal, buckets of cartoonishly red fake blood and hysterically over the top performances.  Blood Feast is a horror landmark and deserves its place in the canon. Enjoy it for its campy fun, deliciously excessive gore and pitch-black humour. 

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