NOTE: This review contains partial spoilers for Psycho.

The film opens with a primitive drumming that generates a sense of foreboding. A young woman enters her apartment and turns on a radio. An insert shot of the radio imbues it with a sense of agency as an announcement about a murder plays; women are being warned to stay at home after dark due to the presence of an unhinged killer. The score accentuates this proclamation and consequently becomes more unnerving.

However, the young woman listening doesn’t care for this warning and turns off the radio. She gets ready for a bath and begins to strip; a canted shot of her undressing plays on our anxieties and makes the death from the announcement a foregone conclusion. She is marked for death.

Before she gets into the bathtub to meet her fate, the films cuts to a book titled: “Ancient Weird Religious Rites.” This second insert shot ties the book and radio together and grants a context to the aforementioned serial murders: they are part and parcel of some kind of ritual. Yet, the two highlighted items – a modern radio with a serious warning about a current crisis and an esoteric book focused on discovering the past – introduce a discordant feeling. If an agent is being hinted it through shots of these items, it’s certainly one that’s out of joint.

Then, a scream. The music cuts out for a moment and the young woman is stabbed by an intruder. A strange organ-based score replaces the previous drum-based music as the perpetrator of the attack, Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), proceeds to repeatedly stab his unsuspecting victim in brutalizing fashion.

The film cuts from the victim back to Fuad and back again; she’s surrounded by a green-tiled background while he’s encompassed by a wall painted in yellow. The juxtaposition in color adds to the disharmonious feeling up to now as the two colors seem to bear no connection to one another and introduce an incongruity within the shared space of the bathroom; these sides feel like they belong to different spaces, a feeling accentuated by the lack of a master shot by which to make sense of the room’s geography.

Finally, the violent attack ceases. The camera takes perverse pleasure in poring over the ensuing carnage, showcasing the bright-red gore against the distinctive backdrops of the space; this sign of violence is what connects the sides of the room together – bloodshed is what unites the otherwise disjointed space into a cohesive whole.

The gore fades to black, the drum-based score comes back into play, and a face on a pyramid dominates the frame; the past intrudes into the modern setting. The title appears on the screen as a splatter as the blood begins to pour of the letters and overwhelm the boundaries it’s meant to demarcate; the score becomes accentuated by a tubular instrumental matching this visual excess.

Then, the pyramid fades to black again and we cut to a plain textual display, dark blue letters against a plain brown background marking a police office – a sharp contrast to the mystique of the font, color, and setting of the title sequence. We’ve returned to the present once again.

Inside the room, Detective Pete (William Kerwin) and the police Chief (Scott H. Hall) express fear at the number of killings, the inexplicable removal of body parts from the victims, and the fact that no evidence has been pointing to any subjects. The most recent murder, that depicted in the opening, has only compounded their worries. Frustrated and left with no other options, the two resign themselves to playing more radio warnings.

Then, the organ music comes back into the fray and the film cuts to a sign for “Fuad Ramses Exotic Catering”, a display utilizing a distinctive font similar to the one used in the title credits; we know that the police’s warning is doomed to failure. Try as they might, the killer has now entered the scene once again.

He performs his “cover” job as a caterer and tends to a checkout counter. A woman dressed in fancy garb, Mrs. Fremont (Lyn Bolton), approaches him and hires him to cater a dinner for her daughter, Suzette (Connie Mason); she’s interested in something eccentric to make the night special. Her manner of speech is direct and her mannerisms are exaggerated in a bourgeoise fashion. There’s something unreal about the way she approaches the encounter.

This feeling is amplified when Fuad responds by fully leaning his body into the frame, staring at her without daring to blink. He offers to cook an Egyptian Feast, the likes of which the ancient pharaohs performed over 5000 years ago. The camera cuts to a close-up of his intense gaze as a droning noise begins to play; it feels like a spell is being cast. The relationship between the two changes: it’s not her hiring him as much as he’s hiring her.

Mrs. Fremont’s mannerisms change and she acts as if in a trance before accepting the offer; once she does, the moment breaks and she returns to her previous manner of acting. The magic subsides and the transaction is complete.

Alone again, Fuad slowly limps towards a door in the back of the building. The amount of time spent chronicling this movement serves no purpose and serves as a strange form of punctuation, merely elongating the distance between the events before and after it. But this moment is also marked by the drum score from earlier, granting it an importance that it doesn’t seem to warrant.

This traversal finally ends when he makes it to a hidden room draped with red curtains, the color of blood. He walks towards a figure in the far corner of the room while the camera pans and tracks him; this figure is Ishtar, the Goddess that Fuad plans to do the feast for. As he exalts her and swears his allegiance to her cause, the camera cuts to a close-up of the statue’s face; it’s here where the film’s use of close-ups and insert shots merge as the focus on the statue’s visage makes it apparent that this is the magical agency that’s been operating unseen in the film up to now; Faud’s ritual has been working and the subject of the statue is closer to resurrection. With Mrs. Fremont’s request, the ritualistic endgame is in sight.

Thus, at a surface level, director Herschell Gordon Lewis’s (in)famous Blood Feast seems to position itself as a low-budget, exploitative attempt meant to take advantage of the “demise of many state censor boards” to deliver a blood-soaked experience. The performances are odd, the score is “tuneless” and” experimental”, the plot is seemingly inane, and the budget seems to have gone mostly to the gore effects which the camera seems to care most about ^[1]Mendik, X., Schneider, S. J., Kaufman, L., & Mendik, X. (2002). Chapter 16: ‘Gouts of Blood’: The Colorful Underground Universe of Herschell Gordon Lewis . In Underground U.S.A.: … Continue reading. Yet, these oddities and the manner in which they’re executed transform this “slasher” film into an “ur-text” that’s remained pivotal in defining contemporary horror cinema ^[2] Brottman, M. (1996). “There never was a party like this. . . !” Blood feast and the Primal Act of cannibalism. Continuum, 9(1), 25–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304319609365689.

While the “appointed ancestor of the slasher film is Hitchcock’s Psycho”, a seminal piece of work whose subversion of narrative conventions and utilization of subtle, impressionistic cinematic techniques in generating unease continues to part and parcel of the golden standard by which films, not just horror, are evaluated, Blood Feast‘s introduces a visceral element that remains just at vital at exploring taboo and the costs of violating the same. The film’s focus on gore leaves little room for the imagination and lets us see the “opened body”; a taboo has been violated as the “visible” and “knowable” are literally opened up to reveal the unseen insides. ^[3] Clover, C. J. (2015). Chapter 1: Her Body, Himself. In Men, women, and chain saws: Gender in the modern horror film. essay, Princeton University Press.

Yet, these obscene displays of violence aren’t meant to scare us as much as allowing us to fully engage with and enjoy the spectacle. Unlike Hitchcock who located “thrill in the equation victim=audience” and consequently shot the most violence scene of the film, the iconic shower murder, as an impression of the knife “slashing” the film itself in an attempt to rupture the viewer’s body,^[4] Ibid Lewis treats us as participants in the violence and invites us to participate in the macabre ceremony. Opposed to the victim, we’re aligned with Fuad as perpetrator; we want to consume a “blood feast”.

This dichotomy in the two film’s approaches to violence is made explicit in the way they handle the same situation: a shower murder. While Psycho’s scene is absolutely iconic, a pinnacle in dread and tension, it’s effect is achieved through “virtuoso editing and a sprinkling of chocolate syrup.”^[5]Skal, D. J. (2001). Chapter Eleven: Scar Wars. In The monster show: A cultural history of horror. essay, Faber and Faber. The realism of the narrative allows Hitchcock to impress upon the audience the impact of the violence without ever showing too much; he doesn’t even need to use red gore effects to convey the impact.

However, the same scene in this film operates almost in an inverted fashion; the film juxtaposes distinctive aural choices and strange color decisions to immediately throw the viewer off and makes the situation oneiric; there’s nothing to latch onto. The shock comes from the haphazard fashion in which the violence “appears” and takes control of the frame. Bucket of red gore and blood are what we end up taking away from the scene.

Lewis employs several such oddities throughout the film to distance us from the severity of the kills such as to let us partake in the violence without feeling alienated by it. The caricature like acting makes it hard to relate to the characters; thus, we can’t be bothered by the brutal executions and don’t feel put off by our identification with Fuad’s position as gore purveyor. The absurd editing – both within and between scenes – propels the narrative forward towards the next fleshy display with little semblance of logic or coherent momentum. There’s no concern with how Fuad gets to each murder scene, commits the murder without difficulty, and gets out of said scenes scot-free with no real planning even during moments when other characters should definitely notice him or find a meaningful clue to his identity. The narrative even goes so far as to utilize supernatural trappings like Fuad’s apparent magical skills and the presence of Ishtar an agent in her own right to further to disrupt the reality of the narrative. The only real constant throughout the film is the gore effects which are bright, red, and take control of the frame; we’re allowed to fully attune ourselves to them.

While the technical implementation of these “distancing” techniques may potentially distract viewers unable to get past the crude presentation, the telos they aspire to remains an important influence to the genre; Psycho may be more influential and an infinitely more compelling film, but Blood Feasts contributions still reverberate just as strongly as the former’s. In fact, I’d argue that a good portion of horrors, especially in the slasher and splatter sub-genres, take varying levels of influence from both of these archetypal films in their construction. For example, films like Halloween leans more into Psycho’s taut narrative construction and utilization of mood to generate tension along with a light amount of gore to sell the impact, but films like Friday the 13th treat plot as a tool to get the next gore-based, logic be damned, in the manner of Blood Feast.
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Thus, while the film may be sloppy and fail to remain compelling through its entirety, its heart and sheer dedication carry it through and make it worth studying; its mistakes give it a texture that proper construction would be unable to engender. Horror fans who enjoy the visual grossness that comes with the genre owe the film a sincere watch.

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