In the summer of 1963, a Miami motel hosted the filming of a picture that would quietly rewrite the rules of horror. Herschell Gordon Lewis and his producer David Friedman shot for less than a week on a budget around $24,000, using the Suez Motel as both base camp and primary set. The result was Blood Feast, the first true splatter film, the first movie to put graphic, lingering gore front and center as the entire point of the exercise. The story was the thinnest possible excuse to get there: an Egyptian caterer named Fuad Ramses gathers grizzly ingredients from a string of victims to prepare an ancient feast in honor of the goddess Ishtar.
The effects were crude and shockingly explicit for the era, and the most infamous scene reportedly used a real sheep’s tongue from a local butcher. Friedman, always the sharper showman, handed out novelty bags in the lobby for queasy customers and even staged a fake legal injunction against his own film in Sarasota purely to drum up publicity. None of it was tasteful, and all of it worked. Blood Feast premiered at a drive-in outside Peoria, Illinois, and reportedly took in close to four million dollars against its tiny budget.
That return turned Lewis into the self-styled Godfather of Gore overnight and proved there was a hungry audience nobody else was serving. British censors banned the film for decades, and it was not passed uncut there until 2005. But its real legacy is everything that came after. Pull this single thread, and a huge stretch of modern horror comes loose with it: the slasher boom, the splatter pictures, and the whole blood-spattered branch of the genre that runs through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and far beyond.
Blood Feast did not emerge from nowhere. It was the product of the same showman who had spent the early 1960s stitching together orphaned footage and inventing new ways to shock audiences on shoestring budgets. Years earlier, in Wisconsin, a young filmmaker named Bill Rebane had started a no-budget science fiction quickie about a radioactive astronaut turned monster, casting a 7-foot-6 vaudeville giant named Henry Height in the lead. He shot what he could afford, then ran out of money and walked away, leaving the reels unfinished for years.
Lewis bought the orphan footage for almost nothing. Instead of completing Rebane’s story, he hired a new cast, filmed fresh scenes around the old ones, and recorded a wandering voiceover himself to cover the gaps. The result was released on the bottom half of a double bill. The seams were the entire show: characters vanished partway through, brothers replaced them without explanation, and the monster’s climactic attack happened entirely off camera, narrated in that rambling voiceover while the audience stared at almost nothing.
It earned the verdict, from a writer on the comedy show Mystery Science Theater 3000, of being the worst movie the show had ever aired. That breed of shameless thrift ran through dozens of pictures made in the same years, all of them built on borrowed sound stages, rubber suits, and the desperation to fill a screen for the price of a used car. In 1961, a Connecticut dinner theater actor named Del Tenney directed a picture in two weeks for $50,000, splitting the cost with a drive-in magnate and shooting around Stamford with local talent. The monsters were the whole show: radioactive sea creatures with mouths crammed with pale, lumpy shapes that viewers instantly read as hot dogs.
The suits were built so cheaply that one shrank during production and ended up on a 16-year-old local boy. Tenney billed the film as the first horror monster musical, hired a New Jersey band for rock numbers between the killings, and made audiences sign a fright release before entering. The distribution deal came from one of the strangest pieces of showmanship on record: Tenney reportedly carried one of the rubber sea zombie suits into his pitch meeting at 20th Century Fox, and the costume played far better in person than on screen. As the story goes, a studio executive came away genuinely shaken after meeting the creature unexpectedly in the men’s room.
Fox took the picture. Two decades later, it appeared in a book on the fifty worst films of all time and became a steady target for late-night mockery, and it gathered its admirers anyway, including a young horror novelist named Stephen King. Meanwhile, in London, producer Herman Cohen spent half a million dollars on a riff on King Kong with the British studio Anglo Amalgamated and American International each putting up half. He paid RKO $25,000 purely for the right to use a title that rhymed with Kong, after first considering calling it I Was a Teenage Gorilla.
The science never held up for a second: a botanist injects a chimpanzee with a serum meant only to make it grow, and it changes species along the way, arriving as a full-sized gorilla. No explanation is offered because none is possible. The great ape rampaging through London was plainly a man in a suit, but the film stayed watchable on the strength of Michael Gough, who played the mad botanist with enormous relish surrounded by carnivorous plants, filming on after-hours permits in the real streets of the city. The oddest part of its legacy arrived on the page: the comic artist Steve Ditko took that same gorilla and made him the lead of a Charlton comic that ran for years, long outliving the cheap little picture that gave it a name.
In Mexico, the silver-masked wrestler El Santo headlined dozens of horror films without ever showing his face on camera, keeping his hood on in the ring, in interviews, and reportedly almost everywhere else for decades. One of his pictures, built around a coven of vampire women planning to claim a professor’s grown daughter, is widely considered the best of the Santo series. The story grinds to a halt every so often so Santo can wrestle a full match, because the producers knew exactly what the kids had paid to see. A Florida distributor named K.
Gordon Murray bought it, renamed Santo as Samson to dodge a trademark snag, and shipped it off to weekend television. It later became one of the most beloved episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and for many viewers, it was the first step down the rabbit hole of Mexican wrestling monster movies. The same K. Gordon Murray dubbing empire spread another Mexican picture across American late-night screens, one featuring a monster with pincers for hands, a long darting tongue, and a misshapen skull that throbbed like it might burst.
The creature was once a 17th century nobleman, a sorcerer burned by the Inquisition, who swears revenge on his judges and returns 300 years later when a comet carries his spirit back to Earth. The budget showed in the loveliest ways: the comet was a piece of cardboard sliding across a sheet of glass, the grand exteriors were painted backdrops, and the resurrected monster prowled through it all draining the minds of his victims, sometimes dipping into a goblet for a snack between killings. Fans crowned it the holy grail of Mexican horror, and the strangest tribute came from the rock musician Frank Zappa, who was so taken with the creature that he built an entire song around it. In the final days of the war in Europe, a very different sort of monster movie came together across the ocean.
A German submarine carried the still-beating immortal heart of Frankenstein’s monster to the Japanese mainland, where it reached Hiroshima just before the city was destroyed in 1945. Years later, the heart regenerates into a wild feral boy who grows until he stands as tall as a building. The talent behind the premise was deadly serious: director Ishiro Honda and effects man Eiji Tsuburaya, the exact pair who had created Godzilla a decade earlier. The American distributor trimmed a few minutes, restored the leading man’s original English dialogue, and passed on an alternate ending Toho had filmed in which a giant octopus rears up out of nowhere to attack.
That footage was never destroyed, so two completely different climaxes survived side by side to this day. The leading man, Nick Adams, a recent Academy Award nominee, was adored by the Japanese crew, and the experience mattered enough to him that he flew straight back to Japan for another monster picture with the same team before his life was cut short in 1968 at just 36. Some of these films found fame through sheer absurdity. A giant turtle that fans described as a 20-story chicken with a jet plane for a head came from Shochiku, one of Japan’s most respected studios, home of refined art house masters who apparently decided they wanted a piece of the monster money.
The studio of quiet domestic dramas gave the world a giant space chicken that hatches from a glowing spore, stomps across the country, and is brought down by a wonder substance with an unpronounceable name. For years, it was a half-forgotten curiosity. Then, in a twist nobody saw coming, the Criterion Collection scooped it up in 2012 for a box set celebrating exactly this kind of studio detour. A 20-story chicken preserved for posterity by the most respectable name in the business.
Not every story ended in triumph. A veteran actor named John Carradine cost a production $3,000 for two days of work against a total budget of $37,000, standing in a basement dressed up as a laboratory reciting pages of invented techno-jargon while solar-powered men shuffled off to attack people. The film would be forgotten today if not for one odd twist: the punk band The Misfits borrowed its name for one of their best-known songs, and that single scrap of secondhand fame did more for the movie’s legend than the movie itself ever managed. One picture crossed a line no other film on this list approached.
In the middle of a lurid, brightly colored monster movie, the film cuts away to genuine surgical footage, real hands working inside a real chest, spliced in to shock a paying audience. The man responsible was Rene Cardona, a giant of Mexican exploitation cinema, working from a premise in which a desperate surgeon transplants the heart of a gorilla into his dying son, and the operation works far too well. The young man turns into a snarling pajama-clad creature who breaks loose and rampages through the city. The American distributor wanted something harder for late-night crowds, so he spliced in those real operating room clips along with a string of crude shock effects.
The bet paid off, perhaps too well. When the film reached Britain, censors banned it outright during the video nasty panic of the 1980s, and for years it carried a reputation as one of the most disreputable titles you could track down. Some films were saved from oblivion by the stubbornness of their own stars. A black-and-white feature shot for 20th Century Fox in just seven days around Malibu and Santa Monica existed for decades only as a handful of haunting photographs in Famous Monsters of Filmland.
It could not be legally shown because Fox’s television rights lapsed in the early 1980s, leaving the print in a legal gray zone. The film might have disappeared for good except that its leading man, John Agar, held onto a copy and quietly handed a videotape dub to a film historian not long before he died in 2002. A movie famous for being unseeable survived because its leading man refused to let it go. Near the end of the decade, a friendly little Southern town threw open its arms to welcome a group of visitors with a parade, a banquet, and a warm centennial celebration.
The catch was that the townsfolk were long-dead Confederate ghosts, returning once every 100 years to take a gruesome revenge on northern travelers. The gap between the sunny hospitality and the horror underneath it made this the sharpest film of its kind from the period, a deliberately twisted inversion of the gentle stage musical Brigadoon. The city of Chicago banned it outright in 1964, and it could not play there for two more years. Its fingerprints are all over the slasher films that followed.
Which brings the story back to where it began. Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman shot Blood Feast in a Miami motel, and it changed horror forever. They followed it with two more pictures in a so-called blood trilogy, but the friendship behind the genre did not survive the decade. The partnership came apart, and the two men who had built an entire disreputable genre together went their separate ways.
The fake blood kept flowing in the films that followed. The friendship did not. Twenty-eight movies, a few hundred thousand dollars between all of them, and somehow more staying power than half the polished prestige pictures of their day. That is the thing these films understood that their critics did not.
Having no money pushed them to be stranger, gutsier, and more inventive than the competition, just to earn their spot at the drive-in. The rubber-suit honesty of a Bill Rebane, a Ted V. Mikels, or a Herschell Gordon Lewis is exactly why they are still being discussed sixty years later, long after the respectable films of 1964 faded from memory.
A man sweating inside a rubber suit, lit by a single bulb on a borrowed sound stage, turned out to be more durable than almost anything the polished studios could offer.