Bizarre goes behind the scenes on the Wizard of Gore remake here

Half filmmaker and all businessman, the 81-year-old Herschell Gordon Lewis is rightfully revered as the ‘Godfather of Gore’. With true Barnum-esque glee, he thrashed out a string of highly successful underground exploitation hits in the 60s and was largely responsible for creating the splatter film genre, with his butcher’s-parts-filled epic Blood Feast (1963).

Finding the formula of appealing to audiences who were denied graphic depictions of violence from Hollywood because of the stringent rules of the Hay’s Code, he continued to direct and produce such cult favourites as Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Color Me Blood Red (1965) and Blood Orgy (1972). Upon a return to his advertising business when the studios began producing big-budget exploitation titles themselves, Lewis was finally persuaded back into the director’s chair after nearly a 30-year hiatus with Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002).

How do you feel about the mantle ‘Godfather of Gore’?
I don’t think I would want it as my epitaph, but I certainly don’t object to it. It’s sort of a way of cheating 15 minutes of fame I suppose.

How did you move from making nudie cuties to Blood Feast?
Other filmmakers were catching on and it was time to go in another direction. I had been watching an old gangster movie where the cops shot this hoodlum and he died so peacefully. I thought, “Wait a minute, this isn’t right.” Then a lovely four-letter word leaped into my mind: G-O-R-E. Blood Feast was the upshot of that and it was the first movie where people died with their eyes open. It broke ground in a whole bunch of ways I didn’t anticipate.

Blood Feast has been described as the first modern horror film.
It was the first horror film that transcended the traditional Dracula-type. Psycho (1960) was shot in black-and-white and there were some bloody scenes but they showed nothing; they showed the results of it but not the act itself. Blood Feast blew the doors off.

Was Blood Feast largely improvised?
I think that’s a euphemism. Someone asked, “Who wrote the script?” I replied, “What’s that?” I won’t say we made it up as we went along, but certainly because we weren’t at all certain that anybody would ever want to play that picture, I wasn’t about to invest a lot of money in an experiment of that sort. In fact, after Blood Feast opened I said to my partner David Freidman, “What if we made a good one?” That’s how we happened to make Two Thousand Maniacs!, which even till this day is the favourite of all the movies I‘ve made.

What is the enduring appeal of exploitation movies?
I think bloodlust is implicit in the human psyche. It goes back to the Roman Colosseum, where people would usually turn thumbs down rather than thumbs up so they could see more blood and guts.

One of your earlier films, Living Venus, was based on the early days of Playboy. Did Hugh Hefner ever see the film?
Oh sure, Hef came to the first screening of that movie. I think he simply shrugged and walked out.

How much art do you think there is in filmmaking?
None. I know that’s a brutal answer but if you regard yourself as an artist, you are doomed in this business. An artist is not necessarily an entertainer. Movies should not be made to satisfy the ego of the producer or the director. It should be made to satisfy the dollars or pounds or euros that somebody pays to see it.

How much persuasion did it take to get you to return to the director’s chair with Blood Feast 2?
Between three and four seconds. I have always maintained that making movies is like having malaria; you think you’re over it but it’s lurking in your bloodstream.