Blood Feast
Blood Feast is a 1963 film from the USA, directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, running 67 minutes. reelscum files it under classical exploitation and splatter.
- Year
- 1963 · 1960s films
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 67 min
- Director
- Herschell Gordon Lewis
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (33/100)
- Also known as
- Egyptian Blood Feast · Feast of Flesh
- Banned in
- UK
Defined in the glossary: Classical exploitation, Splatter
One of the 39 successfully prosecuted video nasties, decades after Herschell Gordon Lewis shot it as the first splatter film.
The first gore film. Barely competent, historically unavoidable.
The first gore film, made by Herschell Gordon Lewis in a few days for around $24,500 because the nudie market was drying up and drive-ins needed something television could not show. A deranged caterer murders women to assemble an Egyptian goddess from their parts.
It is barely competent as filmmaking, the acting is dire and the pacing is deadly, but it put on-screen dismemberment in front of an audience for the first time, and everything in the splatter genre descends from it. The tongue-removal scene is the historical moment.
Essential as history, close to unwatchable as entertainment.
Trailer
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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The cycle in depth
- The grindhouse and where the word came from
What a grindhouse is: a continuous-performance theatre, the 1925 trade term behind the word, and how the programming got its reputation.
- The B movie and the double bill it was made for
A B movie is what an exhibitor took to get the A picture, a flat-rate second feature, and the 1948 Paramount ruling ended the arrangement.
On these lists
- Nastiest of the nasties
The tapes the DPP put on its seize-on-sight list. Prosecuting them in a country with ferries to France was the best advertising any of them ever got.
Filed alongside
Frankenhooker
A man rebuilds his dead girlfriend from the parts of exploded sex workers. Exactly that stupid, and great.
Street Trash
People melt in primary colours. Tasteless, inventive, weirdly beautiful.
Two Thousand Maniacs!
H.G. Lewis, a Southern town, and gore effects that predate everyone.
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
A live-action gore manga where nobody has heard of restraint or arterial pressure.
The Driller Killer
Abel Ferrara's debut. More interesting as a document of downtown New York.
Mom and Dad
Kroger Babb toured it for twenty years with a fake nurse in the lobby.
The Untold Story
Anthony Wong won Best Actor for this. Then you find out what goes in the pork buns.
Class of Nuke 'Em High
Troma's toxic high school, second only to Toxie. Exactly as stupid as you want it to be.
Dead & Buried
Stan Winston effects and a good twist. Underseen.
Frontier(s)
Texas Chainsaw with a French accent and a swastika over the door.
Tokyo Gore Police
The Japanese splatter movement at full arterial pressure, from the man who built it.
Nekromantik 2
Buttgereit's necrophilia sequel, prosecuted on arrival, and stranger than the first.