Herschell Gordon Lewis

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Herschell Gordon Lewis (right) with Rock Savage on the set of Chainsaw Sally (2003)

Herschell Gordon Lewis (born June 15, 1929 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † September 26, 2016 in Fort Lauderdale , Florida ) was an American filmmaker and advertising specialist. He is considered to be the first filmmaker to integrate explicit scenes of violence into his films for the sake of viewing value, and is therefore the founder of the splatter and gore genre. He is often given the title "Godfather of Gore".

life and career

For his first film The Prime Time (1960) he only worked as a producer. Thereupon he took over the direction of some films of the then very lucrative "nudist camp genre" for the producer David F. Friedman . Hugh Hefner wrote the screenplay for the first of these films, Living Venus (1961) .

As more and more filmmakers, e.g. B. Doris Wishman , made nudist films , Lewis and Friedmann looked for a new genre in which large profits could be made with low production costs. Lewis was inspired by a film in which a man is shot with a machine gun and no bullets or blood were seen on his body. Blood Feast was shot in 1963 , the first film with explicit splatter scenes in film history. Two Thousand Maniacs quickly followed ! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965). With the latter, the collaboration with Friedmann ended, Lewis produced the other films himself. His lost film Linda and Abilene (1969) was shot in the early summer of 1969 on the Spahn Movie Ranch , which was then inhabited by Charles Manson and his clan. The scenes of explicit violence intensified from film to film up to Wizard of Gore (1970). His trailers, which warned all pregnant or heart disease viewers to leave the cinema before the trailer begins, became known. During the trailer, a voice often speaks soothingly to the audience: “Remember! It's just a movie. "

In the mid-1970s, Lewis retired from the film business and started a second career in the advertising industry. Some of his books on effects in advertising are now considered standard works and have been translated into several languages.

In 2002 he returned to the director's chair and directed Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat .

Frank Henenlotter published a documentary about him in 2010 with Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore .

Trivia

  • Lewis spent some time in jail for tax evasion. When he came out again, his landlady had thrown away the film copies in the attic, so that he suspected that the films would be lost forever. For him this was the low point of his life. However, individual copies were later found in some drive-in theaters, so many of his films are now available on DVD.
  • John Waters considers Lewis and Russ Meyer to be the greatest American filmmakers; Lewis mainly because of his marketing ideas such as trailer warnings or the distribution of spittoons before the performance begins .
  • While filming Two Thousand Maniacs! Didn't the residents of the small town where the film was filmed know that they were playing crazy backwoodsmen in a splatter film; accordingly, they were annoyed after the film was released.
  • The film Bloodsucking Freaks is based on Herschell's The Wizard of Gore .
  • In the Canadian-American comedy film Juno , the future adoptive father of Juno's baby, Mark, shows Juno The Wizard of Gore. She had previously denied that Herschell Gordon Lewis was the "ultimate master of horror".

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jonathan Barkan: RIP Herschell Gordon Lewis, the “Godfather of Gore”, Has Passed Away at 87 . Bloody Disgusting, September 26, 2016, accessed September 27, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Lewis, Herschell Gordon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American filmmaker and advertising professional
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , United States
DATE OF DEATH 26th September 2016
Place of death Fort Lauderdale , Florida , United States