Some of my earliest memories involved black and white blood.
Not in real life, oh heavens no. My family may have been slightly peculiar, but our blood was the usual iron-based red. No, this was on an influential, enjoyable, and surprisingly gory early 1960’s police procedural that was shot entirely in black and white.
The show in question was the original Untouchables, about legendary Prohibition opponent Eliot Ness and a supporting cast of loyal federal agents battling to break the Chicago mob during the Depression. Never mind that the scripts bore only the faintest resemblance to what Eliot Ness actually did (hint: he didn’t go after Ma Barker and her boys), the American Mob during the early 1930’s (hint: more of it was based in New York than Chicago), or the prominence of certain gangsters over others (hint: the Nazis were not involved). Unlike my parents, I hadn’t lived through the last years of Prohibition and the beginnings of the New Deal, and all I saw was the glamor and the glory.
You think I jest? Consider what The Untouchables offered as I watched it in reruns:
- Robert Stack, heroic and upright, heading a team of men who were so devoted to justice they could not be bribed, corrupted, or tortured into evildoing.
- Walter Winchell’s hurried, staccato narration, which conveyed the urgency and the necessity of the eternal fight against crime.
- Beautiful, almost silvery cinematography straight out of film noir.
- Surprisingly accurate period touches, especially in the set design and props.
- A rotating cast of fine guest stars that ranged from Nehemiah Persoff and Barbara Stanwyck to Leonard Nimoy and Louise Fletcher.
- Suspenseful plots that were a forerunner to today’s story arc.
- Gun fights, assassinations, illegal booze, mob hits, and enough action to keep even a small child enthralled.
- Lots and lots of fake blood, particularly when the bad guys went after each other, the Untouchables, and random spear carriers.
The blood didn’t hold much fascination for me, at least at first. Action was one thing, physical harm another entirely. I was a kid, after all, plus I was a girl in a nice, safe, suburb. The most blood I ever saw was from my own scraped knees and elbows, or possibly Dad’s hand after Toto Barbarossa bit him by reflex when Dad accidentally grabbed an injured paw. Blood really wasn’t my thing. Besides, The Untouchables was filmed entirely in black and white, which meant that the blood simply looked like another dark, shadowy liquid rather than human juice.
Then Dad shared a secret, and it completely changed the way I thought about the wounds, puddles, splashes, and bullet holes in The Untouchables: the fake blood wasn’t red.
I frowned, since that didn’t make sense. Then I asked my father, whom I was convinced Knew All Things And Was Never Wrong, how this could possibly be.
Dad gave me a hug, settled back on the couch, and pointed at the television screen. “It doesn’t need to be red because they aren’t filming in color. Stage blood is expensive so they don’t use it unless they have to.”
I mulled this over for a few seconds. “Then what do they use instead?”
“Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup,” said my father, and I was so shocked I almost fell over onto the dog.
My dad was not entirely correct about this. Hershey’s is not the only chocolate syrup, after all, and surely the makers of Bosco and U-Bet, the Only True Source of an Egg Cream, would have howled in rage at being omitted. However, his main point was absolutely correct: black and white TV shows and films, especially older ones, most certainly did use chocolate syrup instead of stage blood.
The reasons for this were many, and went well beyond “it looks just like actual blood on camera.” First and foremost, chocolate syrup was cheap, only a fraction of the cost of stage blood. It was also readily available, both at kitchen/bakery supply warehouses for bulk purchase and at the local grocery/five and dime for a quick fix. It was unlikely to cause allergic reactions unless one was sensitive to chocolate, and it stayed nice and shiny and liquid-looking for take after take after take.
Best of all? Once filming was done, all the leftover Bosco (or Hershey’s, or U-Bet) was right there, ready to be squirted into a glass of milk or have a glass of seltzer squirted into it. Dessert topping, fake blood, drink flavor — what’s not to like?
Thus it was that chocolate syrup, tasty, sticky, and popular, became the “blood” that trickled from the lips of dying gangsters, that besmirched the white tie of murder victims, and that festooned the battlefields flickering on many a silver screen/early Philco. Just how my father found this out is not clear — he’d known some theater people during graduate school in New York so it’s possible he found it out then — but he was right. The blood on The Untouchables was the same stuff we’d occasionally squirt on our Baskin-Robbins French Vanilla ice cream on hot summer days, and if that made me giggle, well, I’m not ashamed to say that it also made me hungry.
Chocolate sundaes with French vanilla ice cream. Ooooooo……..
Alas for movie trivia, and the bottom line of Bosco and Hershey (and possibly U-Bet), chocolate syrup fell out of favor as more and more films and TV shows were filmed in color. Stage blood comes in many varieties these days, depending on whether one needs a large quantity of bright red liquid a la Carrie, a durable sticky mess for Bruce Campbell to wear fighting zombies or Bubba Ho-Tep, or something darker and nastier for a war film. Only small time auteurs making deliberately referential films set in the Good Old Days even consider using chocolate syrup, and most of the time they use modern stage blood (which can be formulated to look like blood in black and white) just because it’s easier. The only uses for chocolate syrup these days are those intended by Milton Hershey, Herman Fox, or the unknown inventor of Bosco: chocolate milk, baking, and of course the Best Drink You Can Only Get Fresh In New York (Not the Bottled Ones, They Suck), the egg cream.
This of course does not mean that filmmakers have stopped making films that need lots of fake blood, as anyone who’s ever endured Quentin Tarantino’s brand of cinema can amply attest. If anything, movies and TV shows today are far, far bloodier than they ever were during the heyday of Hershey-fueled violence, with hits like The Walking Dead gracing the small screen in knotty pine rumpus rooms across this great land. Exploding heads, exploding guts, sucking chest wounds, blood-smeared surgical scrubs, Jason Voorhies and Freddy Krueger in a steel cage match refereed by Wolverine and the Bride — you want blood, you have only to bring up your Netflix queue and you have more blood than the average Red Cross mobile unit.
Or you could simply rent a couple of films by Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Herschell Gordon Lewis didn’t use Bosco, or U-Bet, or even Hershey’s syrup in his films. No, this worthy son of Pittsburgh, raised in Chicago and educated at Northwestern, made his cinematic masterpieces in grainy but still vivid color, questionable taste, and monaural sound just adequate enough for the characters’ shrieks, screams, yells, and howls to register with grindhouse audiences from sea to shining sea. The blood that soaked the extras and the screen in Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, The Wizard of Gore, and that all-time classic Color Me Blood Red was anything but brown. Carmine, scarlet, cardinal, cochineal…no matter what you call it, it was all red, and it was all new when Lewis decided to turn his camera lens from cheap soft core pornography to even cheaper horror.
Lewis didn’t set out to make movies in the beginning, oh no. He began his working life as a journalist, then taught communications in Mississippi before chucking academia for advertising. This led in turn to setting up his own advertising firm, directing commercials in that exciting new medium known as “television,” and eventually directing feature-length films.
These films, which he made in partnership with exploitation specialist David Friedman, were among the first to buck the production code in early 1960’s. Artistic expression had nothing to do this, nor did a commitment to the First Amendment. No, Lewis wanted to make money, lots of money, preferably without spending much of his own coin in the process, and what betterway than to churn out a series of what were then termed “nudie cuties”?
The first of these, a screwball comedy (get it? “Screwball”? Isn’t that funny? Ha ha ha!) entitledThe Adventures of Lucky Pierre, set the pattern for the next few years. Made for only $7500, it earned three times that, giving Lewis enough money to make another comedy, Boin-n-g! , then a couple of films set at nudist camps. One of these films gave future star Karen Black her first paid work, but otherwise films like Bell, Bare, and Beatiful, which were advertised with taglines like “a positive plethora of pulchritude” and “prized and prime princesses pleasingly, provocatively and prismatically presented for your pleasure and profit” were not exactly Fellini,or even Antonioni. The climax (sorry, I couldn’t resist) of this period was the world’s first, and God willing, only nudist musical, Goldilocks and the Three Bares (aren’t these puns hilarious? Har har har!), which came out in 1963, made a boatload of money, and prismatically pleasured a great many very, very enthusiastic males of the teeange persuasion.
Like Lucky Pierre, all of these films were made on the cheap, ducked the censure of the censors by appearing at drive-ins and similar lowbrow film palaces, and earned back many times their production cost. Unfortunately, there are only so many ways one can film a chesty yet firm-busted girl cavorting about a nudist camp without putting even the randiest filmgoer to sleep, so after only two years Lewis decided to explore other options. In so doing, he inadvertently created an entire genre of horror films, one that continues to this day.
Ever wonder how all those teenagers ended up hacked to pieces at Camp Crystal Lake? Why Tobe Hooper thought that taking an obscure crime and turning it into an advertisement for unsavory ways to use a chainsaw was a good idea? Why there were so many films about the Last House on the Left, or heavily scarred spirits carving young people into stir fry strips? Where the idea that large numbers of people (especially sexually active women with big breasts) being killed with as much blood, guts, and agony as possible was entertaining came from in the first place? Why John Waters is so damn weird?
That’s right. Blame Herschell Gordon Lewis.
It all started with a little film called Blood Feast, which Lewis and Friedman decided would be a perfect way to turn a tidy profit without running afoul of thecensors. It seemed that the Production Code, which was so strict about sex and nudity and all the fun things humans can do with each other’s private parts, said absolutely nothing about gore. “It would be like having regulations against outer-space driving,” Lewis said years later, describing how he turned four days of his life and $24,500 into megabucks by being as bloody as possible.
The plot of Blood Feast, which may or may not actually qualify as such, involves an Egyptian caterer, Fuad Ramses, who decides to honor the goddess Isis (played by a department store mannequin spray-painted gold for that authentic Egyptian ambience) by serving a very, very special meal in her honor. This in turn involves the main character carving up the rest of the cast (all pretty girls with nicely rounded bosoms, of course) for choice cuts of USDA Prime. There’s an astonishing quantity of blood, some of which looks like it was thrown on the set in a strange homage to Jackson Pollock, and the production qualities are less than stellar, but what Variety dismissed as “an insult even to the most puerile and salacious of audiences” and the Los Angeles Times called “a blot on the American film industry” made millions.
Lewis, who had advertised the film with the slogan “Nothing so appalling in the annals of film,” was thrilled. Without even meaning to, he’d tapped a brand new audience: men who liked to see pretty girls treated like meat, literally, and would pay good money for the privilege. And make no mistake: Lewis quickly realized that his audience was indeed largely composed of men who really, really got off on hyperviolent, silly, misogynistic films. “If a woman showed up, she was dragged there,” he said, leaving out the strong possibility that a lot of these women promptly broke up with the men who’d dragged them to Blood Feast and started dating nice quiet accountants and English teachers.
It didn’t stop with Blood Feast, of course. Lewis went on to make ever more outrageous gorefests, including A Taste of Blood (“A GHASTLY TALE DRENCHED WITH GOUTS OF BLOOD SPURTING FROM THE WRITHING VICTIMS OF A MADMAN’S LUST!” screamed the advertisements, and of course the crowds and flowed right right in), Two Thousand Maniacs! (reportedly one of John Waters’ favorite films), Color Me Blood Red, The Wizard of Gore (about a stage magician who kills during his routines), and The Gore Gore Girls (a mutilated stripper kills off her colleagues “Candy Cane,” “Suzie Cream Puff,” and “Pickles” (???), of course with as much of the red stuff as possible). The last of these stars Henny Youngman, God knows why, though thankfully not as “Suzie Cream Puff.”
Fortunately for those too delicate to watch Two Thousand Maniacs chowing down on Candy Cane at the Wizard of Gore show, Lewis made plenty of other films during the 1960’s. He tried monster movies (Monster A Go-Go, which was only partially his work, was such a mess that it ended up on Mystery Science Theater 3000), hillbilly flicks (Moonshine Mountain), birth control comedies (The Girl, the Body, and the Pill,and no, I am not making this up), and something called Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In, which may or may not involve Tesla coils but absolutely does involve sex. Lewis even tried making children’s movies, including The Magic Land of Mother Goose (who does not end up as part of a blood feast, thank God) and Jimmy, the Boy Wonder (which does not involve Batman or any of his multitudinous adopted spawn, probably due to copyright concerns), mirabile dictu et stupor mundi.
All of these films were made for as little money as possible. All got reviews that were the dictionary definition of “brutal.” And every single one of them, without exception and regardless of quality, made money.
Alas for John Waters, fans of birth control comedies, or the dozen or so very strange people who longed to know more about Miss Nymphet, The Gore Gore Girls was Lewis’s last film for thirty years. He’d made money, so much money, so why should he knock himself out making yet more terrible films? His next movie could always prove to be his first flop, so better to go out with yet another hit and let others pick up where he left off. He had other things to do, like concentrate on his advertising business and write books on topics such as direct mail, advertising, and public relations.
This he proceeded to do until 2002. By then exploitation cinema, crude, rude, bloody, and flat out disgusting, had become chic, fashionable, and even (at least when done by Quentin Tarantino) respectable. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhies, even Francine Fishpaw and Ash Williams and so many other lowbrow horror/comedy/zombie/slasher characters had become part of the nation’s common intellectual heritage. Lewis, who’d become something of an idol to the younger generation, decided that he might as well do a little exploiting of his own.
Is it any surprise that his next film was Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat? That it was a sequel about what happens when Fuad Ramses III reopens his grandfather’s catering business? Or that John Waters, who claimed that he’d “grown up on [Lewis’] movies” and found his work “endearing,” had a cameo?
I think you all can guess the answer.
Lewis himself took an unsentimental view of his oeuvre, which also came to include 2009’s The Uh-Oh! Show (game show contestants who miss a clue are dismembered, and boy oh boy am I glad that I won’t have to deal with that on Jeopardy). “To some extent, ‘Blood Feast’ is an embarrassment, not just to me but perhaps to the entire motion picture industry,” he said in 2006. “But the result has been a realization of my personal philosophy, which is, ‘If you live long enough, you become legitimate.’”
Given how much money he made, and how many directors and writers were inspired by his work, Herschell Gordon Lewis, king of the Gore Gore Girls, definitely had a point.
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Have you ever seen a Herschell Gordon Lewis? Did you like it? Would you admit it if you did? It’s Saturday night, so spill (your opinion, not your guts)….
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