Herschell Gordon Lewis

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Herschell Gordon Lewis (June 15, 1926 – September 26, 2016) was an American filmmaker best known for creating the "splatter" subgenre of horror films.

He is often described as the "Godfather of Gore" (as well given to Lucio Fulci), but his film career included work in a variety of exploitation film genres, including juvenile delinquent films, nudie-cuties, two children's films, and at least one rural comedy.

AllMovie wrote about Lewis' career, "Herschell Gordon Lewis was a pioneer, going farther than anyone else dared, probing the depths of disgust and annoyance on film with more bad taste and imagination than anyone of his time."

Early life

Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in 1926 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Geraldine (Waldman) and Emmanuel. Lewis was Jewish. His father died when he was six years old; his mother never remarried. Lewis' family lived in Chicago, Illinois, where he spent the bulk of his adolescence. Lewis earned a bachelor's and master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, after graduating from high school. He taught communications at Mississippi State University for a short time. He was lured from his academic career to work as the WRAC Radio station in Racine, Wisconsin, and later became the studio director at the WKY-TV studio in Oklahoma City.

Lewis began teaching graduate advertising classes at Roosevelt University in 1953, when he began working for a friend's advertising company in Chicago. In the meantime, he began directing television commercials for a small production firm called Alexander and Associates. Lewis and Martin Films later purchased out half of the company with business associate Martin Schmidhofer and renamed it Lewis and Martin Films.

In 1959, Lewis produced Carving Magic, a short promotional film produced by Swift & Company. William Kerwin and Harvey Korman, as well as Swift & Company's "home economist," Martha Logan, were among the briefed actors, who would continue to perform in other Lewis projects.

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Film career

Lewis was a producer on his first film venture, The Prime Time (1959), which was the first feature film to be shot in Chicago since the late 1910s. From then on, he'll do directing on almost all of his films. Living Venus (1961), Hugh Hefner's first in a long line of collaborations with exploitation producer David F. Friedman, was the first in a long line of playboy's fictional account. Lewis and Friedman's films were early exploitation films, and the films' nude scenes were not included in "mainstream" Hollywood films because of the Motion Picture Production Code's censorship.

In the early 1960s, the two met in a series of erotic films. These films represented the start of a deliberate approach to filmmaking that each party would maintain throughout their development careers — films made solely with the intention of making money. The screwball comedies Boin-n-g! (1963) and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), a film produced for a shoestring budget of $7,500, which would be the duo's first major financial success; it was also the first time that the duo's first great financial return; it made three times its budget on its first appearance. The bulk of Lewis and Friedman's early films consisted of nudist camp features such as Daughter of the Sun (1962) and Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963), which properly described themselves as "the first (and to date the only) nudist musical" because film prohibitions had not yet allowed for sexual representations in films.

Lewis and Friedman's seminal Blood Feast, 1963, which most commentators regard as the first "gore" film, debuted with the nudie market beginning to fade. They were able to appeal to the drive-in theater market that would have been inaccessible with their previous skin flicks due to the uniqueness of this film.

Two Thousand Maniacs!

(1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965) used the same formula. The full-color gore on display in these films caused a worldwide sensation, with horror film-makers around the world eager to saturate their films with similar striking visual effects.

Lewis left Friedman after making Color Me Blood Red, but he continued to make more gore films into the 1970s. His next gore entry wouldn't be published until 1967, with A Taste of Blood, often described as the "Gone with the Wind of Gore" due to its relatively lengthy running time of nearly two hours. The following year will see a more modern twist on the story, with The Gruesome Twosome (1967) most notable for using an electric knife to scalp one of the victims.

Lewis, who was best known for his gore canon, went on to a number of other exploitation avenues throughout the sixties. Some of the more taboogie subjects he investigated included juvenile delinquency (just for the Hell of It, 1968), wife swapping (Suburban Roulette, 1967), and birth control (The Girl, the Body, and the Pill, 1967). He was also not above tapping the children's market, as with Jimmy the Boy Wonder (1966) and The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967), which were padded out to feature film length by including long foreign-made cartoons. Lewis' films are available for purchase through Seattle-based video company Something Weird Video, which finds and restores lost and little-seen exploitation films from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Lewis invested and produced virtually all of his own films with funds earned by his successful advertising company, headquartered in Chicago. Despite the poor budgets he worked with, Lewis bought the rights to an unfinished film and directed it himself, re-titling the film Monster a Go-Go (1965). Many years later, the film gained notoriety after being seen on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 television show, where the cast said it was the worst film they had ever seen. Lewis would repeat this formula when he bought a gritty psychological piece named The Vortex and launched it as Stick It in Your Ear (1970), his second sequel to The Wizard of Gore (1970). Lewis' business acumen did show that he understood his business instincts by acquiring the rights to both features (as well as the majority of his feature films), he knew he would not be fleeced by theaters juggling the box office returns, which was a common occurrence at the time.

Lewis' third gore phase brought the genre even more bizarre shock territory. The Wizard of Gore (1970) included a stage magician who would mutilate his volunteers in a string of merciless routines. Lewis had pushed the gore technique to such a degree that it began to lampoon itself, which is why The Gore Gore Girls (1972) (featuring Henny Youngman's appearance as the owner of a topless club) would mark his semi-retirement from filming entirely.

He left filmmaking to work in copywriting and direct marketing, a field on which he published several books in the 1980s. He is reportedly one of the most popular direct response copywriters in direct marketing.

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