| The premises of Herschell
Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast and Two
Thousand Maniacs! are startlingly similar and simple.
In Blood Feast a religious-fanatic, Fuad
Ramses, murders suburban women, (or, more precisely, dismembers
them), in preparation for a great feast, (in which their body
parts feature prominently on the menu), that will give life
to the ancient Egyptian deity he worships; in Two
Thousand Maniacs! a small southern town in the US
celebrates the centennial of a massacre that took place during
the Civil War, the celebrations involving little more than
luring unsuspecting tourists into the town and murdering them,
(also by dismemberment).
In both films, Lewis displays only the most rudimentary of
filmmaking skills. Entire scenes are played out in static
shots that do little more than watch the characters speak
reams of badly written dialogue, (which in some places the
actors appear to be reading from not too carefully concealed
dialogue sheets). More often than not, Lewis’ placement
of the camera is awkward, almost as if he has set it down
it in any spot that will allow him to fit all the characters
in the frame. For the most part, he seems to edit only when
moving to a new location, or when there may be a real and
present danger that the audience might doze off unless he
injects the film with some sort of kinesis to kick it along.
In short, Lewis doesn’t attempt to use the cinematic
form of his films to create any sort of mood, nor does it
seem that he is able to. But then, to watch Blood
Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!
for their filmic form would be to miss what these films are
about.
Each movie is exactly 66 minutes in length, (a strange coincidence
that I will leave for readers with a penchant for kabbalistic
number symbolism to explore). From a conventional point of
view, the number 66 means only that both films are pushing
the lower limits of ‘feature length’. Each film
is known today, not for its artistry, themes, characters,
etc., but for being the first ‘gore’ movies. (I
am aware that as soon as one person calls something ‘the
first’, another is likely to find examples of movies,
perhaps lesser-known, that did the same thing many years earlier,
much as Citizen Kane [1940] was not the first
film to use deep focus photography, merely the first to become
famous for doing so). And being the ‘first’ gore
films is what Blood Feast and Two
Thousand Maniacs! are famous for,
and it is a status that invariably colours how they are treated
by audiences.
Viewing Blood Feast and Two Thousand
Maniacs! today is an activity that is influenced
by everything that has changed in the way that
violence has been presented onscreen in the 40 years since
these films were first released. Changes in both the graphicity
and the quantity of onscreen violence since Lewis’ heyday
mean that it is almost impossible to see these films with
the innocence that audiences in the cinemas and drive-in theatres
of the early 60’s saw them, audiences who, (if the reports
are to be believed), were sometimes shocked, sometimes outraged,
and sometimes sickened by what they viewed. One scene in Blood
Feast – the whipping of a girl chained in the
back of Fuad’s exotic foods shop – was so incendiary
that it had to be trimmed, and yet, when compared with the
extended flagellation scene in Mel Gibson’s The
Passion of the Christ (2004), where a man is mercilessly
whipped with a cat-o-nine-tails on which each lash is fitted
with sharp metal hooks to cause deep lacerations, Blood
Feast’s whipping scene comes across as decidedly
mild.
Some of the reasons that the gore effects in these films
look outdated are due simply to advances in the digital and
robotic technologies that allow filmmakers to represent their
wildest imaginings onscreen. Other reasons are due to socio-cultural
shifts in the value system that underlies our moral judgments
and which are reflected in greatly relaxed censorship laws.
These shifts are clearly seen in the way that Lewis presents
his killings and dismemberments. He only shows us the before
and the after, rarely the act itself. For example, in Two
Thousand Maniacs! we see hicks tie a man’s
arms and legs to four horses, we see them set the horses pulling
in four different directions, then Lewis cuts directly to
a torn off leg lying in the grass. Or Lewis will show us Fuad
Ramses moving towards a woman, knife in hand, a leer grinning
across his face, then Lewis will let us hear her screams as
the killer’s body obscures our view, and finally we
see the dismembered limb. Lewis’ not showing
the act of dismemberment makes us aware of the technical and
censorship restrictions under which he was working, restrictions
which belong, from where we look today, to a past time and
a past place. And this awareness generates new ways of framing
the film’s meanings: the quaint production techniques
seem humorous, and laughter, not moral shock, is an accepted
and probably fairly standard 21st century audience reaction.
Most of the laughter directed at these films, however, comes
from another domain. The underlying morality which guides
these films, and governs the social order they present, (which,
in effect, represents the moral conservatism of a certain
strata of American society in the early 60’s), seems
not only dated but somewhat simplisitic and whenever audience
members feel they have moved beyond the moral values immortalized
onscreen, whenever we feel morally superior to the films (and
by implication to the filmmakers) whose work we are viewing,
then their attempts to shape our moral evaluations will seem
laughable, childlike even. Audiences are entertained as much
by being given the opportunity to laugh at
films as they are by laughing with them, and
with audiences such as these, Lewis’ films, and others
like them, are able to find a new lease of life four decades
after they were made.
Modern-day cinematic representations of homicidal maniacs
provide, almost as a matter of course, details regarding the
psychopath’s background – perhaps a history of
being abused as a child, (medically, physical abuse can lead
to brain damage that has been linked to an impaired sense
of morality), perhaps he has experienced unsuccessful and
frustrating relationships with women and is lashing back,
perhaps he’s a Nam veteran, (a sufficient explanation
in the 70’s to convince audiences of a psycho’s
credentials). Some filmmakers present a fleeting moment of
sympathy for a killer – only ever fleeting because they
want to make sure we still feel enough antagonism towards
him or her to allow us to accept and enjoy the suitably violent
demise that awaits them – but the sympathy is there
nonetheless, usually evoked in moments when the killer is
shown as a victim of circumstances, as someone who, raised
in a different environment, or in a different family, could
have been a normal enough person.
But, nevertheless, there is no fleeting moment of sympathy
in Blood Feast or Two Thousand Maniacs!
for any of the killers. Lewis doesn’t want to present,
even for a moment, his killers as victims of their upbringing,
or their social circumstances, and he doesn’t want to
do this for the very simple reason that he doesn’t want
to present his killers as a product of society.
For example, Fuad Ramses, the killer is Blood Feast,
is presented as sleazy camped-up grey-haired weirdo. Worshipping
an ancient Egyptian goddess, (her shrine is at the back of
his shop), he begins to prepare a ritualistic ‘blood-feast’
that will bring her back to life. Fuad roams the streets with
a butcher’s knife and knapsack carving up ladies left,
right and centre, in a devotional and desperate effort to
find all the organs needed for the sacred repast: brains,
tongue, eyes, heart, leg, (you name it). We are left no room
to doubt that Fuad is a twisted individual whose murders are
driven by a lusting for what others abhor. Lewis doesn’t
want Fuad to be seen as a product of society, precisely because
he wishes to present him as the opposite of everything that
America, (at least the America he envisions), stands for.
Behind Lewis’ Blood Feast is a fairly
provincial view of American suburbia as a place full of caring,
generally good-hearted people who throw garden parties, enjoy
life’s little luxuries, and love their neighbours. It
is a place that is ‘psychologically clean’. Fuad’s
psychological dementia is something which Lewis’ shows
as having been created by an ancient very un-American cult:
he is the ‘other’, the ‘alien’, the
counter force to the innate good that Lewis’ suburban
town represents and that which it must be cleansed of if it
is to be restored to its pristine Edenic state.
Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!
were never intended as ‘serious’ films, (though
many similar movies do seem to have pretensions of serving
some high-minded purpose), and even within the exploitation
genre they are fairly breezy viewing. Compare them to the
drug exploitation films made in the 30’s – films
like Cocaine Fiends (1935), Reefer
Madness (1936), Marihuana, the Weed with
Roots in Hell (1936)(I love that title), Assassin
of Youth (1937) – all of which are pervaded
by serious anti-drug polemics. Often such films were funded
or endorsed by parent- or teacher-groups in order to show
the ‘horrors’ of drug use and to show how drug-use
invariably leads to criminal activities, activities which
might begin with petty theft but quickly escalate to prostitution,
murder, and leave addicts to suffer psychosis, destitution,
and early death. Lewis has no such message. He never dwells
on post-mortem scenes, on grieving families, never gives graphic
police descriptions, and never shows too much suffering on
the victims’ side, always allowing them to die rather
quickly. For these reasons, Lewis’ films enable audiences
to enjoy viewing the onscreen mayhem –
and I think this enjoyment factor was as important to these
films initial success as the physical gore was to their initial
infamy.
In the end, it may be Lewis’ complete lack of concern
for the ‘proper’ way of presenting such material,
and the joy he exudes in colouring his images blood-red, filling
his scenes with human limbs and screaming women, (that old
staple of cinema), that also largely accounts for these films
continuing appeal. If his ‘blood’
looks more like thinned-out paint, his evident glee in applying
it to his victims and their surroundings is something which
has traversed the decades, and which can still be found in
these films, despite everything else that might have changed.
To buy Blood Feast and Two Thousand
Maniacs!
from Siren Visual Entertainment click here
|
