Blood Feast

Ever since the teeming multitudes of ancient Rome packed the stands of the coliseum, thrilling to the spectacle of savage butchery and bloodletting being enacted upon the living bodies of slaves and gladiators dueling below, mankind has exalted in the sadistic murder, mutilation, and killing of his fellow man. Often, he has viewed this wretched tendency to brutality and violence as a sport, as part and parcel to an evening's entertainment. Whatever the reasoning behind this atavistic and barbarous desire to see the mangled and eviscerated remains of some luckless victim,(whether because of the thrill of witnessing the horrific result of a rage he dare not, as a member of polite society, indulge in himself, or for some other reason), that is a subject that is best debated by the shrinks (once called "alienists"), who spend their days talking with madmen who would put Renfield and his fly-scarfing antics to shame.

(After all, many of our modern madmen have ingested prey far, far more unappetizing than the common arachnid, or housefly.)

In late Victorian times, the Grand Guignol theater in Paris offered generally short plays with plots focused around the theme of homicidal revenge. These dramas were centered upon characters who were psychopaths, murderers, and the denouement was always bloody and bestial, a graphic display of gory stage magic; all the better to thrill the repressed audiences of the era, who, for attending such sordid performances, must have felt excited and slightly dirty at the same time.

No matter. Whatever social demons were exorcised (or conversely, psychological demons invoked), one thing was undeniable: Men such as Joseph Vacher, H.H. Holmes, and Jack the Ripper ruled the dark, filthy, cobbled streets; men who were "down on whores." They painted the stinking slum quarters of Chicago, New York, and London bloody red, and, in many cases, in those early days of police detection, they were never apprehended, disappearing into the night and fog of history, vanishing in time.

The Grand Guignol tradition was transferred to the cinema by two men: producer David Friedman and director Herschell Gordon Lewis. The two enterprising entrepreneurs, who started out by exploiting kinky sex instead of explicit violence, churned forth "nudie cutie" films and exploitation fodder such as Living Venus and Scum of the Earth! , before finally hitting upon a formula that worked: the insane, psychopathic slaughter of the innocent, with buckets of stage blood and animal innards. In other words: graphic, gory murder is the central appeal of their pictures.

Prospering on the same human weakness or foible that creates the desire in people to crane their necks in awe and wonder at bloody highway accidents (often with the thought that, "thank God it wasn't me!"), Lewis and Friedman filmed a backyard turkey of a picture called Blood Feast, a short, simplistically brutal version of Grand Guignol for the mid-Sixties drive-in theater set. It's the odious tale of an Egyptian caterer, "Fuad Ramses", (Mal Arnold), who is obsessed with celebrating the "Blood Feast" of the goddess Ishtar (who I always thought was Babylonian). To that end, he murders young, scantily-clad women, taking their organs to put later into a pot of sickening, smokey grue. In the back of his catering shop is a golden statue of Ishtar herself, along with the bloody relics of his homicidal undertakings.

The Miami police are at a loss. Detective Pete Thornton (William Kerwin) suspects that there is a serial killer about, but, as to how to catch him, he has no clue. Four women have been murdered in a similar fashion, and they have nothing to go on.

We see Ramses in his shop, where wealthy socialite Dorothy Fremont (Lyn Bolton) hires Ramses to cater her daughter Suzette's party. Ramses, a weird and intensely creepy little man with steel grey brows as well as hair, assures her that the feast he is preparing has "not been served in five thousand years!" Duly impressed, she leaves, and he goes in back to stir his huge vat of mutilated organs.

A young couple (Ashlyn Martin and Gene Courtier) are attacked while making out on a beach. The woman alone is killed, the top of her head sawed off and her brain removed. Ramses brings along a cobra as an added touch. The cops, including Detective Thornton, show up and are still puzzled.

A woman in a motel room (Astrid Olsen) gets her tongue ripped out through her throat. The cops discover later she was one of those who wrote and ordered the book "Ancient Weird Religious Rites" from a newspaper advertisement.

Detective Thornton is, incidentally, the boyfriend of Suzette Fremont (Connie Mason), and together they attend a lecture on ancient Egyptian occultism, where the lecturer describes the "Blood Feast" of Ishtar. Later, while taking the proverbial "Sunday drive," Thornton and Suzette hear the radio describe another victim of the mad butcher, this one in the hospital with her face heavily bandaged from the mutilation. She tells the detectives, before she dies, that a wild-eyed man attacked her, saying the name "Ehtar." They find that she also ordered the book.

Trudy, a friend of Suzette's, also has "Ancient Weird Religious Rites," and Fuad kidnaps her, taking her back to his shop and chaining her to the wall in a bondage scene. He then whips her back until it drips the bright red blood that has flowed so copiously through this short film.

Thornton and company, after speaking again with the Egyptian lecturer, finally put two and two together, racing to Ramses and finding the bloody, mutilated corpse of Trudy in the back of the store. The Fremont affair, which Ramses is catering, is still going on, but he has cut the phone lines. Kerwin can't call and warn Suzette and the other guests.

Ramses has brought the Blood Feast meal with him, and he convinces Suzette (who is to be the final sacrifice) to lie down on a counter in the kitchen. He then prepares to behead her when her mother comes in and interrupts.

"Just Like the Garbage He Was!"

"He died a fitting end, just like the garbage he was!" is how one cop describes the bloody strip that is the remains of Fuad Ramses. Having been interrupted in quick succession by Suzette's mother, and then the cops, Thornton, and company chase the Egyptian psychopath through a garbage dump, where he tries to hide in the back of a garbage truck.

Unfortunately for him, the trash compactor suddenly comes on, crushing the life out of Ishtar's most loyal servant. The Bloody End.

I have personally seen Blood Feast multiple times in my life, and enjoy it for its brutal, primitive simplicity. The film has no frills of characterization to offer, no "reality"; it's an urban legend, a campfire story designed to fit around a series of brutal and gory killings. The strange, foreign man is designed to prey upon our deepest fear and xenophobic response to "The Other," strange immigrants and foreigners whose ways are different from our own, who may even "threaten" us. Xenophobia is real; it's still a huge factor in American political life, even in these supposedly enlightened times. Blood Feast is an almost moronically simple cautionary tale about the danger of trusting those with ways that may conflict with our own all-American football and apple pie values of John Wayne, the Lone Ranger, and the Stars and Stripes.

After all, it's only when the women go peeking around the corner out of curiosity that they end up on the chopping block. The final punishment, beheading, was to be reserved for Suzette, whose mother wanted a "genuine Egyptian catered feast." Thus, allegorically straying from tradition, she opens herself up to her own destruction.

But, beyond these very simple subtexts, Blood Feast is essentially a cinematic freakshow: the paltry story, wooden characters, and threadbare "plot" mask what is, essentially, an experience in exploitation, a stark and simple wrap-around for violent and graphic gore, a movie capitalizing on what Anton LaVey called, "The Law of the Forbidden": We drive past a bloody highway accident compelled to look at what we know we, really, shouldn't be staring at. But we can't help it! A dark, atavistic vein of pure animal sadism, a wild, untamed thing that lurks within, is drawn to stare death and mutilation in the face, to see life for what it really is, stripped of all its middle-class pretense and bourgeois puffery.

It may be a desire to be liberated, spiritually, from the modern, confining world. It may even desensitize us, as some will claim, to the suffering of others. Some will even suggest it can and has INSPIRED the sort of cold-blooded, homicidal butchery it so crudely portrays.

Perhaps. Perhaps violence on screen is a catharsis. Or perhaps, alternately, it is a stimulant. Perhaps this is all based solely on a personal perspective. Are men sullied or soiled, spiritually, for watching such trash? (And even enjoying it? What does that say about them?)

I don't know. All I know is that I've seen Blood Feast multiple times.

And I really, really like it.

Blood Feast is available for viewing at Archive.org.