(well…notoriety) by basically inventing movie gore. The story goes that Lewis, who had already been dabbling in extremely downmarket films with “exploitable elements,” found himself in 1963 with some left over stage blood from another film. Not wanting to waste a thing, he dreamed up the idea of using all of the leftover material in his next film, and therefore found himself a trailblazer in movie horror so nauseating that even the film geek writing this blog refuses to see them.
(The true story of the first splatter film is a bit more complicated but was another example of economy being the mother of invention. Since no one had ever made a gore film before, film censors had no real rules against it and so it was a relatively easy way to attract thrill-seeking young audiences — however, none of the stage blood that Lewis found was realistic enough to be