ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses American independent filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis, nicknamed “the Godfather of Gore.” Despite a fairly diverse body of films during his brief but productive career, he is best known for his unapologetically gory, trashy horror film. In interviews, Lewis repeatedly framed his filmmaking as an entirely economical venture, arguing that he was making films for a poor rural audience that Hollywood neglected. In addition to locating Lewis’s career within the phenomena of American exploitation cinema, this chapter focuses on Color Me Blood Red (1965), in which a struggling artist develops a technique of painting with human blood and turns to murder to acquire it. The film surrounds its protracted scenes of torture and death with tedious filler alongside a bitter commentary on the art market. The chapter emphasizes the film as an expression of Lewis’s cynicism and anti-intellectualism, and discusses the latter-day re-evaluation of Lewis as a transgressive figure, including the reference to him in the “Indiewood” hit Juno (2007).
