Blood Feast: A Review of the Novelization of the Landmark Gore Film

           (Warning: contains spoilers, so please excuse the smell of putrefying flesh.)

    Exploitation film legend, Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!) wrote a lot of books in his lifetime. As one of the chief pioneers in the field of direct marketing (junk mail to you and me) the man was regarded as an icon by his advertising peers … a label that may or may not be applicable to Lewis as a filmmaker, depending on your preference for cheaply-made, gore-drenched exploitation movies.

    With titles like, Sales Letters That Sizzle, and Direct Mail Copy That Sells, Lewis’s prolific body of written works deal mostly with the subject of penning effective ad copy. The man did, however, write a few novelizations of his cinematic car accidents; novelty books that were sold at the drive-in movie theatres showing Lewis’s over-the-top films. Today these books are highly collectible in their first run print versions due to their extreme rarity; a fact that surprised author, Lewis, who later said, “in those days we couldn’t give them away.”

    Thankfully, for those of us who can’t seem to track down these prized collectible novels, reprints of both the Blood Feast novelization and the Two Thousand Maniacs novelization were published in 1988, with each including a new introduction by Herschell Gordon Lewis. As a strange bonus, my copy of the Blood Feast novel was published with a small collection of pages printed out of order, a mistake that seems oddly fitting, given HGL’s long, single-take, ragged pan directorial style of filmmaking. It was like a reel of film shown out of order that no one noticed.

    Say what you will about the man’s filmography, but Lewis’s intelligence and wit were undeniable, a fact that makes the Blood Feast novelization such a fun and outrageous read. Written with severed tongue planted firmly in slashed cheek, this tale of murderous Egyptian caterer, Fuad Ramses, and his efforts to resurrect the goddess Ishtar with an offering of diced female body parts contains passages that are laugh-out-loud funny.

    Lewis’s humor often waltzes into surreal territory, as evidenced by his inclusion of a talking cat in this pungent potpourri of deranged dismemberment. Yes, you read that correctly … there is a talking cat in the novelization of the film, Blood Feast (and if that’s not sales copy that sizzles, I don’t know what is.) The cat's name is Carson, and he is quite the animal rights activist.

    HGL’s breezy prose makes for a quick and amusing read. And, if the man’s subsequent prolific book output is any indication, Blood Feast was probably written in one evening. It reads a bit like an old Woody Allen story with female eviscerations peppered into the mix: a gimmick that a few of Allen’s recent films could use to their advantage, but I digress.

    The book is hardly a straight re-telling of the infamous splatter film's plotline by any means—not with characters such as the aptly named Sergeant Bull Schitt—so if you are seeking true horror thrills, you might look elsewhere. Instead we are gifted with passages such as this gem: "Karl had been standing in the bathroom applying Man-Tan to his somewhat darkened face, as he had been doing periodically for eight days, anticipating eventually that he would be black enough to pass for the Count Basie concert at the Trivoli, an exclusive for the spade trade." Or this introduction of the character, Fuad Ramses: "He had been known as the 'Elliptical Egyptian' in the early years around Cairo. The name derived from the shape of his head, which, elliptical as an egg, had been hairless from the time of his addiction to the narcotic Sphinx cigarettes exported by his father. He had started smoking these on the occasion of his first visit to the Ramses Factory of Tobacconist Arts, a notorious producer of well-disguised narcotics, including Half-and-Hashish, Rum-and-Marijuana, Cocaine-Cokeakoola and Sphinx, the cigarette for distinguished addicts."
  

     Strange? And how. The weirdness continues in the same chapter: "He was not a frugal man and lavished himself with an incredible variety of luxuries, including gigantic sponges, solid gold-sheeted wall coverings, one hundred pound bags of cashew nuts, a trailer filled with ping pong balls which he later dumped from the top of the Prudential Building, rubber falsies of varying sizes with which he covered the walls and floor of an entire room."

    And I would be remiss if I did not include this excerpt: "Sol also wore the new hip pants, that hugged the hip, and the thigh, and the knee, and the ankle, and couldn't be worn by anyone with big toes. Sol had big toes, but he was resourceful enough to put the pants on over his head."

    I just have to wonder what the hell anyone might of thought after reading this book in 1963. Maybe something along the lines of "What the fuck was that?" A response similar to what anyone might have thought after viewing the film for the first time.

   As previously mentioned, my copy of the book went completely apeshit after page 64, and the novel suddenly leapt forward to pages 77-80, then back to pages 73-76, and then leapt back further to pages 69-72 and finally ended up back at page 65, making for a wacky reading experience indeed. I have no idea if every copy of the novel was reprinted in this manner, but if they are, I suggest just jumping about the book as the pages dictate. The weird journey contained in those pages is certainly worth the effort, despite the inconvenience. Perhaps all other copies were printed in proper order and mine is just a fluke. Someday I must track down another copy of the book to check, or, better yet, find an original first edition from 1963—now that would be something I would rip out someone's tongue for!