On September 26th, Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man better known as "the Godfather of Gore" passed away peacefully in his sleep at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 90 years old.
In the early 1960s HG Lewis was the first filmmaker who dared to gross out his audience by showing full frontal gore in glorious full colour, using things like sheep's tongues and other animal organs, locally imported meat and anything else that would achieve the perfect gore-y result. Films like 1963's Blood Feast, 1964's Two Thousand Maniacs!, 1965's Color Me Blood Red, 1967's A Taste Of Blood and The Gruesome Twosome, 1970's The Wizard Of Gore and 1972's The Gore-Gore Girls are typical examples of his bizarre aesthetics and innovative filmmaking, while movies like 1968's Just For The Hell Of It and She-Devils On Wheels show that Herschell had quite an eye for b-movies and exploitation in general.
In the seventies HG Lewis stepped away from the movie industry to focus on marketing and advertising, about which he wrote and published no less than twenty books. He returned to filmmaking in 2002 with Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat. In 2009 his next film The Uh-Oh! Show was released, while recently Herschell was working on Herschell Gordon Lewis' BloodMania, an anthology of horror stories, that turned out to be his last film. It is expected to be released sometime in 2017.
ZR