Overview

Dubbed ""The Godfather of Gore,"" no other exploitation filmmaker made the most of scant budgets, short shooting schedules and amateur special effects like the legendary Herschell Gordon Lewis. Making his mark with Blood Feast in 1963 and helming such notorious splatter-shockers as Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), The Gruesome Twosome (1967) and The Gore Gore Girls (1972), the director provoked generations of indebted genre stylists from John Waters and Frank Henenlotter to Eli Roth and Damien Leone, with his hit Terrifier franchise. This is the first academic study into the work of Lewis, covering not just his bloodstained celluloid, but also his background in sexploitation and infomercials. In doing so, this entry in the ReFocus series takes one of cinema's most influential low budget craftsmen out of the grindhouse and considers him as an Avant Garde auteur in his own right.

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9781399536011

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Reviews

ReFocus: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis constitutes a substantial anthology of critical essays dedicated to an often overlooked figure in horror cinema. This volume is poised to serve as the definitive scholarly resource on Lewis’s oeuvre, encompassing his earliest industrial documentaries through to the direct-to-video sequel, Blood Feast 2. * Mikel J. Koven, University of Worcester *

Author Information

Calum Waddell is a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, where he also received his PhD. His previous work includes The Style of Sleaze, The American Exploitation Film (2018), Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa (2021), South African Horror Cinema (2025), and the edited collection The Films of Wes Craven (2023). He has occasionally worked on producing bonus content and documentary work for Blu-ray labels and documented the “gory glory” days of grindhouse cinema with his feature-length nostalgia-trip 42nd Street Memories (2015).

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