Eli Roth – Blood and Porridge

September 26, 2026September 30, 2026

The Herschell house of horror

From wikipedia.org / © Super Festivals

Halloween is just over a month away. Here’s a first, horror-themed post to mark the beginning of the ‘witching season’.

I didn’t particularly care for the films of American director and producer Herschell Gordon Lewis, who was nicknamed ‘the Godfather of Gore’ and who passed away ten years ago today, on September 26^th, 2016. That said, I certainly liked the idea of Lewis.

Lewis’s exploitation movies spanned a variety of genres – softcore erotica (usually set in nudist colonies and including the likes of 1963’s Goldilocks and the Three Bares), comedies, children’s movies and at least one feminist biker flick, 1968’s splendidly titled She-Devils on Wheels. However, it’s for his horror films that he’ll be remembered, and for the simple but at the time innovative approach that he brought to the horror-film genre. He made the first horror movies that were truly horrible, i.e., loaded with bloodletting, dismemberment, disembowelment, scalping, eye-gouging, tongue-ripping and so on: Blood Feast (1963), 2000 Maniacs (1964), Colour Me Blood Red (1965), Taste of Blood (1967), The Gruesome Twosome (1967), The Wizard of Gore (1970) and The Gore Gore Girls (1972).

Not unexpectedly, Lewis’s approach did not go down well with mainstream movie critics – “Thoroughly revolting Z-grade garbage” was a typical assessment of Blood Feast – and was hardly the stuff that mainstream movie audiences flocked to. But his horror movies still packed enough folk into America’s drive-ins for them to turn a tidy profit and, over the years, he found a number of admirers among left-field film fans, filmmakers and commentators. More on those later.

Needless to say, his work didn’t make its way to the United Kingdom anytime soon. I remember reading about Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs in film books and magazines when I was a kid and thinking, “Wow, these must be the most hideous and terrifying films ever made!” But at the same time I knew the chances of me seeing them in censorious Britain were non-existent. The chances became less than non-existent during the 1980s when British politicians, tabloid newspapers and moral campaigners worked themselves into a lather over the ‘video nasties’ scare.

In fact, it wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that I finally laid eyes on some footage from his movies. This was courtesy of Jonathan Ross’s offbeat TV series The Incredibly Strange Film Show (1988-89), which devoted a whole episode to Lewis.

How different it is nowadays. A while back I saw some of his movies as double-bills on Britain’s now-defunct Horror Channel, which was available for all to watch on Freeview. Quite a few of them are up on the Internet, on sites like YouTube and Dailymotion. And with modern films featuring high-tech animatronic and computer-generated effects, Lewis’s movie gore – basically all the offal he could find at the local butcher’s shop and lots of bright red paint – looks so primitive it almost has a retro charm.

From wikipedia.org / © Box Office Spectaculars

Blood Feast was the film that made Lewis’s name and it remains his most famous, or infamous, effort. I have to say it’s a very bad film. The acting is atrocious, the budget is visibly tiny and the general level of professionalism is not much higher than Ed Wood standards. And yet… It might be one of the worst films I’ve seen, but I’ve never been able to forget it. Somehow, it still creeps me out. Maybe it’s the stark, single-minded way it goes about its bloody business – something reinforced by the score, a slow, thudding, doom-laden thing that’s little more than a funereal drumbeat. It’s so minimalist it makes the sparse, pulsing synth scores that John Carpenter did for his movies sound like Vivaldi.

Among the rest of Lewis’s oeuvre, I’ll admit to liking (a little bit) 2000 Maniacs, possibly because it’s an insolent remake of Brigadoon, the cheesy 1954 MGM musical about a phantom Scottish Highland village that appears out of the mist for one day every century. But while the village in Brigadoon appears so that Gene Kelly and Van Johnson can perform song-and-dance numbers there like The Heather on the Hill and I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean, the phantom village in 2000 Maniacs has a darker purpose.

It’s a southern USA village whose inhabitants were slaughtered by northern forces during the Civil War and now, as ghosts, they reappear every so often to take bloody revenge on any hapless Yankee travellers who come their way. As a commentary on the horrors of the Civil War, it’s hardly in the class of, say, the fiction of Ambrose Bierce; but in its crude, tacky manner it’s effective.

The only other 1960s film by Lewis I’ve seen is his third ‘gore’ film, Colour Me Blood Red, which is about an unsuccessful and embittered painter (Gordon Oas-Helm) whose paintings lack a certain something… A certain colour… A certain shade of a colour… Well, the title tells what the missing shade is and, as soon as he realises that, he’s secretly murdering people and applying their blood to his canvases. Hey presto! The local, snobby art critic (William Harris) immediately switches from slagging off his work to proclaiming him a genius.

While Lewis’s previous two horror films at least did things with a gory elan, Colour Me Blood Red is a dreary, uneventful thing. Particularly duff is a sequence where the artist terrorises two victims who are out at sea in a pedal-boat – an action set-piece involving a pedal-boat is about as exciting as it sounds. Also, among the friends whom the film’s young heroine (Candi Conder) hangs out with are a beatnik couple who insist on talking in a super-annoying type of rhyming hipster / jive-speak. At one point they manage to rhyme ‘daddy-o’ with ‘patio’. I spent the film waiting for them to die horribly. But damn it, they didn’t.

From wikipedia.org / © Mayflower Pictures

Meanwhile, I have to confess to liking, again a little bit, 1970’s The Wizard of Gore, which is about a stage magician (Ray Sager) who uses power tools to perform mind-bogglingly gruesome tricks on volunteers from the audience. When the tricks are over, the volunteers seem to be alive, well and in one piece. But later, after the show, they ‘revert’ to the grisly state they were in onstage and, obviously, die. Again, it’s cheap and ineptly made, but the film has a weirdness that’s difficult to forget.

The Wizard of Gore also won Lewis one of his very few acknowledgements from mainstream cinema. In 2007’s acclaimed comedy-drama Juno, Jason Bateman’s music / comic-book / movie nerd convinces Ellen (now Elliot) Page’s Juno that The Wizard of Gore is a better horror movie than Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). I have to say that if they honestly believe Lewis’s schlocky little opus to be superior to Argento’s demented masterpiece, Bateman and Page must be really thick.

I’ve also watched Lewis’s last movie from this era, The Gore Gore Girls, which is problematic even by its director’s usual standards. It’s a horror comedy, of sorts, wherein an arrogant, dandified – complete with walking cane – private investigator (Frank Kress) and a liberated lady reporter (Nancy Farrell) investigate a series of murders where the victims are strippers and the suspects include a traumatised Vietnam War vet and a bunch of radical feminists who protest against striptease acts with placards saying things like ‘Quit with Tit!’ Finally, the investigator gets the supposedly liberated reporter drunk and goads her into participating in an amateur striptease competition with a 1000-dollar prize, which she wins, turning her into the killer’s next potential victim – and bait in the crafty investigator’s trap.

The Gore Gore Girls is unpleasantly misogynistic and voyeuristic and it handles themes like feminism and post-traumatic stress disorder with as much finesse as you’d expect, i.e., none. But for me its biggest problem is Kress’s investigator, whom Lewis evidently intends to come across as a quirky, outspoken but lovable rogue. He actually comes across as a complete dickhead.

From wikipedia.org / © Lewis Motion Picture Enterprises

After a long hiatus from filmmaking, Lewis returned to it in his later years. This was after his great influence on the horror-movie genre had been recognised – generally in, say, the slasher movies of the 1980s where the emphasis was on bloody and outrageous ‘kills’ rather than on plot or characterisation, and specifically in the works of certain filmmakers who’d drawn inspiration from him, like Eli Roth, John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. In 2002 he directed a belated sequel to Blood Feast, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, which featured Waters in a cameo, and in 2009 a standalone horror film called The Uh-Oh! Show.

Meanwhile, without Lewis as director, 2000 Maniacs was remade in 2005 as 2001 Maniacs (which Eli Roth co-produced), and that remake received a sequel in 2010 entitled 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. The Wizard of Gore was remade in 2007 and Blood Feast in 2016, the latter with Lewis in a supporting role as ‘Professor Lou Herschell’, which must have been one of the last things he ever did. These films contained an element never seen before in Lewis-related movies: some decent actors. Their casts included such accomplished performers as Robert Englund, Bill Mosely, Crispin Glover, Brad Dourif and Jeffrey Combs.

A decade after his death, Lewis’s influence lives on. I recently watched Curry Barker’s acclaimed horror movie Obsession (2025). The sequence in it that’s most horrible – or depending on your point of view, most hilariously over the top – immediately put me in mind of The Gore Gore Girls.

What I love about Lewis, though, is that in the early 1970s he packed in filmmaking and turned to something very different – advertising. He became a guru on the subject and made a fortune writing books about it, such as 1974’s The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion and 1977’s How to Handle your own Public Relations. His speciality was direct marketing, the practice of bombarding large numbers of people with word of your product – which, while pissing off the vast majority of them, should hook a sufficient minority of them to make the exercise worthwhile. In a way, that’s what Lewis did with his horror movies.

In the end, Lewis became a very wealthy man – an exemplar of the American Dream. The fact that he achieved that dream on the back of direct marketing and excessive bloodletting seems odd but, also, appropriately American.

From wikipedia.org / © Box Office Spectaculars

August 9, 2020August 10, 2020

An appointment with Willow’s Song

© Silva Screen

This is a revision of an entry that first appeared on this blog on – appropriately – May 1^st, 2014. Be warned that it’s packed with spoilers about The Wicker Man (1973).

The Scottish-American singer and actress Annie Ross died last month at the age of 89. Even if she hadn’t been a celebrated jazz chanteuse, she could boast of leading a varied life. She worked as a child actress in the USA, became a jazz artist in Europe as an adult, became a familiar face on British TV in the late 1970s, and finally re-established herself in the USA and got citizenship there in 2001. She was both the sister of the well-known Scottish comedian and actor Jimmy Logan (whose performance as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer I was lucky enough to see at Aberdeen’s His Majesty’s Theatre in the mid-1980s) and the one-time lover of a rather different type of comedian, Lenny Bruce. And she acted in films as wildly assorted as Peter Collinson’s Straight On Till Morning (1972), Richard Lester’s Superman III (1983), Danny DeVito’s Throw Momma from the Train (1987), Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993) and, yes, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case 2 (1990) and Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1991).

She was also tasked with the unusual job of making Britt Ekland sound Scottish in my all-time favourite horror movie, 1973’s The Wicker Man. Yes, whenever Ekland opens her mouth in the role of Willow Macgregor, the landlord’s daughter at the portentously titled Green Man Hotel on the remote Scottish island of Summer Isle, it’s not actually her Swedish-inflected tones you hear but those of Annie Ross instead.

Curiously, despite Ross’s famous singing talent, she didn’t get to voice Ekland during the scene that required her character to break into song. At that point, supposedly, Ekland was dubbed by another singer, Rachel Verney. (I’ve heard claims that Annie Ross did perform the song as well, but the weight of evidence seems to be against that.)

Anyway, this gives me a chance to talk about the song sung in that scene, Willow’s Song, sometimes known too as How Do. The luscious Willow Macgregor sings it one night when she’s trying to lure the Green Man’s current guest, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) into her room for some hanky-panky. Howie, a policeman sent to Summer Isle to investigate the disappearance of a local schoolgirl, is a devout Free Presbyterian and is already unimpressed at finding that everyone on the island is a practising pagan. His strict Christian principles prevent him from answering Willow’s call. Just about.

14 years ago, I was working in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, whose small enclave of expatriates, mostly diplomats and aid workers, held a weekly cinema evening. Noticing that the next such evening fell on October 31^st, i.e. Halloween, I dusted down my DVD of The Wicker Man and persuaded Pyongyang’s little cinema society that this would be a good time to watch a classic horror movie. For most of its running time, the audience seemed pleasantly bemused by the film. They enjoyed a good chuckle at how the pagan islanders led the stick-up-his-arse Howie on a merry dance around Summer Isle, taunting him with their innuendo-laden folk songs and their unconventional sense of public decency (e.g. organising mass couplings in the local graveyard, dancing naked through flames in the centre of stone circles). But the people sitting closest to me kept leaning over and whispering, “Isn’t this supposed to be a horror film?”

Then the film’s final ten minutes arrived. Howie discovers what the islanders have planned for him at the climax of their May Day celebrations – it involves ‘an appointment with the wicker man’ – and the room fell silent. The silence continued for several minutes after the film ended, broken only by the voice of a Scotswoman who worked at the British Embassy. She kept wailing to everyone around her, “Scotland isn’t really like that! Scotland isn’t really like that!”

Later, a Dutch lady whose husband headed the Red Cross and Crescent’s operations in Pyongyang came over to me with big smile on her face. “I really liked that,” she said. “But you know, most of the film felt like a musical to me.”

And indeed, one reason why The Wicker Man is so special to me is its music. Willow’s Song is the centrepiece of its soundtrack but the film is choc-a-bloc with gorgeous and haunting folk tunes. Meanwhile, the lack of music is a reason why the 2006 American remake directed by Neil Labute and starring Nicholas Cage sucks, although, to be honest, there are many reasons why it sucks.

The man responsible for the original Wicker Man’s music was New Yorker Paul Giovanni, who assembled a number of songs, some self-composed, some traditional folk songs, and performed them with the folk-rock band Magnet. Clearly a renaissance man, Giovanni was also a playwright and actor during his career. Tragically, in 1990, he died from pneumonia, a complication caused by an HIV/AIDS infection.

As well as showcasing the film’s most famous song, the sequence in which Willow Macgregor sings has some notoriety because it shows her performing a nude dance as well. (Having withstood Willow’s saucy enticements, Howie discovers later that the episode was arranged by the crafty pagan islanders to determine whether or not he’s a virgin and hence suitable sacrificial material.) This is probably Britt Ekland’s greatest cinematic moment. Mind you, her only other well-known major role is in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), so there isn’t much competition.

Come to think of it, though, Ekland was pregnant during the shooting of The Wicker Man, so it isn’t her naked body that we see cavorting during the scene. The filmmakers hired a stripper to act as her ‘body double’ and, in at least one interview with her I’ve read, Ekland has remarked cattily about the size of the double’s bum. So with Rachel Verney (or possibly Annie Ross) doing her singing, and a stripper doing her dancing, Britt’s greatest cinematic moment doesn’t actually have much Britt in it.

It was ignored at the time of its release but, over the years, the prestige of The Wicker Man has grown. And as I’ve said, much of its mystique is due to its music. Willow’s Song in particular has received much attention and a number of artists have had a go at covering it. The most famous version is probably that by cinematically inspired electronica band the Sneaker Pimps. It appears on their acclaimed 1996 album Becoming X, for which they recruited female singer Kelli Dayton (now Kelli Ali) to do vocals. Afterwards, the band ungentlemanly gave Dayton the shove, claiming ‘her voice was no longer considered suitable for their new music’. And has anyone heard anything of the Sneaker Pimps since then? No. Thought not. Incidentally, if you have the right edition of Becoming X you’ll find as a bonus track a version of Gently Johnny, the second-best song that Paul Giovanni / Magnet recorded for The Wicker Man. The scenes with Gently Johnny were chopped out of the film’s original print but years later were restored to the Director’s Cut of it.

The Sneaker Pimps’ version is still recognisably the movie’s Willow’s Song, although it has a lush, synthesised sheen. Filmmaker Eli Roth liked their take on it so much that he incorporated it into the soundtrack of his notorious 2006 ‘torture porn’ epic Hostel – the Wicker Man reference signifying that Something Bad is going to happen to Roth’s own hapless protagonists. I don’t find Hostel as objectionable as other people do, but nonetheless I feel that the delicate, pleading tone of Willow’s Song is incongruous in a movie that’s basically about dumb American backpackers getting tortured to death. Interestingly, both The Wicker Man and Hostel go against the philosophy of conventional, conservative horror movies, like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1980), which holds that only characters who hang onto their virginity escape being victims, while promiscuous characters die horribly. In The Wicker Man, it’s the only adult virgin on the island who goes up in smoke at the end, while in Hostel, it’s the randiest backpacker who survives the carnage.

From genius.com

Before the Sneaker Pimps’ version, in 1991, indie band the Mock Turtles did a take on Willow’s Song – I haven’t been able to find an online recording of it to link to – while a dozen years later soulful British rock band the Doves attempted it too. Both versions are distinctive thanks to the fact that a man, not a woman, does the singing. The song was also covered in 2006 by Scottish folk singer Isobel Campbell (best known for her collaborations with Mark Lanegan), who unsurprisingly took a more traditional, folky approach to it, and in 2007 by indie-dance-hip-hop group the Go! Team.

Definitely worth mentioning is a version of Willow’s Song by the eerie, theremin-loving combo Spacedog, who decided to go for it and deconstructed it. They mixed in a sample from another classic British horror film, the ‘power of the will’ monologue delivered by actor Charles Gray while he played the villain in 1968’s The Devil Rides Out, and the results are impressively phantasmagorical.

Willow’s Song has a Wikipedia entry that lists a dozen other versions, which isn’t bad for a song that accompanies a scene in which a woman tries to seduce an older, unprepossessing man but is rebuffed, and in a film that baffled its studio, got chopped to pieces before its release and was, initially, financially unsuccessful and critically shunned. Perhaps it’s the strange juxtaposition of elements that makes the song memorable. Its sound is gorgeously ethereal and delicate but, when you listen to the lyrics, you realise it’s pretty bawdy too. Willow promises Howie “a stroke as gentle as a feather,” and later boasts, “How a maid can milk a bull! And every stroke a bucketful.”

Come to think of it, the contrasts in the song are similar to the contrasts in The Wicker Man itself, a film packed with humour, music and cheerful lewdness but ending with a horrific act of cruelty – contrasts that have ensured the movie lives on in Britain’s cinematic consciousness.