Blood Feast
Blood Feast is a 1963 American slasher film directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. It is one of the 72 films on the Director of Public Prosecutions' video nasties list, and it was successfully prosecuted for obscenity.
The first gore film. Shot in four days for 24,500 dollars and it looks it, which is half the appeal.
Sign in to track what you have survived.
Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman were making nudie films and noticed the market was collapsing. Their solution was to find something else nobody else would show, and what nobody else would show was viscera.
It is barely a film. The acting is community-theatre standard, the lighting is flat, and the Egyptian caterer villain limps because the actor decided he should. What it has is close-up practical gore in colour, four years before the Production Code collapsed, achieved with sheep tongues and a lot of stage blood.
Its importance is entirely historical, and it is important: every gore film descends from it. As an evening's viewing it runs 67 minutes and feels considerably longer.
Banned, seized, prosecuted
DPP 72 · successfully prosecuted
UK now Passed 18 uncut
Rate this film
No ratings yet. Score it on the five axes and yours will be the first.
Sign in to rate this and add it to your shelf.
Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Australia
Germany
UK
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
Written about
- Gore and disturb are not the same measurement
Why this site rates them separately, and what happens to a recommendation engine when you conflate them.
Discuss with AI
Open a chatbot with a question about this already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, a plot detail, or working out which cut you are holding.
Adjacent
WATCHobscureMardi Gras Massacre
An Aztec-obsessed killer in New Orleans. A Blood Feast remake in all but name, and slower.
WATCHcultThe Toolbox Murders
The first fifteen minutes are notorious. The remaining seventy are a different and much duller film.
WATCHknownManiac
Joe Spinell wrote himself the lead and Tom Savini blew his own head off on camera.
WATCHcultAbsurd
D'Amato remaking his own Anthropophagous as a Halloween knock-off. Grim and dull in equal measure.
WATCHcanonHalloween
Cost 300,000 dollars, took 70 million, and contains almost no blood at all.
WATCHcanonOldboy
A man is imprisoned in a room for fifteen years with no explanation, released, and given five days to find out why.
- Next in Extreme / Transgressive: Blood Rites (1968) →
- Next in Slasher: A Bay of Blood (1971) →