Blood Feast

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.