Herschell Gordon Lewis, the “Godfather of Gore,” has passed away

Another legend has passed away. Herschell Gordon Lewis has died at the age of 87. The cause of his death has not yet been released. He was responsible for many classic genre movies such as The Wizard of Gore, Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!, A Taste of Blood, The Gruesome Twosome, Scum of the Earth!, Goldilocks and the Three Bares, and She-Devils on Wheels.

A new collection of his films, The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast, is due out in a new Blu-ray set on 24th October 2016.

He was often called the “Godfather of Gore”, but outside his notorious gore canon, Lewis pursued a wide gamut of other exploitation avenues. Some of the more taboo subjects he explored include juvenile delinquency (Just for the Hell of It, 1968), wife swapping (Suburban Roulette, 1968), the corruption of the music industry (Blast-Off Girls, 1967), and birth control (The Girl, the Body, and the Pill, 1967). He was also not above tapping the children’s market, as with Jimmy the Boy Wonder (1966) and The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967), which were padded out to feature film length by incorporating long foreign-made cartoons.

During his retirement from filmmaking, Lewis wrote and published over twenty books during his long business career in advertising, including The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion in 1974 and How to Handle Your Own Public Relations in 1977. A slow but steady stream of books followed, which seemed to turn into a torrent in the 1990s. Lewis settled in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and founded his own advertising company, Communicomp, a full-service direct marketing agency with clients throughout the world.

In 2002 Lewis released his first film in thirty years, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, a sequel to the first film. It featured a cameo appearance by John Waters, a fan of Lewis’ work.

Our deepest sympathies to his wife Margot and his family.

Source: SomethingWeirdVideo via Bloody Disgusting