“It all seems too real”: Herschell Gordon Lewis and Theatres of Horror

Hand, Richard (2026) “It all seems too real”: Herschell Gordon Lewis and Theatres of Horror. In: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 94-109. ISBN 9781399536011

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Abstract

The prolific Herschell Gordon Lewis is best-known for his horror films but apart from filmmaking he also had a career in writing, penning numerous books on advertising and business. For a period in 1968, he also ran a theatre. Lewis’s short-lived but nonetheless popular Blood Shed Theater in Chicago featured screenings of films – old horror movies or his own – but was framed and interpolated with ingredients of live horror theatre: there were suitably Gothic character-hosts and set pieces of throat-slitting, tongue-ripping and playful interaction with the audience. This overt theatricality will go on to inform Lewis’s most consciously ‘performative’ film The Wizard of Gore (1970). However, Lewis was also drawing on the traditions of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (1897-1962), the legendary ‘theatre of horror’ which, with its mischievous gimmickry, gruesome effects and nihilistic repertoire, provides a template for Lewis from Blood Feast (1963) onwards. Although based in Paris, the Grand-Guignol had an enormous impact on the popular American imagination in the 1930-50s through golden age horror radio and pre-Code comics and, emerging in the 1960s, the films of Lewis are an evident successor to this. This essay will explore the parallels between Lewis’s oeuvre and the original Grand-Guignol and its progeny. In addition, the chapter will look at contemporaneous theatre: although Lewis’s cinema of exploitation seems a world away from 1960-70s political or avantgarde theatre in the UK and US, the depiction of alienated young people in Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) finds a curious echo in Lewis’s film Just for the Hell of It (1968) just as the violence and destruction in the plays of Jean-Claude van Itallie and other counterculture artists chimes with the comic yet terrifying evisceration of the familiar world that permeates Lewis’s universe.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Comics Studies Research Group Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Film, Television and Media
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	29 Jan 2026 12:30
Last Modified:	29 Jan 2026 12:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101790
DOI:	isbn:9781399536011

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