Blood Feast | 1963 | USA | Herschell Gordon Lewis
The oldest film to make it onto the video nasty list, Blood Feast is considered the very first gore film, emerging in the early sixties to shocked audiences who had previously only been privy to mere trickles of blood in their horror. Featuring a bonkers narrative about a caterer who gleefully slaughters young women, it’s revealed that he harvests their body parts to assemble an Egyptian feast worthy of appeasing the strange idol he worships. Bumbling cops, wooden acting and frequent helpings of plasma-soaked offal proved too much for the DPP, who had the VHS release from Astra seized and promptly prosecuted for obscenity.