Since the entirety of October is officially Halloween this year (shut up, you!), we at Psycho Drive-In have decided to attempt to fill the month with thirty-one recommendations for horror-related movies, comics, books, TV shows, toys, games, and everything in-between. It’s gonna be a grab-bag of goodies we feel you should be exposed to, whether you like it or not! But don’t expect your standard suggestions for Halloween fun, we’re digging into some stuff that we love in the hopes that you might make this October a little bit weirder than usual.
Weirder in a good way. Not like what’s going on outside in the hellscape of 2020.
Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather of Gore. The man who found a niche in the film industry and overfilled it with blood. The HGL collecting basics are still good finds – DVDs, laserdiscs, with or without signatures and the newer and bigger DVD and Blu-ray boxsets if that’s your fancy.
VHS in basic sleeves, Something Weird plastic cases and those oversized shrink-wrapped boxes, especially the 2000 Maniacs close up on the face with blood coming out of the mouth or the oversized Bloodfeast VHS with the aqua-blue background and Playboy Playmate Connie Mason lying dead on the bed after Mal Arnold’s Fuad Ramses has pulled a sheep’s tongue out of her mouth.
Browsing the video stores and seeing that long before I knew who HGL was made me look around to make sure no one was looking while I just looked at it. I think I actually avoided it several times before I took a chance on it.
On vinyl you can have his scores for Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, and The Gruesome Twosome. The first one he scored himself, and he sings the title song on the second.
The more completist or hardcore collectors might look for his own novelizations of Two Thousand Maniacs and Blood Feast–more like novella-izations. Books about him include The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis by Daniel Krogh and John McCarty, The Godfather of Gore by Randy Palmer, A Taste of Blood by Christopher Curry or, penned by Lewis’ own hand, The Godfather of Gore Speaks.
However, the coup de grace for me are his post-filmmaking-career books, some of which I used to own and am just now trying to grab again. Apparently–and maybe obviously, based on his salesmanship promoting his own movies–HG Lewis became an expert in advertising, copywriting and direct marketing and wrote books about it, with titles like Direct Mail Copy That Sells, Sales Letters that Sizzle, Open Me Now: Direct Mail Envelopes that Work… And Those that Don’t, just to name a few of his twenty plus books from this era.
And if you’re really lucky you can grab a hardback with a dustjacket and a photo of his mug and frame it. Nothing like HGL smiling down at you in a red sweater while he types on an old computer in On the Art of Writing Copy or staring straight over his glasses and down at you in Marketing Mayhem: Why Marketing Isn’t Producing the Way it Used To.
Always remember one trick to collecting him is to type his name in all its variations as well as typing the titles of any works without his name. Maybe you’ll find a lazy seller. (EDITOR’S NOTE: This is exactly how I found a Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! photo signed by all three of the Pussycats for under 20 bucks after finding it on eBay listed under Tara Santana instead of Tura Satana!!!)