Nobody had made a film like "Blood Feast" before, and Lewis and Friedman knew it. They had just collaborated on a couple of "nudie cuties," softcore sex comedies where hapless voyeurs/audience surrogates ogle naked Playboy playmates and would-be models, but the market for those films was getting too crowded. So Lewis and Friedman put their heads together, and made a list of films that they could make on the cheap, and that no major studio would attempt to make.
After rejecting potential ideas like, "con man evangelist," and "Nazi torture," they settled on, "Gore." In the film, this translated in scenes where Arnold, armed with a real machete, hacks off limbs caked in a unique mix of offal, gelatin, and fake blood bought from Barfred Cosmetics. These scenes are the film's main selling point, so while Lewis could not show Ramses's weapon penetrating his victims, he did linger on Ramses's spoils: severed gams (mannequin's legs), spilled grey matter (mystery meat), and a hideously distended tongue (a rotting sheep's tongue).
Lewis has always been brutally honest about the low-quality of his films, and his profit-driven motives. He thinks of himself as a "wizard of make-do." In Bright Lights Film Journal, Lewis defensively insists that, "I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an artform and spends money based on that immature philosophy." Lewis had some ambition for "Blood Feast," and did try to ape the French Theater du Grand Guignol's "douche écossaise" style, which film historian David Skal defines as, "a 'Scotch' shower of alternating emotional temperatures."
But Lewis imitated the Grand Guignol because he knew it was profitable, and he did it as only an amateur filmmaker on a very low-budget could. This is, after all, a movie whose script is a skimpy 14-page outline that Lewis dictated, and co-transcribed with his secretary Louise Downe (Downe was originally credited/blamed as the film's screenwriter). So it's not surprising that this translates in off-putting ways. For example, Lewis had Arnold, a professionally trained actor, goggle his eyes while wearing bushy grey eyebrows, speak with a Bela Lugosi-esque accent, and shuffle around with a limp. Arnold's performance is supposed to be stilted, but it wasn't supposed to be "that" appalling.
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