Herschell Gordon Lewis

Herschell Gordon Lewis
Lewis (on the right) in 2003
Born	(1926-06-15)June 15, 1926 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	September 26, 2016(2016-09-26) (aged 90) Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S.
Alma mater	Northwestern University
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, cinematographer, former English professor, advertising executive, direct-mail consultant
Years active	1959–2013

Herschell Gordon Lewis (June 15, 1926 – September 26, 2016) was an American filmmaker, best known for creating the "splatter" subgenre of horror films. He is often called the "Godfather of Gore", though his film career included works in a range of exploitation film genres including juvenile delinquent films, nudie-cuties, two children's films and at least one rural comedy. On Lewis' career, AllMovie wrote: "With his better-known gore films, Herschell Gordon Lewis was a pioneer, going farther than anyone else dared, probing the depths of disgust and discomfort onscreen with more bad taste and imagination than anyone of his era."

Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1926. His father died when he was six years old; his mother never remarried. Lewis's family then moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he spent the majority of his adolescence. After graduating from high school, Lewis received bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism at Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois. A few years later, he briefly taught communications at Mississippi State University. He was lured from his academic career to become the manager of WRAC Radio in Racine, Wisconsin, and later to become a studio director at WKY-TV studio in Oklahoma City.

In 1953, Lewis began working for a friend's advertising agency in Chicago while teaching graduate advertising courses at night at Roosevelt University. In the meantime, he began directing TV commercial advertisements for a small production company called Alexander and Associates. Lewis later bought out half of the company with business associate Martin Schmidhofer and renamed it Lewis and Martin Films.

Lewis served as producer on his first film venture, The Prime Time (1959), which was the first feature film produced in Chicago since the late 1910s. He would assume directing duties on nearly all of his films from then on. His first in a lengthy series of collaborations with exploitation producer David F. Friedman, Living Venus (1961), was a fictitious account based on the story of Hugh Hefner and the beginnings of Playboy. Lewis and Friedman's movies were early exploitation films, and the films' nude scenes, although softcore, were not seen in "mainstream" Hollywood pictures because of the censorship imposed by the Motion Picture Production Code.