[Butcher Block] Herschell Gordon Lewis’ ‘The Wizard of Gore’
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Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
Herschell Gordon Lewis, also known as the Godfather of Gore (a mantle he shares with Lucio Fulci), was responsible for inventing the splatter film, beginning with 1963 gore-soaked shocker Blood Feast. The film pioneer would churn out splatter films with quick succession, and by the latter half of the ‘60s, would focus more on exploitation films than horror. By the early ‘70s, Lewis departed from film entirely and focused on a career in advertising and book publishing instead, with numerous other shady business dealings that would land him in prison for 3 years in the late ‘70s. Lewis wouldn’t return to film until 2002, for a long-delayed follow up to his first splatter film. Before his first retirement from film, though, came one of the last of his splatter films, and one that’s among his most recognized; The Wizard of Gore.
For fans of Lewis’ work, the Wizard of Gore tends to be one of the more polarizing entries in splatter, but it’s one of the more accessible films in the director’s catalog. It’s also one of his goriest. The simple narrative follows Montag the Magnificent as he mutilates women on stage during his performances before horrified audiences, who appear unharmed after the performance ends. Hours later, though, the women collapse and succumb to the same injuries sustained on stage. A TV talk show host, Sherry, and her boyfriend Jack, suspect Montag of the grisly murders after attending on of his shows.
As Montag waxes poetic about the philosophy of reality as he butchers his female victims on stage, reveling in the gore during protracted sequences of mutilation. The women are hypnotized, laying across the magician’s table or sometimes tied upright, as he uses large spikes to ram into their skulls and pull out their brains, or saw them in half with a chainsaw, and various other weapons to dismantle them with glee. Each time Lewis zooms in on the viscera, lingering as Montag plays with the entrails like a child in a sandbox.
While most of the gore and makeup effects can look as low budget as you’d expect from a Lewis film, the guts look extremely real. That’s because they are. Revealed in Daniel Krogh’s book, The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis, much of the gore used in the film came from two sheep carcasses. The female victims were really two different actresses (one as the top half, and the other as the bottom) with a fake midsection filled with guts, stage blood, and makeup between them. The most disturbing element about this is that these carcasses had to be used for two weeks of shooting, and they tried to delay the decomposition with a Clorox based cleaner.
As graphically gory as this film is, budgetary limitations prevented Lewis from taking it even further. The ending isn’t one of huge climatic gore or action, but one that completely encapsulates Lewis’ sense of humor and desire to elicit a reaction that causes its viewer to question just what exactly they watched. That Ray Sager clearly enjoyed portraying the eccentric Montag only further hammers home the satire Lewis was aiming for. The Wizard of Gore is pure camp, and among the very last of Lewis’ splatter films, but it also was influential in the horror that would follow decades later.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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