[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.
Comics
‘Spider-Noir’ Comic Changes Explained: How the TV Series Reinvents Marvel’s Darkest Spider-Man
A little while back, I wrote an article chronicling the Hellraiser franchise’s affinity for Film Noir and touched on how that genre has, historically, always been connected to horror.
This connection can be observed in everything from the cannibalistic serial killers of Frank Miller’s Sin City to the disturbing criminal plots fueling neo-noir thrillers like Stuart Gordon’s underrated King of the Ants. That’s why it came as no surprise when I finally sat down to watch all eight episodes of Prime Video’s recently released Spider-Noir series and was confronted with plenty of classic horror tropes.
What did come as a surprise, however, was how showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot approached these horror elements when compared to the 2009 comic book that the show is based on. From the heavily altered rogue’s gallery to an equally terrifying yet completely different origin story for Nicolas Cage’s take on the webslinger, there are plenty of changes here that I feel might be of interest to genre fans.
With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to take a closer look at all the adjustments that Spider-Noir made to the story in order to bring this incarnation of Spider-Man to life in all of its monochromatic glory (unless you watched the True-Hue color version of the show, in which case you’ll be treated to a surprisingly comic-booky palette that you don’t usually see on television).
The Dark Origins of Marvel’s Spider-Man Noir
Our first order of business should be to examine the origins of the Noir comics themselves. Originally published as part of the Marvel Noir alternate universe that reimagined several characters as hard-boiled crime-fighters, Spider-Man Noir became the most successful book in the entire run. This highly politicized story about Peter Parker coming to terms with the capitalist evils of the Great Depression seemed to have struck a nerve with audiences looking for a darker take on the wall-crawler, which is likely why we’d soon see several sequel stories as well as a video game adaptation of the character in 2010’s underrated Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.
Of course, it wasn’t just Spider-Man’s darker disposition that made this version of the character a hit, as 1930s New York City was depicted as being much more hostile than what we generally see in the standard Marvel Universe. From Peter’s powers coming from an Eldritch Spider God that spawns man-eating arachnids to Vulture being an ex-Freak-Show Gimp with a taste for human flesh, you can definitely understand why this Web-Head isn’t pulling his punches.
Unfortunately, this alternate universe was a little too popular for its own good, with each subsequent sequel/adaptation further diluting the political anger and classic horror influences that fueled the original comic-book run in order to appeal to a wider audience. Spider-Man Noir was nearly unrecognizable once we got to the Spider-Verse crossover that turned the character into a household name, though this would at least lead to an interesting adaptation in 2018.
The Classic Horror Influences Hidden Throughout Spider-Noir
Jack Huston as Sandman in ‘Spider-Noir’
When Phil Lord and Chris Miller finally translated Spider-Man Noir to the big screen, with Nicolas Cage bringing the character to life in an unexpected case of pitch-perfect casting, he was still mostly relegated to comic relief as his nazi-punching antics and over-the-top edginess were played for laughs. However, while this version of the character had little to do with the comics that spawned him, Spider-Noir’s newfound popularity eventually resulted in the announcement of a darker live-action spin-off – a spin-off that I was cautiously optimistic about.
While the showrunners ultimately decided to go in a completely different direction than the 2009 comic, the new team of writers appeared to understand Noir as a genre in ways that even the folks at Marvel Noir couldn’t quite grasp. That’s likely why 2026’s Spider-Noir boasts plenty of horror elements, just not in ways we’ve seen them before.
The series is obviously borrowing tropes and aesthetics from period-accurate monster movies, with Universal’s 1930s output being a particularly big influence. From the re-imagining of Sandman and Tombstone as tragic figures to The Spider even being operated on by a mad scientist with hilariously antiquated techniques, this bizarre collection of super-powered freaks could have easily shown up in a classic creature feature.
The scares aren’t all retro, however, as the showrunners also injected plenty of body-horror into the mix during their attempt at unifying the origin stories for all these larger-than-life characters. Hell, the Spider himself is now revealed to have gained his powers after being bitten by a half-mutated Man-Spider during World War I, and the aforementioned mad scientist keeps a disturbing collection of failed experiments in her basement, proving that not all of her patients were lucky enough to simply gain superpowers after being experimented on.
Nicolas Cage Reinvents Spider-Man Noir for Television
Ben Reilly/Spiderman (Nicolas Cage) in SPIDER-NOIR
Photo: Aaron Epstein/Prime
© Amazon Content Services LLC
I also really appreciate how Cage insists on depicting Ben Reilly as an arachnid trapped inside of a human body, with his uncanny physical performance and classic Hollywood impressions keeping your eyes glued to the screen while also providing some of the show’s funniest moments.
I still think it’s a shame that the character is no longer politically motivated, and I miss the detail about Uncle Ben having been cannibalized by Vulture after his social activism ruffled too many feathers, but at least this time our protagonist actually feels like someone who could have been written by Raymond Chandler if he were a fan of Superheroes.
In fact, the writers nailed the snappy back-and-forth that Noir authors like Dashiel Hammett used to refer to as the “riposte”, and it’s fun to see supervillains being depicted as horrific movie monsters instead of specialized henchmen – with The Spider feeling like just as much of a Freak Show attraction as the rest of them. Purists might be put off by the lack of reverence for the source material, but I think that’s a small price to pay when even the show’s most clichéd moments intentionally harken back to the golden age of Hollywood.
That’s why I’d argue that Amazon’s Spider-Noir isn’t really an adaptation, but rather an equally valid take on the same premise that inspired Marvel back in 2009. And in a world filled with recycled storylines that only serve to advertise future releases, I’d rather have two completely different visions of the same character than a straight-up retelling of the same handful of ideas.
At the end of the day, there’s enough space inside this comic fan’s heart for both man-eating Vultures and a Cronenberg-inspired Man-Spider. And if you’re also a fan of nostalgic creature features with comic book flair, I’d highly recommend this street-level superhero story with a spooky twist.
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