‘Godfather of Gore’ Herschell Gordon Lewis Dead at 87

Pioneering horror filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis has died in his sleep at the age of 87, a spokesman confirmed. Lewis, dubbed the Godfather of Gore, paved the way for the horror genre in the 1960s, with a string of bloody, violent movies that came to be known as “splatter films” and influenced modern directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and John Waters. Among Lewis’s best-known films were Blood Feast, The Gruesome Twosome, A Taste of Blood, and Two Thousand Maniacs. Director James Gunn wrote on Twitter that Lewis’s work “changed cinema." He was in his home in Florida when he died.