I Drink Your Blood

Jerry Gross was one of the great New York-based exploitation distributors. His first company, Cinemation Industries, had started in 1965 and would distribute all manner of cinematic flotsam and jetsam from Mondo movies to mondo movies and sexploitation to low budget horror, some of which he even put his own money into. Cinemation collapsed in 1975 and Gross was said to have been spotted serving customers at an NYC 7-Eleven before he resurfaced with the Jerry Gross Organisation later in the decade. Under the latter banner, he picked up a small rape-revenge movie directed by Meir Zarchi that had been struggling around paltry regional screenings and changed its title from Day of the Woman to I Spit on Your Grave (1978).

While running Cinemation, he issued writer-director David Durston a challenge – to make a film that would be as violent and confrontational as George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) which was still drawing in the crowds at midnight screenings and drive-ins around the country. Durston accepted and came up with I Drink Your Blood which Gross put out on a double bill with I Eat Your Skin, a feeble zombie film directed by Del Tenney as far back as 1964 – and it shows. Ever the one for a title change, especially if it started with “I”, Gross rejected Durston’s original Phobia in favour of the new title that’s sort-of indicative of what goes on in the film but was really just chosen to make up an enticingly titled double bill (“2 great blood-horrors to rip out your guts!”)… read more >