Blood Bath is a 1966 American horror film directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman and starring William Campbell, Linda Saunders, Marissa Mathes, and Sid Haig.
The film concerns a mad painter of weird art who turns into a vampire-like man (with different features) by night, apparently as a result of a family curse, and believes that he has found his reincarnated mistress in the person of an avant-garde ballerina.
This cobbled-together feature was given a brief theatrical release by American International Pictures under the title Blood Bath, with screenplay and directorial credit jointly shared by Hill and Rothman.
There, however, Sordi is possessed by the spirit of a long-dead ancestor and suddenly transforms into a vampiric monster who hacks the screaming Daisy to death with a cleaver, then lowers her mutilated corpse into a vat of boiling substance.
In his vampiric form, Sordi has already killed a lone woman in the town square, then takes her to a nearby car and feigns kissing her so that a pair of oncoming pedestrians assume they are just lovers sharing an intimate moment.
At first he tries to protect her from his vampiric tendencies, warning her his studio is a cheerless place and at one point breaking a date with her to spend time gaining control of himself after murdering Daisy.
In 1963, while on vacation in Europe, Roger Corman made a $20,000 deal to distribute an as-yet unproduced Yugoslavian espionage thriller titled Operacija Ticijan/Operation: Titian.
[2] Corman also insisted on involvement in the production to ensure it could be adequately "Americanized", and provided two well-known English-speaking cast members, William Campbell and Patrick Magee for lead roles.
In addition, Francis Ford Coppola, then fresh out of film school and formerly associated with Corman in the Americanization of Nebo Zovyot, was installed as the production's script supervisor.
[3] Unfortunately, the completed film was deemed unreleasable by Corman, although a redubbed, slightly re-edited version would eventually be released directly to television under the title Portrait in Terror.
Hill added all of the beatnik-related scenes shot with Sid Haig and Jonathan Haze, and was responsible for what many fans believe is the single most effective sequence in the film, the hatchet murder of Melissa Mathes.
Other complications including bringing Sid Haig back for re-shoots; at the time of shooting with Hill, he did not have a beard, but had grown one for the subsequent project he was working on.
[8] In spite of the inconsistencies in the finished product's plot, created by Rothman's new ideas, and the fact that the two principle female characters are played by actresses who look remarkably alike, this was this version of the film that most pleased Corman, and it was subsequently released to theatres by American International Pictures, retaining Hill's Blood Bath title.
"[15] Cavett Binion of AllMovie wrote, "As one might imagine, this is pretty difficult to follow, but there are some good performances — particularly from William Campbell as the haunted shutterbug — and some fairly suspenseful scenes.
These articles included interviews with Hill and Campbell, the latter of whom expressed shock when he was told that the film he had shot so long ago in Yugoslavia had been turned into five individual movies.