Herschell Gordon Lewis (June 15, 1926[a] – September 26, 2016) was an American filmmaker, best known for creating the "splatter" subgenre of horror films.

After graduating from high school, Lewis received bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism at Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois.

His first in a lengthy series of collaborations with exploitation producer David F. Friedman, Living Venus (1961), was a fictitious account based on the story of Hugh Hefner and the beginnings of Playboy.

With the nudie market beginning to wane, Lewis and Friedman entered into uncharted territory with 1963's seminal Blood Feast, considered by most critics to be the first "gore" film.

Because of the unprecedented nature of this type of film, they were able to cater to the drive-in theater market that would have been inaccessible with their prior skin flicks.

The full-color gore on display in these films caused a sensation, with horror film-makers throughout the world becoming eager to saturate their productions with similarly shocking visual effects.

He was also not above tapping the children's market, as with Jimmy the Boy Wonder (1966) and The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967), which were padded out to feature film length by incorporating long foreign-made cartoons.

Lewis financed and produced nearly all of his own movies with funds he made from his successful advertising firm based in Chicago.

Lewis would repeat this formula when he acquired a gritty psychological piece called The Vortex and released it as Stick It in Your Ear (1970) to be shown as a second feature to The Wizard of Gore (1970).

By the early 1970s, he decided to leave the filmmaking industry to work in copywriting and direct marketing, a subject on which he published several books in the 1980s.

Lewis settled in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and founded his own advertising company, Communicomp, a full-service direct marketing agency with clients throughout the world.

He also made a cameo appearance in the 2004 film Chainsaw Sally, and starred in issue one of American Carnevil, a graphic novel created by Johnny Martin Walters.