Strangely enough, the use of Shakespeare as the inspiration for a series of grisly revenge murders does not vulgarise the playwright, but does raise this glorious Grand Guignol to the level of genuine tragedy. The plot is simple but ingenious. Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) is a dreadful ham Shakespearean ham actor who committed suicide having failed to win a coveted Critics' Circle award. Two years later, each critic of the Circle is subjected to a unique and bizarre murder - one is decapitated in his bed, another is forcefed his own dogs etc. The chief critic, Ian Hendry, figures out that each murder is modelled on deaths in the Shakespearean plays performed by Lionheart in his final repertory season. But the police are unable to find a supposedly dead man, and the murders continue as ordained.
Although nominally a horror film - and a very effective and funny one it is - 'Blood' brings together three genres very popular in the early 70. There is the police procedural, in which inspector Milo O'Shea and his sidekick Eric Sykes start reading books in order to catch a killer. There is the all-star disaster movie, in which a group of once -famous celebrities (here including Dennis Price, Jack Hawkins, Arthur Lowe, Robert Morley) are set up and slaughtered for the audience's delectation. And there is the Charles Bronson-like revenge movie, here shorn of any exploitative sexual overtones, but still gruesomely shocking, as in the opening slaughter of Michael Hordern by knife-slashing tramps, or the brilliant scene where his funeral is interrupted by a galloping horse dragging Price's flayed corpse.
The film is, of course, smothered in Shakespeare, and one of the film's themes is how the playwright - the very definition of (English) high art - is not so far apart from culturally despised Hammer films in his work's sensationalist horrors. It is in one sense a plea for viewers - and especially snobbish critics - to look beyond the shallows of genre, to see that horror is capable of great complexity, forcing us, as Shakespeare knew, to consider unpleasant truths about death, fear, sex, repression, history and power.
But Shakespeare manifests himself in other ways, not just in the undigested globs mouthed by Lionheart. Shakespeare's essential idea, if we can suggest such a thing, was that the life was a stage, that our very existence was not natural or given, but a series of performances and masks; that we are mere actors in the service of a greater playwright. Lionheart is the godlike orchestrator of events here, having the power to literally decide others' lives. His base, his home, is a theatre, his very existence a performance - there is no Lionheart outside the roles he plays, or the great drama of revenge he stars in; he lives and dies in the theatre (this surfaces in the mise-en-scene, of course; see particularly the ghoulish plastic proscenium arch Hendry and O'Shea peer through at Horden's mutilated corpse).
Lionheart tries to impose the theatrical on life, erase any distinction between art and criticism, the latter thinking it can remain detached, uninvolved. Criticism is explicitely linked to sterility - the only critic with 'children' has two dogs; Lionheart has a beautiful daughter to do his work for him (another God/Christ correspondence), an embodiment of his power. Unfortunately, in this age of lies and fashion, nobody is willing to hear the truth, and at the end, the surviving critic coldly reviews Lionheart's performance, with as little understanding as he did during the actor's career.
'Blood' is also about another kind of death, the death of repertory theatre in England, the blowing away of the ossified past by the angry winds of the future, symbolised by the conflagration of the old theatre. Hendry justifies his rejection of Lionheart's work by saying that it was too conservative, that the past must give way to the future. Time has revealed the noisy, much-lauded 'angry young man' stuff lauded by the likes of Hendry at the time to be threadbare, imperial clothing; Lionheart on the other hand, is a genuine, terrifying realist, taking realism to its extreme limits. The past can never be forgotten, one of the dominant themes of horror (and Shakespeare); and modernity will always be built on the bones of others, bones not always content to lie still.
Although nominally a horror film - and a very effective and funny one it is - 'Blood' brings together three genres very popular in the early 70. There is the police procedural, in which inspector Milo O'Shea and his sidekick Eric Sykes start reading books in order to catch a killer. There is the all-star disaster movie, in which a group of once -famous celebrities (here including Dennis Price, Jack Hawkins, Arthur Lowe, Robert Morley) are set up and slaughtered for the audience's delectation. And there is the Charles Bronson-like revenge movie, here shorn of any exploitative sexual overtones, but still gruesomely shocking, as in the opening slaughter of Michael Hordern by knife-slashing tramps, or the brilliant scene where his funeral is interrupted by a galloping horse dragging Price's flayed corpse.
The film is, of course, smothered in Shakespeare, and one of the film's themes is how the playwright - the very definition of (English) high art - is not so far apart from culturally despised Hammer films in his work's sensationalist horrors. It is in one sense a plea for viewers - and especially snobbish critics - to look beyond the shallows of genre, to see that horror is capable of great complexity, forcing us, as Shakespeare knew, to consider unpleasant truths about death, fear, sex, repression, history and power.
But Shakespeare manifests himself in other ways, not just in the undigested globs mouthed by Lionheart. Shakespeare's essential idea, if we can suggest such a thing, was that the life was a stage, that our very existence was not natural or given, but a series of performances and masks; that we are mere actors in the service of a greater playwright. Lionheart is the godlike orchestrator of events here, having the power to literally decide others' lives. His base, his home, is a theatre, his very existence a performance - there is no Lionheart outside the roles he plays, or the great drama of revenge he stars in; he lives and dies in the theatre (this surfaces in the mise-en-scene, of course; see particularly the ghoulish plastic proscenium arch Hendry and O'Shea peer through at Horden's mutilated corpse).
Lionheart tries to impose the theatrical on life, erase any distinction between art and criticism, the latter thinking it can remain detached, uninvolved. Criticism is explicitely linked to sterility - the only critic with 'children' has two dogs; Lionheart has a beautiful daughter to do his work for him (another God/Christ correspondence), an embodiment of his power. Unfortunately, in this age of lies and fashion, nobody is willing to hear the truth, and at the end, the surviving critic coldly reviews Lionheart's performance, with as little understanding as he did during the actor's career.
'Blood' is also about another kind of death, the death of repertory theatre in England, the blowing away of the ossified past by the angry winds of the future, symbolised by the conflagration of the old theatre. Hendry justifies his rejection of Lionheart's work by saying that it was too conservative, that the past must give way to the future. Time has revealed the noisy, much-lauded 'angry young man' stuff lauded by the likes of Hendry at the time to be threadbare, imperial clothing; Lionheart on the other hand, is a genuine, terrifying realist, taking realism to its extreme limits. The past can never be forgotten, one of the dominant themes of horror (and Shakespeare); and modernity will always be built on the bones of others, bones not always content to lie still.