INTRO: In 1968, Bill Hinzman terrified audiences as the Cemetery Ghoul in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the first flesh-eating zombie to ever appear on the screen. Twenty years later, Hinzman decided to capitalize on the popularity of his Night character by making his own zombie movie. One that has an exploitation movie sensibility, delivering gratuitous nudity and plenty of gore, all mixed together with a Halloween setting and a thoroughly ‘80s atmosphere. The result is a brilliant piece of entertainment called FleshEater – and it’s the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Hinzman directed FleshEater from a screenplay he wrote with Bill Randolph, and they crafted a very simple story for their zombie movie. It begins with a group of college students taking a Halloween hayride out into the woods, where they intend to drink and smoke, and possibly camp for the night. On the way to their destination, they pass a farmer using his tractor to pull a large tree stump out of the ground. After the stump has been unearthed, the farmer discovers something very strange in the ground: a shallow grave containing a coffin that was locked shut with a chain that has rusted and broken. On top of it is an engraved stone and wax seal. On the stone is a pentagram, on the seal a warning: “This evil which will take flesh and blood from thee and turn all ye unto evil.” The farmer doesn’t take the warning. He figures this is just a prank being pulled by the damn college kids that keep wandering onto his property. He opens the coffin… and discovers a zombie played by Hinzman himself. The FleshEater of the title.
In seconds, FleshEater has risen and ripped the farmer’s throat out with his teeth. Twenty years after Night of the Living Dead, a Hinzman ghoul has again kicked off a night of horror. The campers have barely settled in at their campsite when the party is crashed by FleshEater and his already growing legion of zombies. who make quick work of the college kids. The leader type, the couple who can’t keep their hands off each other, the annoying prankster, they all fall prey to the living dead. The kids board themselves up in an old farmhouse that appears to have been turned into a tool shed. You might expect this to be the set-up for a Night of the Living Dead reworking. They’re going to be hiding in that shed for the rest of the movie, right? No. The boarded doors and windows don’t even keep the zombies out for ten minutes.
Only one couple, Bob and Sally, survives to run off into the night, desperately seeking help and trying to warn people about the zombie threat. Since this movie is set in a world where characters have actually seen what are referred to as “cheesy zombie movies,” their warnings aren’t taken seriously. The movie follows Bob and Sally from location to location as each place gets wrecked by the zombies. The woods, the tool shed, a horse ranch, a barn where more college kids are having a costume party. But it also drifts away from Bob and Sally to show us that the zombie plague is spreading through the countryside. FleshEater shows up at a house to ruin a family’s trick-or-treating plans. Reports of zombie attacks make the nightly news. And in the morning, police and citizens join together to form a zombie-hunting posse.
Given that FleshEater was a low budget independent production, you’ve probably never heard of most of the film’s cast members. This was the only movie credit for the vast majority of them. A lot of the cast weren’t even actors, but models that Hinzman found through a modeling agency. As he said at the time, “I don’t know if they’ll be able to act, but everyone’s gonna look good.”
The most prolific actor in the cast is Rik Billock, who briefly shows up as a character called Farmer Ned. Billock previously had uncredited roles in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Knightriders, and Monkey Shines. He would play a zombie again in the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead. John Mowod, who plays Bob, would go on to work with Hinzman on the Christmas horror movie Santa Claws. A couple cast members, Kevin Kindlin and Terrie Godfrey, had previously worked with him on the slasher The Majorettes. Hinzman got his daughter Heidi into the film as an ill-fated trick-or-treater in an angel costume. His wife Bonnie plays the little girl’s mother. Typecasting. Vincent Survinski, who was a trigger happy member of the zombie-hunting posse in Night of the Living Dead, appears in this one as well, still hunting zombies, and still a little too quick to pull the trigger. Supervising producer Andrew Sands has a memorable cameo at the Halloween party.
BACKGROUND: Bill Hinzman was a still photographer when he joined George A. Romero’s commercial production company Latent Image in the 1960s. During his time with the company, he also became a cinematographer. And when Romero and his collaborators decided they were going to get into feature filmmaking with Night of the Living Dead, Hinzman was one of the initial investors. He was also a crew member on the film – and during production, Romero decided to stick him in front of the camera as a featured ghoul because he was tall, skinny, and owned an old suit. The makers of Night of the Living Dead didn’t intend to re-define the term zombie. They called the flesh-eating living dead creatures in their movie ghouls, because as far as they were concerned zombies were created through voodoo, and voodoo didn’t have anything to do with their ravenously hungry ghouls. But the public started calling the creatures zombies anyway. Now these monsters that made their screen debut in Romero’s movie are the first thing that come to mind when most people hear the word “zombie,” and Hinzman’s Cemetery Ghoul is the very first one we see.
After Night was released, Hinzman continued working in film alongside Romero and Night co-writer John A. Russo. He was a crew member on Romero’s films There’s Always Vanilla and Season of the Witch, and on Russo’s film Midnight. He was the cinematographer on Romero’s The Crazies. He appears in Knightriders. He directed the slasher The Majorettes, which was scripted by Russo. But due to a copyright error, he and his fellow investors didn’t make as much profit off of Night of the Living Dead as they should have. The movie had been released directly into the public domain, so anyone could sell it or show it without paying the filmmakers. And somehow, Hinzman didn’t realize just how popular the film and his ghoul character were until the late ‘80s. When he went to visit Russo at a convention appearance, the fans attending the convention recognized him as well. That fan experience convinced him to make a low budget zombie movie of his own. A movie where he would revive the Cemetery Ghoul in his own way.
A working title on Night of the Living Dead had been Night of the Flesh Eaters, so Hinzman decided to call his movie Zombie Flesh Eaters. That was then shortened to FleshEater. As he was gearing up to go into production, he took some promotional pictures of himself in character. He sent a picture to Romero and Russo to let them know what he was up to… and got an unexpected response: cease and desist letters from their lawyers telling him not to make the movie. Hinzman decided to ignore their warnings and go ahead with his plans. As he said in an interview, he felt his script made it clear enough that the FleshEater isn’t really the same creature as the Cemetery Ghoul, who was shot in the head and put in a bonfire by the end of Night of the Living Dead. He said, “I gave this guy almost a supernatural type of strength. He can do just about anything. And having him discovered buried by insinuated witchcraft, I think that changed it enough.” He didn’t feel that Romero and Russo had ownership of the Cemetery Ghoul anyway. He was an investor and played the character, so he felt he had some ownership of it as well. So he made FleshEater. Romero and Russo didn’t pursue legal action, but when they made the Night of the Living Dead remake a couple years later, Hinzman wasn’t invited to participate.
The budget for FleshEater started out at sixty thousand dollars, and Hinzman and Randolph were aiming to make a small film when writing the script. Something that could be shot entirely on farmland and in private residences not far from Pittsburgh. Hinzman already had the necessary 16mm film equipment from his career making educational and industrial films, so at least he avoided that expense. And once the film was in production, they were able to widen the scope thanks to volunteers and the resources of their collaborators. Andrew Sands had worked on a TV movie called Alone in the Neon Jungle, starring Suzanne Pleshette and Danny Aiello. That was about a female police officer working in a corrupt precinct in Pittsburgh – and Sands knew that the police supplies used for the shoot were still in storage there. So he dug some of that out to be used in FleshEater. A college offered the use of its media center, allowing for a scene set in a news studio. Real life newscaster Dave Kelly volunteered to appear in the movie. Hinzman knew animator Rick Catizone, who had worked on Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead II, and the Creepshow movies. Catizone animated the face of the FleshEater for the movie’s opening title sequence. And by simply putting an ad in the paper asking if any local landowners had a barn that could be burned down, they were able to have a literal barnburner of a climactic sequence.
Most of the cast members wore their own clothes in the film, resulting in the characters wearing a whole lot of denim and plaid. Those who wore layers to set were wise to do so, because once FleshEater got rolling it was miserably cold outside. Hinzman had planned to start shooting in September, but the start date got pushed back to November. Which was great for the look of the film, as cinematographer Simon Manses captured images of a beautiful Pennsylvania fall, perfect for the story’s Halloween setting. But not so good for the comfort of the cast and crew. Soon enough, full-blown winter hit, so FleshEater had to shut down for several months, waiting for temperatures to rise and the snow to melt. But this is another thing that turned out to be beneficial, since it allowed Hinzman the time to cut together the footage that had been shot. He then presented this footage to potential distributors, telling them the movie was already complete. FleshEater landed distribution deals, and Hinzman put the money from those deals into the movie. According to Terrie Godfrey, who also worked as the director’s assistant, the budget ended up being two hundred thousand dollars, and they were able to come in under budget. It helped that crew members only received twenty-five dollars for a regular day’s work, and half that for a shorter day.
There were cold temperatures, low pay, and other hardships that come with working on an independent production, like actors not showing up to set, or needing to be replaced at the last minute, and Hinzman getting shot in the foot with one of the blanks he made for the gunfire. But looking back, many of the cast and crew say that working on FleshEater was some of the most fun they ever had.
FleshEater was a direct-to-video release, put out on VHS in the United States by Magnum Entertainment. Magnum sent two different versions of the movie out to video stores: an R-rated cut, and an unrated cut. It’s the unrated cut that made its way to DVD, Blu-ray, and the Vinegar Syndrome 4K UHD release, as well as the Tubi streaming service. The R-rated cut faded into video obscurity. But the title on the movie wasn’t FleshEater when it reached store shelves in 1988. The distributor wanted something that sounded similar to Night of the Living Dead, so they called it Revenge of the Living Zombies. In some countries, it was called Zombie Nosh. If you watch a copy these days, chances are the title on screen will be FleshEater: Revenge of the Living Dead.
There was no premiere held for the film. Investors had to rent it on VHS like the rest of the public. And apparently it was a popular rental for a while, as Hinzman said he made a lot of money off of it. Magnum Entertainment was so pleased with their profits, they asked Hinzman to deliver another movie. There were some ideas considered, but oddly no thought was given to making a FleshEater 2 at the time. Whatever Hinzman was going to make, he was in no hurry to do so. He used his FleshEater money to buy a horse ranch and spent some time enjoying life. By the time he was ready to get back to work, the video scene had evolved and the interest from Magnum had gone away. Hinzman never directed another movie, but he did cinematography work on things like Santa Claws, Children of the Living Dead, and the thirtieth anniversary edition of Night of the Living Dead, where he worked with John A. Russo to add new scenes into the classic film. An effort to secure the copyright of at least one version of the title, since the original remained in public domain.
A black and white version of the FleshEater scene where Hinzman chomps on the trick-or-treater played by his daughter was included as a bonus feature on that edition of Night of the Living Dead. Hinzman and Russo had even thought of editing Night of the Living Dead and FleshEater together, then shooting more scenes to turn it into one huge zombie epic. But that idea never panned out. More than twenty years after the release of FleshEater, while being interviewed for the Mail Order Zombie podcast, Hinzman mentioned that he was interested in making FleshEater 2. Sadly, he was diagnosed with cancer soon after that interview aired and passed away in 2012. So we only ever got one FleshEater, but the one we got is awesome.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Romero had made the Night of the Living Dead follow-ups Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead by the time Hinzman made FleshEater. Russo had been involved with The Return of the Living Dead. All those films are considered classics. Fans love their characters, and Romero’s films earn praise for their social commentary. But Hinzman wasn’t aiming to make something that could be held up as a classic alongside Night of the Living Dead. Instead, he delivered an exploitation-style companion to that classic. FleshEater doesn’t aim to be anything more than a mindless good time, a gore-soaked movie filled with ghouls and gratuitous nudity. Hinzman clearly wanted to make something along the lines of the sort of horror movie that was very popular at the time: the slasher. That’s why we get college student characters, bare breasts, and as much bloodshed as possible. Of course, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead had been quite gory as well, so it had been proven that audiences liked to see guts being spilled in their zombies movies.
The FleshEater himself even behaves like a slasher at times, as he has a tendency to attack people with weapons. He impales one victim with a pitchfork and buries a hatchet in the head of another. But he doesn’t really need weapons when he can just punch his hand through a person’s body and tear out their heart. Like Hinzman said, the character has a supernatural level of strength, like Jason Voorhees in the later Friday the 13th sequels. The existence of zombies in this film seems to be tied in with reports of Satanic cult activity in the area some years earlier, and the zombies that are created as a result of those occult rituals are nasty. In Romero’s movies, the zombies often come off as being rather pathetic creatures. You can feel sympathy for them. That’s not the case in FleshEater. You can’t feel sorry for these zombies. As the seal on the coffin warned, these things are pure evil; snarling, malicious monsters that tear into victims with hate in their eyes. While this is a rather ridiculous movie that is more likely to make you chuckle than scream, the zombies are effectively creepy at times. The synth score composed by Erica Portnoy also adds an unnerving edge to scenes.
The gore was provided by special effects artist Gerald Gergely, whose credits include The Majorettes, Night of the Living Dead ‘90, The Dark Half, and My Bloody Valentine 2009. He did some impressive work on this film, even though he didn’t have much time to prepare some of the effects. Hinzman contacted him about the job on a Friday, and Gergely was on the set the following Monday. Luckily, he was very inventive, putting things like peanut butter, Rice Krispies, and pink grapefruit to use and making it look like brains and a destroyed head. The corpse of a zombie that was caught in a fire was created with a sofa cushion, a cardboard tube, some latex, and gel blood. It looks great. For a moment where the FleshEater reaches into a victim’s stomach and pulls out their heart, Gergely and his assistant had to resort to using real pig guts. They failed to inform Hinzman about this, though. So Hinzman pulled out the heart and bit into it, expecting it to be made of gelatin. Biting into a pig heart wasn’t pleasant for Hinzman, but it works for the movie. Since FleshEater had a low budget and was being shot on film, almost everything was done in just one take. Gergely faced the challenge and succeeded, giving gorehounds plenty to enjoy about this movie.
BEST SCENE(S): FleshEater moves quickly from set piece to set piece, never going too long before we get another zombie attack scene. Between the kills, there’s some clunky dialogue and atrocious line deliveries. It’s all just part of the fun. One of the best moments is when the little angel opens the door expecting to see fellow trick-or-treaters and instead finds the FleshEater there. She clearly doesn’t believe there’s an age limit to trick-or-treating, because she still thinks this guy is there for candy. He picks her up and takes a bite out of her instead, her blood spilling onto a dropped Krunch bar.
The Halloween party sequence is another standout, as supervising producer Andrew Sands is hilarious as the drunken Dracula hosting the party. When Bob and Sally come to him for help, he berates them for not wearing costumes. Then he compliments the look of a zombie that comes wandering in. This doesn’t turn out well for him.
PARTING SHOT: If you want to see a well-polished horror movie with great character work… FleshEater is not the movie for you. But it definitely is if you just want to kick back and watch something fun. The legendary Joe Bob Briggs came up with a Drive-In Oath that includes the line “We believe in blood, in breasts, and in beasts.” And if you’re the kind of horror fan who could recite that oath with feeling, you should know that this movie has it all. So seek out a copy of FleshEater. Head back into the Pennsylvania countryside with Hinzman and his fellow ghouls. It will be one of the best Halloweens you’ve ever had.
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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