General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

I Drink Your Blood

I Drink Your Blood is a 1970 American exploitation horror film directed and written by David E. Durston, in which a boy takes revenge on a Satanic hippie cult by feeding it meat pies injected with the blood of a rabid dog, turning the cultists rabid and setting them on a murderous rampage through a small town.¹^•² Produced by Jerry Gross and distributed by Cinemation Industries, it is remembered chiefly as the first film the MPAA rated X for violence alone, and for its long afterlife on home video and in grindhouse (theater showing low-budget exploitation films; central to article) revival culture.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	David E. Durston¹
Production / distribution	Jerry Gross Productions; Cinemation Industries¹
US release	January 20, 1971 (limited)⁵
Working title	Phobia, changed so the film could be double-billed with I Eat Your Skin⁶
Rating history	Initially rated X for excessive violence; changed to R after cuts and additions⁶
Filming location	A ghost town near Sharon Springs, upstate New York, over eight days in 1970⁷
Notable cast	Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, Jadine Wong, Rhonda Fultz, George Patterson, Riley Mills, and Lynn Lowry in her first film role¹^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

A group of Satan-worshipping hippies arrives in a fading small town when their bus breaks down, terrorizes the residents, and takes over an abandoned hotel. They rape a local girl and dose her grandfather with LSD. Her young brother, seeking revenge, shoots a rabid dog, draws its blood with a syringe, and injects it into meat pies from the town bakery, which he then sells to the cult. The infected cultists descend into a rabid, murderous frenzy, killing and infecting others, including workers at a nearby dam.²^•⁹

Despite the title, no one drinks blood in the film; the name came from an advertising executive's idea for a double feature pairing, I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin.³

Production

Durston wrote the screenplay under the working title Phobia. According to his audio commentary on the 2002 director's cut DVD, distributor Cinemation Industries changed the title because it wanted to pair the film with I Eat Your Skin, a 1964 zombie film, in a joint release.⁶ Durston stated that he partially based the story on Charles Manson, whose cult's crimes were then recent news.⁶

The film was shot on location in a ghost town near Sharon Springs in upstate New York over eight days in 1970; locations included the old Roosevelt Hotel on Washington Street, which was torn down in 1976.⁷ Durston himself stepped in to play the town doctor at the last minute after an actor dropped out.³ The cast includes the dancer and choreographer Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury as cult leader Horace Bones, a performance critics have singled out as the film's strongest element, and a young Lynn Lowry, uncredited and mute, in her first screen appearance.⁹^•⁸

Censorship and ratings

According to a February 1971 Hollywood Reporter news item, the film was initially assigned an X rating because of excessive violence, and the rating was changed to R after cuts and additions were made.⁶ IMDb trivia and the distributor Grindhouse Releasing both describe it as the first film rated X by the MPAA on the basis of violence alone.³^•⁴

The film's release history is tangled. IMDb's alternate-versions entry states that the original 73-minute cut received the X rating and that the film was re-edited, with scenes added, to an R-rated 83 minutes, while the AFI Catalog lists the running time as 80 or 82 to 83 minutes.¹⁰^•⁶ Durston said that when theaters threatened to pull the film over the X rating, the distributor allowed them to edit their own prints, producing hundreds of different versions in circulation.³ One excised sequence, restored on the 2002 DVD, shows the character Rollo stabbing Shelley twelve times in the chest and cutting off his leg with a hatchet.⁶

Reception and legacy

The film was, by Grindhouse Releasing's account, a big grossing hit at drive-ins and grindhouse theaters despite the censorship, and it has since been described as one of the most infamous movies in the history of exploitation films.⁴ Contemporary critical opinion is mixed: on Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 60% Tomatometer score from four reviews, with critics such as Scott Weinberg calling it a looser, sillier cousin of Night of the Living Dead while conceding that it moves fast.² Reviewers have noted its practical gore effects, its minimalist electronic score by Clay Pitts, and its place in the short-lived "evil hippie" cycle of early 1970s horror.⁸^•¹¹

The film was not copyrighted at the time of release; a videocassette version was copyrighted by Valiant International Pictures on April 5, 1995.⁶ Grindhouse Releasing issued an authorized special edition DVD in 2002, restoring long-lost scenes with Durston's participation, and in November 2016 a deluxe two-disc Blu-ray presenting the uncut director's cut in high definition alongside I Eat Your Skin and Durston's Blue Sextet (1969).¹²^•⁴ The film has also been featured in documentaries and retrospectives on grindhouse cinema, including American Grindhouse and the "Video Nasties" guide.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026