As the old philosophical thought experiment goes: If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to hear it fall, does the tree make a sound?
I couldn’t help but ponder this age-old question as I watched I Drink Your Blood (1971) – a cult, low-budget exploitation film from David E. Durston. Marketed and released as a double feature alongside I Eat Your Skin (1971), I Drink Your Blood was one of the most heavily censored films upon its release: slapped with the dreaded X-rating by the MPAA, with the producers giving license to distributors to censor the film as they saw fit for their market. Today, almost five and a half decades later, the film is, presumably, available in its original uncensored form. But I don’t believe the version I watched – albeit free, on Plex – was it.
Which raises the question. If a film is censored to within an inch of its life – a film, bear in mind, whose whole purpose and raison d’etre is to shock, sicken, and transgress – does the film even exist? Robbed, like the tree in the silent forest, of the eyeballs of its audience, how does a film like this survive when its juiciest bits are condemned to the cutting room floor?
Watching I Drink Your Blood in 2025 also raises some questions about censorship in modern times. Sure, when this thing was released – into a hotpot of societal issues like the Vietnam War, the Manson murders, the rise of drugs and the general, indefinable idea of "moral decay" – censorship was probably understandable. Now, though, why shouldn’t we be getting the original, uncensored cut of films like I Drink Your Blood (1971)?
Of course, in this film’s case, it’s not just the fact that I Drink Your Blood (1971) still appears online today in (at least a partially) censored format. It’s that the censored scenes are cut so heavy handedly and clumsily from the film. I had no idea which bits had been redacted from the copy I was watching – because it was by no means blood and gore-free – which ended up making the viewing experience a disorienting, dissatisfying one. I got the sense we were jumping from scene to scene, like that old skip-through feature on DVDs. Yes, you can still broadly understand what’s going on – I Drink Your Blood (1971) is no Inception (2010) – but in those omissions, something gets lost in the process. Something fundamental to the act of watching and consuming I Drink Your Blood; amid the viscera, something vital.
I Drink Your Blood (1971) follows a group of anarchic, satan-worshipping hippies. Nomadic and nihilistic, the hippies – led by Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) – turn up in a small, quiet, middle America town, where they begin by raping one of the local residents, Sylvia (Arlene Farber), after she observes them conducting a nude satanic ritual in the woods. The hippie group – which also includes members Rollo (George Patterson), Sue-Lin (Jadin Wong), and Molly (Rhonda Fultz) – make themselves known to the locals by squatting in an old abandoned house and intimidating neighbouring families. That includes Sylvia’s brother, the young Pete Banner (Riley Mills), and his grandpa Doc (Richard Bowler) – who’s roughed up by the hippies after attempting to avenge his granddaughter’s rape.
Young Pete decides enough is enough, and sets out with his injured grandfather’s rifle to really stick it to those lousy hippies. What he finds instead, though, is a rabid dog. After shooting it dead, we know he’s up to something when he later lies to his sister and says the dog escaped: sure enough, Pete has a master plan. The next day, when working at the town’s bakery – where Sylvia also works, along with the kindly Mildred (Elizabeth Marner-Brooks) – Pete infects several meat pies with the blood of the rabid dog from the night prior. That day, when the hippies turn up seeking breakfast, they end up with a long, slow descent into first sickness, and insanity, and finally death – but before that latter stage, we get plenty of murderous chaos as the hippies begin attacking and infecting the town’s populace.
As I Drink Your Blood (1971) has aged, it’s developed a reputation for being almost the Platonic ideal of an exploitation film: playing on not one, or two, but a whole litany of the time’s pervasive societal fears.
Fear of hippies.
Fear of satanists.
Fear of drugs.
Fear of unrest, fear of the breakdown of order.
Fear of the stranger across the street; fear of the other.
Fear of the mad, uncontrollable animal bringing death and destruction.
And, of course, fear of infection.
Yet despite all that, I Drink Your Blood (1971) feels surprisingly devoid of substance, or social commentary of any solidity. Like the exploitation films of its ilk, it prefers to stick to its lane – to exploit. To splash blood first, ask questions later, and hope its box office stubs are sufficient to keep its producers in the black. Ultimately, I Drink Your Blood (1971) is a film entirely infatuated with its own premise – and that is, admittedly, a brilliant one – and not altogether that interested in fleshing out that premise’s promise with any bigger ideas. It’s a film that manages to be low-budget in both a literal and ideological sense – one with nothing more on its mind than to shock and horrify the audience.
So does it achieve that? For the cinema-going public of the early 70s, almost certainly: and in that sense, plus the degree of acclaim it’s achieved since, Durston’s film is a success. But there’s also an inescapable sense of missed opportunity here. There are some extremely creepy scenes – when the hippies begin to succumb to the rabies virus, for example – but mostly the whole thing has a strange, stilted feel. There’s a kind of flat affect to the film, especially when it comes to the kill scenes: which, despite the occasionally discomfiting synth spikes by the film’s musician, Clay Pitts, play out in a strangely prosaic way.
Through that lens, I Drink Your Blood (1971) isn’t as subversive as it thinks it is; isn’t as transgressive as it wants to be. It’s a film that perhaps sees itself as being ahead of its time, that’s inextricably of its time, but in many ways is actually behind its time.
In places, it’s a hard movie to watch, but more notably it’s a hard movie to like – and the skein of misogynistic cruelty running through it doesn’t help matters. (The gratuitous rape scene – which in my copy was censored – and a scene where a character calls his female partner a “stubborn bitch” are just two examples.)
As for the performances, they’re mostly characterised by the usual tonal contrast – between amateurish chewing the scenery and exaggerated earnestness – of low budget films. In most scenes, lines are delivered with such a monotonic flatness that the actors might as well have their scripts in hand, leading to the inevitable moments of (evidently unintentional) comedy. That’s not helped by some of the effects work: there’s one particularly comical scene in which a group of infected construction workers appear, staring down the camera with mouths daubed with what looks like whipped cream. That said, Chowdhury cuts a genuinely menacing and unpredictable figure as Bones, while Mills portrays Pete with a parallel menace and unpredictability – that of the hotheaded, vengeance-driven young man.
As I alluded to earlier, the pacing feels erratic – especially in the transition from dialogue-heavy scenes to blood-soaked action – though in defence I Drink Your Blood (1971), this is an issue inextricable from the film’s censorship. The flipside of that is that it lends the film a vague sense of surreality throughout – which is probably the best thing you can say about it.
In the end, I Drink Your Blood (1971) is inseparable from the wider sociocultural and political tapestry against which it entered the genre – as, indeed, all exploitation films are. There was a time and a place for it; neither is today. But hey, who knows – I haven’t seen it yet, but I Eat Your Skin (1971) might be better…right? Right?!
Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this I Drink Your Blood (1971) review. And, for more blood-soaked spatter, try my Braindead (1992) review or this Terrifier 3 review.
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