What is it Tarantino says, about all movies being interesting even if they’re not all good? I Eat Your Skin is a case in point. Not great but absolutely fascinating, it started life in 1964, when it went by the title Zombies, gaining the name it’s now stuck with when a distributor was looking for a companion movie to make up a double bill in 1971. Director/writer/producer Del Tenney had just the film to go with I Drink Your Blood, he said. And so, taking Zombies (aka Zombie Bloodbath aka Voodoo Blood Bath) off the shelf where it had sat for seven years, he gave it yet another new name and some refreshed opening credits and here we are.
In those seven years the George Romero zombie revolution had happened. Since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, zombies had generally stopped being victims of heinous voodoo rituals practised on remote Caribbean islands. In Tenney’s movie, made four years before Romero changed everything, white women are still being menaced by black zombie men, a subtext harking back to the zombie films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Tenney’s movie also harks back slightly less far, to 1962’s Dr No, in the shape of its hero, a womanising writer called Tom Harris (William Joyce) who is lured to a faraway island on a research trip by his publisher Duncan Fairchild (Dan Stapleton), whose promise of “virgin natives” is more than Harris can resist.
The island is arranged almost apartheid style. Big white boss Charles Bentley (Walter Coy) runs things with a proprietorial regard for the natives. Over cocktails he likes to discuss the natives – “simple people – with his guests. Along with Harris and Fairchild, there’s Fairchild’s horny wife Carol (Betty Hyatt Linton), tame but mysterious scientist Dr Biladeau (Robert Stanton) and his comely daughter Jeanine (Heather Hewitt). On the other side of the island, meanwhile, it’s juu-juu, elaborate masks, frenzied dancing, animal sacrifice and zombies.
Joyce is a bargain-bucket Sean Connery figure, his shirt often almost entirely unbuttoned to reveal man fur, striking a silhouette-ready pose with a gun in his hand more often than you might expect for a writer on a research trip. As for “virgin natives” – near but not quite. Jeanine eventually becomes the focus for some despicable zombie ritual requiring a white virgin, though by that point Harris has been at her tamper-proof seal.
This is a splendidly corny movie. It’s shot on the cheap in black and white but it’s technically pretty good. The visuals are crisp and and rich thanks to the involvement of a decent cinematographer (François Farkas) and the score by Lon E Norman is also a cut above the usual drive-in exploitationer. Norman even chucks in a few James Bond chords early on in case we hadn’t got the point.
The fact that Hewitt isn’t that great an actor is a mark against the film, and Joyce is shouting the entire time, as if he’s worried that the sound guy isn’t doing his job. He may have a point – the sound is a bit tinny and echoey.
I’ve seen reviews of this film that mock the zombie make-up, but I thought it was pretty good, achieving a startling and unsettling effect with little more than white powder and something that looks like porridge oats caked on and left to dry. There’s also some pretty good voodoo dancing in scenes that Tenney shot without telling everyone involved exactly what he was up to. Vanoye Aikens, later part of the great Alvin Ailey’s company, has some impressive moves and so does the unnamed female dancer who opens up the movie with a lithe demonstration of sexy voodoo trance-dancing.
In the end, nothing can really make up for the slow pace and the lack of a decent plot, though Tenney does try to turn the tables on us towards the end, when all is explained in a reveal straight from Scooby Doo. The strangest feature of this movie though – original title Zombies, let’s not forget – is how uninterested it seems to be in the actual zombies. There’s no skin-eating either, but hey.
I Eat Your Skin – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
