‘The Mad Doctor of Blood Island’: The movie that mistakenly gave its audience dysentery
At the very least, audiences expect an experience whenever they take their seats in the cinema. Whether good or bad, profound or haunting, the bare minimum is expected that the people in attendance will have left feeling something. In one case, that feeling proved to be dysentery.
When 1969’s The Mad Doctor of Blood Island was screening, many patrons suffered an excruciating illness after a marketing gimmick went horribly awry. These days, viral promotion and the occasional 3D surcharge is about as gimmicky as the movie industry gets, but there was once a widespread desire to hype an incoming release – usually in the horror or fantasy genre – through entirely bespoke means.
William Castle was one of the most noted; at various points floated a skeleton on wires over the crowds gathered for House on Haunted Hill, attached de-icers from military planes to the underside of seats to literally chill people to their core for The Tingler, offered a refund if anyone couldn’t make it through the final act of Homicidal, and took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on the cockroach star of Bug.
Taking a leaf out of that playbook, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island sought to immerse prospective customers in the world of the film, which saw John Ashley’s Dr Bill Foster travel to the titular location to try and prevent a monstrous creature from wreaking havoc on the local population.
A prologue would air before the screening that invited audience members to ingest a packet of liquid dubbed ‘green blood’. As per the mythology of the movie, doing so – and making sure to “recite the oath of green blood” – would allow them to watch “the unnatural green-blooded ones without fear of contamination”.
Drinking a mysterious and unnamed concoction straight out of a packet prior to viewing seemed like a questionable practice, and it was one that its originator ended up regretting. Producer Sam Sherman was the mastermind behind the ‘green blood’, and while plenty of excitable folks followed the instructions, there were adverse side effects.
Sharman admitted that even though it was his brainchild in the first place, drinking the unexplained liquid made him severely ill, with reports of dysentery emerging in the aftermath of The Mad Doctor of Blood Island. Trying to drum up extra publicity and engage the wider public with unique marketing tactics boasted a decidedly sketchy hit rate, but there surely can’t have been any others to have actively induced sickness and diarrhoea.
Nobody really seemed to know or care what went into the creation of the ‘green blood,’ but presumably, everybody stricken with dysentery learned their lesson and never again subjected themselves to being an active participant in such a gimmick.
