The Dark Seance: The Oath of Green Blood

“The Mad Doctor of Blood Island invites YOU to join him in taking the Oath of Green Blood,” dripping letters shout at the beginning of Mad Doctor of Blood Island, a Filipino horror film distributed by Hemisphere Pictures in 1969.

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!

A voiceover continues, over footage of young couples making out, shot at Clark Air Base in Manila: “The Green Blood Potion has been known to passionately affect some people after drinking it. Others experience a feeling of the supernatural conscience entering their beings. Get your samples of the Green Blood Potion ready, and recite the oath of Dr. Lorca aloud with me, before drinking of the green blood.”

From here, a text crawl joins the voiceover, so you can read along as you recite the oath: “I, a living, breathing creature of the cosmic entity, am now ready to enter the realm of those chosen to be allowed to drink of the Mystic Emerald fluids herein offered. I join the Order of Green Blood with an open mind and through this liquid’s powers am now prepared to safely view the unnatural green-blooded ones without fear of contamination.” The voiceover continues, “Now, drink your sample of Green Blood and it is guaranteed that you can never turn into a green-blooded monster!”

Sam Sherman, who then ran Hemisphere’s productions in the Philippines, came up with this “bizarre initiation.” But the Green Blood Oath was more than just a way to get the audience’s attention at the beginning of the picture – it actually had a physical component, too.

“Hemisphere ordered up thousands of green blood packets, which arrived on their doorsteps a few weeks later,” writes Fred Olen Ray in his book The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors. “Sherman had anticipated something on the order of the sugar syrup-filled wax bottles popular with kids, but instead received something that resembled catsup packets filled with an aqua-colored gel. In fairness to his audience, Sherman drank one of the packets and was sick for several days. At this point, he was beginning to get his own company, Independent-International Pictures, off the ground and gracefully bowed out of Hemisphere. His parting advice was to never distribute those packets and if they did, to get themselves a damn good insurance policy.”

According to Beverly Miller, an associate producer on The Mad Doctor of Blood Island who also owned the Fort Drive In Theatre in Leavenworth, KS, Hemisphere not only distributed the packets, but “the kids actually drank the stuff.”

Though it may be one of the strangest – and unhealthiest – The Mad Doctor of Blood Island was far from alone when it came to giveaway gimmicks. Giveaways were an easy and inexpensive way to give the audience something to remember your film by. William Castle did it with Zotz! (1962) and Strait-Jacket (1964), and The Hypnotic Eye (1960) combined its HypnoMagic gimmick with branded giveaway balloons.

“During the 1940s,” Mark Thomas McGee writes in his book Beyond Ballyhoo, “theaters used to give away dishes or play Keno (a variation of Bingo) for cash, or both, to entice customers. For some reason there was a resurgence of this giveaway philosophy in the 1960s, only by then the studios were rarely offering anything quite as useful as dishes.”

When 20th Century Fox showed a double bill of Hammer’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness and Plague of the Zombies in 1966, they gave out “Dracula fangs to the male customers and Zombie eyes to the females.” Both Day of the Triffids (1963) and Torture Garden (1967) gave out packets of seeds, advertised as “Triffid Seeds” or “Fright Seeds,” respectively. “Only they weren’t even going to supply the seeds,” according to McGee. They simply told exhibitors to print up small envelopes with their copy, and then use “sunflower seeds dyed green.”

One early example of the giveaway gimmick was Columbia’s American release of the 1958 Ishiro Honda picture The H-Man, in which individuals exposed to radioactive material become deadly “liquid people.” Those who saw the Columbia release “were given a highly compressed sponge, die-cut in the shape of a man with this imprint: DIP ‘THE H MAN’ IN WATER … AND WATCH OUT.”

Some of these giveaways went further than simply adding a keepsake to the moviegoing experience. Like the Green Blood given away with Mad Doctor of Blood Island, some brought audiences into the action of the movie – by promising to protect them from it.

Well before the release of Mad Doctor of Blood Island, those who came to see the 1962 release of Burn, Witch, Burn (one of several adaptations of Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife) were given packets of salt and iron that were said to “ward off the curse of any witch.” Along with this, like Mad Doctor, the opening titles of Burn, Witch, Burn were preceded by a voice speaking over a black screen which warned that “the motion picture you are about to see contains an evil spell,” followed by a protective incantation meant to “dispel all evil spirits that may radiate from the screen during this performance.”

Not every such apotropaic strove for the same degree of credibility. Those who went to see Hammer’s Rasputin the Mad Monk in 1966 were given fake beards, “blue for the boys and pink for the ladies,” which were supposed to “protect the wearer from the forces of evil.”

Among the simplest and yet most fascinating of all these giveaways were the “Witch Deflectors” handed out to those who went to see a double-bill of Witchcraft and The Horror of it All in 1964. “Only the Witch Deflector can save you from the eerie web of the unknown,” warns the poster for Witchcraft. “Be sure to grip your Witch Deflector tightly when the unknown evil materializes before your very eyes.”

Another poster exhorts, “When you feel the powers of ‘THE’ evil upon you, grip the Witch Deflector tightly until the evil subsides.”

In actuality, the Witch Deflector was nothing but a plastic coin, a little bigger than a quarter, with the words “Witch Deflector” and a skull and crossbones printed on it. On the reverse was the title of the two films. You can still find them on eBay sometimes. Many descriptions online and in old books say that they’re green or glow in the dark, but every one that I’ve ever seen a photo of (I’ve never been lucky enough to see on in person) has been a kind of bright pink color.

These sorts of giveaways still take place today, though these days they are more likely to be sent out in advance to select social media “influencers.” I myself have a branded condom that I got at a preview screening of the 2014 film Devil’s Due. For the most part, however, the giveaway craze was left behind with much of the rest of the age of ballyhoo.

Today, instead, we have themed popcorn buckets. And far from giving them away, they cost like $40.