I Drink Your Blood

• It was shot in the near-abandoned spa town of Sharon Springs, New York. The production used the condemned Roosevelt hotel, which was already slated for demolition, and per director David Durston paid the town just $300 for the use of it. (Sources disagree on the shoot length, with accounts ranging from about eight days to eight weeks.)
• It was one of the first films handed an X rating by the MPAA for violence rather than nudity. Producer Jerry Gross released the X cut anyway and asked each projectionist to censor it however their local market demanded; the appeals board later flipped it to R after cuts and additions were made.
• Cinemation paired it on a drive-in double bill with Del Tenney's 1964 zombie picture (shot as Caribbean Adventure, also known as Zombies), which Gross re-titled I Eat Your Skin specifically to match the cannibal-grindhouse branding.
• Horace Bones was played by Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, a genuine Indian classical dancer (trained in Kathakali, Bharatanatyam, Kathak and Manipuri) who relocated to New York in 1955 and founded the Bhaskar Dances of India company. Durston built the film as a deliberate response to the Charles Manson murders.
• Lynn Lowry, later a Cronenberg and Romero regular (Shivers, The Crazies), made her screen debut here in the uncredited role of the mute cult girl Carrie. Durston wrote the part in after meeting her, since it wasn't in the original script.
• On the tight budget the effects and stunts were mostly practical, with the cast handling their own rather than bringing in doubles.

The rabies is the film's blunt verdict on the 1969 Manson hangover: the hippie dream curdles into rabid violence, then jumps the species line into the straight working men at the dam. The counterculture doesn't just rot itself, it infects everyone it touches, which is exactly the moral panic the title and the Satan-cult framing were built to feed.

The boy is the real monster of the piece. Horace's gang are vicious but human; it's a child weaponizing disease who turns an assault into a town-wide bloodbath. The horror isn't the cult, it's that vengeance scales completely out of anyone's control once the kid plays God with a syringe.

The condemned, half-empty Sharon Springs setting reads as the film's true subject. A dead resort town and a flooding dam project frame an America already collapsing into itself; the rabies just gives the decay something to bite.

A Manson-flavored cult of Satan-worshipping hippies rolls into a half-dead resort town, drugs the old town doctor and assaults his granddaughter. Her kid brother hits back the only way a kid can: he kills a rabid dog, draws its blood, and injects it into meat pies at the local bakery, then sells them to the gang. The infection takes. The hippies froth, foam, and turn feral, then spread the rabies to a crew of dam-construction workers, and the whole valley curdles into a hydrophobic massacre with nobody left clean.