CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Blood Bath

1966 film by Stephanie Rothman, Jack Hill

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ2906936 ↗
Source-derived summary

Blood Bath is a 1966 American horror film directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman, and starring William Campbell, Linda Saunders, Marissa Mathes, and Sid Haig. The film concerns a mad painter of macabre art who turns into a vampire-like man (with different features) by night, apparently as a result of a family curse, and believes that he has found his reincarnated mistress in the person of an avant-garde ballerina.

Blood Bath had a complex and troubled production history, marked by various cuts and reshoots. In 1963, Roger Corman had co-produced a Yugoslavia-made spy thriller called Operation: Titian, but the film was deemed unreleasable. Corman purchased the rights to another film and assigned writer-director Jack Hill to write a new script. This time, it was a horror film that incorporated the previous footage from Operation: Titian. Hill wrote and directed numerous horror sequences that were edited into the film, and it was re-titled Portrait in Terror. Still unsatisfied with the completed product, Corman hired Stephanie Rothman to film additional sequences that were also added. This cobbled-together feature was given a brief theatrical release by American International Pictures under the title Blood Bath, with screenplay and directorial credit jointly shared by Hill and Rothman. An additional version of the film was made for television and re-titled Track of the Vampire.

Editorial summary

“Blood Bath” enters the record as 1966 film by Stephanie Rothman, Jack Hill. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Blood, Bath and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1966, 1963—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1966-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Blood, Bath and film.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Blood Bath” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Blood, Bath and film provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2906936. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966 and 1963.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Blood Bath”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Blood Bath primary sources, Blood Bath archive and Blood research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Blood Bath”?
  2. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Blood Bath” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.