Released in 1970, I Drink Your Blood is one of the all-time great grindhouse movies for a bunch of good reasons, not the least of them being that it introduced Lynn Lowry to the world. Writer-director David Durston hired the willowy, exotic-looking young actor on the spot when she walked into his New York office, shoehorning an entirely new part into a film that had already been cast, and making Lowry’s character mute so he didn’t have to write new dialogue.

“And he could kinda sneak me by Jerry Gross, who was the producer, and hope that Jerry wouldn’t notice that he added another actor that was getting paid,” Lowry tells the Straight, with a chuckle, in a call from her home in L.A. If it didn’t make her rich, Lowry’s career in the immediate wake of I Drink Your Blood was phenomenal nonetheless. In short order she worked with George Romero (The Crazies), Radley Metzger (Score), David Cronenberg (Shivers), and Jonathan Demme (Fighting Mad). Her short scene in Paul Schrader’s 1981 remake of Cat People remains the film’s most memorable five minutes.

In the midst of all this, Lowry also took a dual role in Sugar Cookies, an ambitious drive-in feature that took on the dark side of an industry all too guilty of destroying its talent. For the most part, Lowry managed to avoid the harder edges of exploitation cinema. Indeed, it sounds like I Drink Your Blood was a blast behind the scenes.

“I think I was unpacking my suitcase when the gaffer leaned out of his room across the hall with a joint in his hand, and said, ‘Hey, wanna toke?’ ” she recalls. “I’d never had grass or anything like that before.” On their off days, cast members would dabble with something a little heavier—an ironic sidenote to a film that drew specifically from contemporary fears about murderous, acid-gobbling hippie Satanists.

“David told me once that he wrote it while he was on acid, and it kinda looks that way,” Lowry says, although she agrees that it’s a much more playful film than its reputation might suggest. I Drink Your Blood received the first ever X rating for violence and it still retains some of its power to shock. A scene involving some skewered rats—with Lowry’s angelic face hovering inches from the roasting vermin—comes to mind.

“I’m supposed to be a sort of stoned hippie girl, and a mute, so I might have had some marijuana before I did that scene,” Lowry offers. “I don’t remember! I mean, you just did it. They were dead, they were being barbecued, and that was it!” That precise attitude, she continues, explains the enduring appeal of her early filmography.

“That’s the difference between film in the ’70s and film now,” says the actor, who re-entered the industry not long after cult film distributor Grindhouse Releasing restored I Drink Your Blood in 2002 (check out Lowry's updated reel here). “There’s a realness about it. There’s just a dirty earthiness about those films. Now they have so much money when they do the remakes. They look clean and cool and there’s special effects, but it just doesn’t have that feel. And then nobody understands why the fans don’t like it as much as the original. It’s because the original cost, like, $150,000 and the remake of The Crazies cost $21 million. That’s the difference. That’s why.” 

I Drink Your Blood screens at the Vancity Theatre as part of the Northwest Horror Show on Saturday (April 23), with Lynn Lowry in attendance.